 from San Jose in the heart of Silicon Valley. It's theCUBE, covering Big Data SV 2016. Now your host, John Furrier and George Gilbert. Okay, welcome back. We are here live in Silicon Valley for Big Data Week, Big Data SV, Strata Hadoop. This is Silicon Angles theCUBE. It's our flagship program. We go out to the events and extract the signal from the noise. I'm John Furrier with my co-host, George Gilbert, Big Data Analyst at Wikibon.com. Our next guest is Jim Davis, Executive Vice President and CMO for Informatica. Welcome to theCUBE. Thank you so much. Pleasure to be here. So you're a career tech IT technologist. You've been SAS before you just joined Informatica what, a couple of weeks ago, months ago? How long have you been? I joined Informatica probably two months ago. I was with SAS for 21 years. And prior to that, I was actually a, my background's in computer science. So I was a software developer. That's awesome. And you know, as we say, we always have the innovation inflection point curve and you know, Dave Vellante. And I always talk about this in theCUBE is that if you look at the major histories that you've lived through, you've seen this movie before, what's your personal perspective? I'm not that old. I mean, even just the past inflection point, client server was a big inflection point. It was. And people saying that this is like the client server and the PC revolution in one. With a lot of things exploding at the same time, the theaters are of innovation are from business model to technology. What's your thoughts? No, I absolutely agree with you. So we start with talking about Big Data a few years ago and to me it sounded like a lot of hype. What did that hype do for us? It became a reality in terms of products and services that come to the market. But probably the number one benefit that's come out of this is an understanding within the business community about the value of data. The value of data and what it can do for business beyond just optimizing current activities. So I believe data has now become an asset that's as important to an organization as its people, its products, its infrastructure, you name it. And I think that's why it is so big today. So the challenge becomes how to harness it. Peter Barris, who's head of research for the team and we keep on, it's looking at Angle. We're talking about digital assets. Data is the asset now. And that digital asset turns into digital currency, digital capital. This is the future. So data is interesting. And amid the Chief Product Officer at Informatica says something really compelling this morning I thought was worth noting and I want to get your thoughts on is that the data layer is now the glue. It's the new middleware. And that's where the battleground is and that's where the innovation is around software. Your thoughts there, looking at the landscape and what you've got going on at Informatica and what attracted you to go there? I mean, with all this action going on, is that how you see it like he does? What's your thoughts? Yeah, that's a good point. I do see data today as being an absolute critical asset to the success of business, to the success of organizations. It is the currency. It's a shame that we don't today and you probably had discussions with leaders on this. It's a shame that today we don't actually value the valuation of companies is based on not only customer satisfaction, which people have talked about for years, but the quality of data. So if you're looking at acquiring a company or doing business with a company, how good is that asset? And I like what you said that Amit said this morning where it's the middle layer, it's the middle layer and it's the piece that actually binds things together. So I think that organizations have come to realize that it is an asset again, as I mentioned, that not only help you optimize existing activities, but if truly respected within the organization, it becomes an asset where you can initiate new lines of business. It's something where data can become something that you actually innovate on, that you rely on for innovation. And it's no longer, no longer just exhaust from operational systems. So what attracted you to informatics? Cause you had a stellar career at SAS. Okay, you've been in the industry. You know, you kind of know what's going on. What you see that opportunity, you don't have to go into the details how they recruited you. But I mean, you gotta see, they probably, you know, you looked at it. What was it about the asset and pictures? That's how things get done, right? No, no, go ahead. Besides the pictures. They have great architecture slides. I'm telling you, it's very sexy, you know, the Informatica. But what lured you over there? I'll tell you, and there's no question that I did have a very great career at SAS and it was a very tough decision to leave. But when I look at Informatica, Informatica has historically been the gold standard in data management, data quality, data governance, master data management within the IT community. And we're all seeing this today. We're all seeing the trends in the market where data is absolutely becoming essential to end users. So when I see the opportunity at Informatica, I see the opportunity to expand out into the end user community out of IT into an environment by which we can really bring that benefit there to more of a self-serve nature. Do you see the flywheel of apps driving this? Because this came up earlier in the conversation. Some look at it as a challenge, maybe an opportunity as well. The fragmentation of the apps. It's a huge problem, yet opportunity as the developers look at the DevOps model where the cloud's enabling fast real-time development. The data's got to be vetted. The quality of the data's got to be clean, not dirty data. All these things are coming into the front end, which now are in cars, IoT. I mean, you name it, the data edge. Total fragmentation is hitting the marketplace. Therein lies the opportunity as well. So if I'm an application developer and I come up with a great idea for something, I think that's wonderful. How do we get those things to market very quickly? The cloud can help us with that. Maybe I don't want to deal with all the aspects of data management and data currency and data governance. Why not hook into something that's tried and true, a brand, a functionality that we know is going to work very, very well? Spend our time developing the application and less time worrying about how we're going to reinvent data management and when companies like Informatica have been doing it for more than 20 years. So the fragmentation of the apps is actually an opportunity not only to help application developers get out there quickly, but also for organizations that are piecing together these apps to guarantee some level of consistency as well. I know George's got a question he wants to jump in, but I want to ask about the fragmentation because you think about what that means too with agile development. They don't want anyone in their shorts kind of telling them what to do. Oh, because we have the systems of record over here, you have to change your development cycle. They want to be agile. They want to hit the target objective, which is either use experience or some value proposition. How much does that factor in? And what do you guys say to customers saying, hey, I don't want you to tell me what to put into it. I just want guys building code. I mean, we have to be able to provide a platform that can facilitate that type of activity, but at the same time, guarantee that this activity that's taking place where the developer doesn't necessarily have to worry about systems of record that's being taken care of from a metadata and lineage perspective on the back end. And that's where Informatica comes in. So we want to be able to walk into organizations and say, we can help you feel better and sleep better at night knowing this is being taken care of on the back end. Let your application developers do what they do very well, which is to go ahead and take ideas and bring them to fruition in forms of products that people can actually use. I'm listening to you talk about taking the systems of record and all the work you do to keep the data consistent and sort of the source of truth and extending that out to new applications and maybe where the center of gravity is shifting to outward facing applications. And it sounds to me the term that pops into my mind is data as a service. And yet at the same time, we have the Hadoop vendors saying they're providing data as a service. They're very different layers. How do they complement each other? Yeah, they are very different layers. Obviously, Hadoop represents a platform by which we can store tremendous amounts of information. We can use different techniques on that data to make sure that we can process it very quickly and then serve it up. But the question then becomes if we have these very large repositories within organizations, what does all that data mean? And from an end user perspective, how can I get to it quickly? I might have a very fine data lake out there, but what's in it? So where the marriage occurs is what we can provide and what is absolutely necessary for the end user community is to have a very robust metadata layer. And that metadata layer needs to be such that the average user can navigate it. It needs to be Google-like. What's available to me? What data can I rely on? What types of questions can I ask of that data? And Hadoop's not doing that. Hadoop is facilitating that. So the marriage of that technology with metadata data lake capability is very, very powerful from an end user perspective. Talk about the metadata piece. That's interesting. No one really knew what that was in mainstream until they heard of the Edward Snowden case and the word metadata was on the New York Times. But that is the engine of innovation in software around data to create that scale piece. Can you share your thoughts on what's changing in that aspect, anything? Yeah, I think metadata would be a hotter topic right now, like big data was if it would fit on a magazine cover. Big data fit perfectly. Metadata is too long, but in all seriousness, the reality is that metadata used to just be data about data that IT people worried about so that they could understand what jobs had run and how successfully they ran and when they last ran. Metadata has evolved to a point that it can now be consumed by applications and user applications such that they can understand the content. They can understand the relevance to the decisions that they're making. So we've always talked about IT metadata and end user metadata, but we really, really didn't spend the time on end user metadata that we should have over the years. And I think now we're getting to a point where the end user metadata and the interfaces into it are easily, we can easily navigate through them. I'm listening to this and it's a very clear sort of mission or mission expansion that you're talking about. But collecting that metadata from systems of record, which had very well established repositories of metadata, their own system catalogs, it's a very different problem when you're in the primordial soup of the data lake. Now, without trying to challenge you to get into the, well, how do you actually collect all that? It's, the benefits are obviously the same in empowering and new generation of developers, but it seems like it's a much harder problem to crack. It is, but it is becoming easier because what we find with metadata right now is the people that have applications that are based on a very specific metadata layer for their application understand the importance of working well together with others. So what's happening with those metadata layers are we're seeing a lot more open API availability around their metadata layers. So now it becomes incumbent on vendors like Informatica who are trying to bring together these environments to rationalize those different metadata repositories into a single repository. So not only are we bringing the data together across platforms, we're now bringing a single view of metadata and surfacing that to the end user. That's a really good point because end users could not do searches on data throughout the organization unless this metadata came together. Okay, share with Jim, share with us some color on the customer environment. So you've got a good view into that over the years, but also now new to Informatica, compare and contrast, pre-Informatica, your view, and then now post-Informatica where you're now employed a couple months now. What are the customers saying? What's the pattern? If we can do some pattern recognition on the customer, you know, what's trending? What are the top three things that they care about now when they look at, okay, I got to produce a path to digital capital. I need a path to business value that's digital. I have data. What is some of the conversations that kind of stack rank up? Yeah, and it's a really good thing. So the conversation has shifted from one that's all about architecture and what we do from an IT standpoint. That becomes very tough to quantify the value to an organization. So the fact that businesses are now asking these questions of data, it's a good thing because the questions and the value of those answers can be quantified. So projects can be justified. So if we look at what's happening, obviously everybody talks about a single view of the customer. Everybody talks about that. If we look at a lot of the activity around fraud and there are different types of fraud and fraud differs across industries, those things are high value. If you look at things like churn and telecommunications, high value. If you look at drug development within life sciences, high value. So it's all about how do I utilize data in such a way that number one, I can optimize my current processes, but I can also do new things from an innovative perspective, but all along the way, making sure I can measure the value. So that if you're doing business with me, if you give me a dollar, I'm gonna end up giving you $10 in return. So it's not speeds and feeds we're talking about, they're talking about outcome-based solutions. Outcome-based, value-based scenarios. Any particular projects that are the most ranked conversations? Is it development? Is it apps? Is it the fragmentation? I think it's more along the lines of point solutions, point apps, which is where some of this, this is where big data emerges with end-user solutions, because a lot of the end-user solutions don't require big data. As a matter of fact, most don't, but it requires big data activity on the back end to then segment out the data for- Pushing data to the solution. Pushing data out to the regulatory environment and financial services. Pushing data out to the marketing department and telecommunications. Pushing data out to some regulatory piece within the public sector. So these are the kinds of activities that we see. It truly is application-based within a bigger- Yeah, I know what you're talking about. Some of these exciting things under the covers, which is like machine learning, some of the predictive analytics stuff, can actually just push data to apps rather than querying back in. So the new querying is push notifications as well. It is. It is alerting people to what's possible, not requiring them to dig down and investigate what's going on, but actually be notified that it's now time to look at something. So who was your, who did you call on in the old world when you were essentially connecting the systems of record with data warehouses? And now the data is, the lifeblood is, data is the sort of digital asset. Do you have a new sort of champion or business sponsor? Yeah, and it differs, right? And there are different sponsors within a large organization. So the way it used to be, and this should come as no surprise, was it was all about IT. It was all about IT producing that data warehouse. And in effect, that's where we are again. We just don't necessarily call it a data warehouse. We call it a big giant data something. But the reality now is that it's the folks, it's the end users right now that are really driving things. They're holding the budget because they've got the problems that need to be solved. They're holding the budget because they've got new lines of business that they need to go ahead and nurture. Now, that isn't to say that IT isn't involved. It's becoming a much better world because you have IT and business partnering where before, as we, you all have had these discussions many times with people, I'm sure, it was, there was a breakdown between IT and the user community. This is actually bringing it together. But are they bringing it together in a collaborative sense at all layers of the stack where they're looking to IT to help them be more effective in building the solutions for the business side? Or are they asking IT just for the infrastructure and then looking externally for the applications? Well, therein lies the danger too. And this is one of the wonders of cloud. So a lot of this stuff can be handled via operational budgets, say in marketing. You can go out and say, I'm gonna go ahead and do my own thing with this cloud-based provider over here. And over time, that just creates this massive problem for IT. So yes, in some cases that's being done. And I believe the businesses have got to understand IT's responsibility in this and have to consult with IT and involve IT so that they can deal with the overall architectural needs of integration consistent view of information and then surfacing out the piece that the end user actually needs. James, talk about your plan. I'll see Informatica doing well, private company. So they're not chasing the earnings, which is a whole nother conversation. But I love this concept of valuing the data. You don't mention valuation. Really interesting provocative concept that people are talking about in the influence of circles, which is this is a new asset class, this middleware. And you've seen data being globed into these conversations and I wrote a blog post in 2007 saying data's a new development kit, meaning you develop with data as an asset. So clearly this has evolved up. It has. And if you think about it, if you were involved in M&A discussions with people 10, 15 years ago, you'd never brought data to the table. You might have talked about what are your products and are your customers happy. But today, if I'm looking at a transaction with anybody, I'm gonna look and say what kind of shape is that data in there? And the only people that used to care about the shape of the data were the, when you're getting ready to go public or your accountants needed to make sure that the data was of sound quality and it was only financial oriented. But now we need to be looking at data and we need to be looking at how well organized it is, the quality of it, and is it being used? So there's an attitude towards data too. It's a total attitude. It's not only from evaluation from a company worth of going public being sold in M&A but also from a solutions standpoint, customers are gonna probably have some sort of TCO and analysis around data. That's interesting. So all this kind of on the table, I wanna ask you kind of the marketing question, which is, as CMO, you have an opportunity to kind of cast out a new net of, if you will, of messaging and directional thoughts. What is your vision around marketing informatics? Because your privacy, again, no distraction in the public market. The product guys were doing their job. We've been talking to them. What's the message to your customers? Yeah, well, number one, it's great to be private. And I came from a career of 21 years working for a private company and that's the way to go. You don't have to deal with somebody who doesn't know your operation every three months telling you you need to do something different. You can invest more for the long haul. And that was the excitement around Informatica was that we can do some new things without that quarterly script. The long game, if you will. The long game, exactly. So as I look at the opportunity, I mentioned before Informatica's long been seen as the gold standard within the IT community. Now let's talk about what we've actually been doing for the last 20 years and the effect that we've had on business. I don't know that we've been telling people about that. So people rely on Informatica to support. Does this impact to your customers? What they could do with this? Yeah, people rely on us to support risk calculations. People rely on us to support activities around fraud. People rely on us to support things around anti-money laundering. They rely on us. I'm sure you've got the data on that too. Yeah, well, the customer does. The customer does. That's right, that's right. So big plans. Any milestones that you see hitting next year just for you on a personal level just kind of with the team? Yeah, I mean, I think, and you met with Ahmed this morning, there's no question in my mind that the quality of software that Informatica has is one of the reasons I came to Informatica. It is solid. So one of the milestones is let's understand that it's not just about the IT infrastructure. It's about business value. And if at the end of the year, I can look back and say people see Informatica along the lines of providing strategic business value to an organization, not just ping and pipe and speeds and feeds. Yeah, getting beyond speeds and feeds. And I'll feel like it was a successful year. We appreciate the insights here in theCUBE. Great to see you guys doing a great job on social. Certainly here in Big Data Week here in Silicon Valley, you've seen great presence on social and Twitter, great conversations. Thanks for sharing. It's theCUBE. We're live here in Silicon Valley. 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