 From San Francisco, it's theCUBE covering Informatica World 2016. Brought to you by Informatica. Now, here are your hosts, John Furrier and Peter Burris. Hey, welcome back, everyone. We are here live in San Francisco for Informatica World 2016 exclusive coverage from SiliconANGLE Media's theCUBE, our flagship program, where we go out to the events and extract the signal from the noise. I'm John Furrier with my co-host, Peter Burris, head of research at SiliconANGLE Media General Manager for our Wikibon research team. Our next guest is Rob Carroll, Vice President of Product, Strategy and Marketing for Informatica World. Welcome back to theCUBE. Great to see you. Great to see you. Glad to be here. We chatted last year about engagement data, and that was all the rage. Now, master data, it seems to be the hot announcement. I'll see master data management in the cloud yesterday. Kind of, in the day before, really yesterday, it kind of shook the world here. What's the update? What's changed since last year? Yeah, what's changed is a lot of our master data management customers are just looking for ways to get MDM up and deployed without the complexity and the cost and the hassle of the infrastructure. And so, getting this into the cloud, having a- You know where it sits, basically, right? Right, it's really the deployment model, but it's also the managed service aspect of it. It's saying, we don't want to worry about the hardware, but we also don't want to worry about the upgrades. We don't want to worry about dealing with keeping this thing fresh and updated, so we're taking that on for our customers at a low cost, so they can focus on the actual business outcomes from mastering their data and getting multiple domains mastered and shared. Don't worry about the infrastructure. So, talk a little bit about where master data management is going, because it has, it started out with kind of a super catalog with a little bit of metadata regarding for federated data and those types of things. And it's, today, it provides maps to data, provides some sense of ownership and whatnot, but where's it going? And why should you invest in master data management now? And how does that set up options for how you manage your data in the future? Yeah, and master data management starting as kind of a data middleware infrastructure investment to kind of get the data in order for warehousing. It's kind of a middleware in many respects. In a lot of ways, where master data is going is the fact that it's actually that edge that's driving the business outcomes. Whereas our foundational parts around data integration and data quality are really the plumbing to just make sure this thing's trusted and connected, master data is getting it ready for use and sharing it ready for use. So it's actually within processes and applications, it's not just sitting in some pretty repository somewhere. So getting our data fueled applications strategy, things like customer 360 and supplier 360 and product 360, getting not just single master domains but the relationships between multiple master domains in context to support a business process and more importantly a business outcome. That's key to master data management actually delivering on its promise of kind of transforming the way you're engaging with customers and optimizing your supply chain and doing any of your core processes. It's really foundational. So Rob, you've got an extensive background both in products, in data, you and I were both analysts before us at the same time. Still talk a little bit about in three years how is an organization, let me step back. We were talking yesterday at the close that Informatica has put a stake in the ground, that they're going to be a data company. Not a database company, not a middle work, a data company. And there are not a lot of companies that have stepped up and said we're going to be a data company. And that has enormous implications because data is hard and it's diffuse and it's ambiguous and it's a lot of other things. But give us kind of the outlook for three years. How is in particular things like master data management going to change the way the chief data officer works or data governance works or the way the development works as it pertains specifically to data? Yeah, master data management in particular but really just their entire data management competency is really changing from kind of a one-trick pony to a jack of all trades. It's actually supporting multiple business imperatives. It's not just supporting compliance and getting that regulatory reporting out or just supporting customer engagement or just supporting better decision-making. It's doing all of that and it's actually allowing a single foundational investment is allowing your business to actually tackle a significant number of transformational initiatives. And that's key to its future journey is you've proven out some value within a pocket of your organization but now scale that investment. You've already made the investment. Now scale that investment to supporting other parts of the business. And that's where we see it. So the same data being used in a lot of different places. Right. This is one of the beauties of data as an asset is that unlike most assets, which you apply an asset to a productive use and it's pretty limited. You can't apply a building to multiple purposes. It's hard to apply a machine to multiple purposes but data can be copied and data can be repurposed and data can be versioned and applied in a lot of different places. And so many respects, mass data management is that kind of inventory of all the data elements, how they're being used, where they're being used, picking up some of the metadata about the context in which it's being used. Now is that going to become effectively the management framework that the CDO is going to use to look across data as an asset within the business? Yeah, absolutely. So I think about it. It's the only sustainable renewable asset within the organization. Your cash gets consumed, your people resources get filled up, but data can be used forever as long as you're governing it, as long as you're governing it and making sure it doesn't degrade. It does degrade. So, but if you have appropriate governance in place and you have the right infrastructure around quality and security and master data management to ensure it continues to be fresh and relevant, you can use it and get value from it forever, that same bit of data. So the CFO is utilizing a variety of different applications to try to take a look at what the business is doing and increasingly moving from a quarterly view to a monthly view and even now a real-time view as the applications and the technology supports that. What is the CDO? The Chief Data Office is going to use, it's comparable. Is there going to be a comparable toolkit to that? So the CDO is looking across all these assets, evaluating utilization, evaluating how fast they're degrading, what new levels of investment are required to forestall that degradation. What do you envision that group is going to use to manage data effectively? The emerging role of the CDO really depends on each company in each industry in terms of what's their mandate, what's the thing that got them the job and what's the thing that is allowing those resources to flow and it might be a compliance or regulatory type of initiative and it might be an analytic type initiative and where it starts is they, to be successful and honestly to make the CDO role itself a real thing that's going to survive and be a critical CXO role in the future is measurable success. So whatever they start doing, they have to figure out very quickly what are the tools that they're going to need and a lot of it is around metadata management and audibility and ability to have dashboards and scorecards around business outcomes. If they have that infrastructure to be able to prove that the value of the cost center of data management, they could actually be able to turn their role into a profit center of data management but they got to start building it out early to prove the value. Otherwise, people are going to start asking the question, how can we get this done elsewhere with existing resources because we don't want to keep investing into anything that consider a cost center. That's a good point. I want to drill into that because yesterday Peter and I were talking and what came out of some of the interviews was this notion of just another regulatory project that's coming off the scene and this is something that came from which gets some from Informatica world and it was notable because here's the deal, right? You don't want to have to bolt on another siloed project. This iteration of the cloud business model really is about setting up some base core stuff, call it Informatica's data 3.0 platform or whatever you guys are calling it, intelligent data platform but having multiple avenues into infrastructure and reducing the complexity of delivery and deployment. We got that. So what I love is this notion of as stuff comes down the pike that needs attention, privacy, security, you name it, there's going to be another regulatory handcuff, if you will, on the CDO directly. Talk about that dynamic because this is something that people kind of overlooked that the diminishing return of setting up just another siloed project is huge and the consequences are it could be grave. Talk about that. Yeah, so what our Jim Davis, our new chief marketing officer shared in his keynote was on the data competency maturity model is that you start with one business initiative, whatever it might be, and you bring in the components of the intelligent data platform that are necessary to deliver on the objective of that one initiative and then you build upon it. You don't throw away, you actually build upon that and add the additional components to support the next incremental business initiative and deliver that outcome and then you keep building on it but it's all reusing this foundation and then over time you're building out kind of a holistic intelligent data platform for your own organization to enable without having to silo these investments and those investments have diminishing returns if it's only supporting one small portion. It sounds really easy, but it's not. It's that simple. No, but here's the thesis, here's the premise on that. The premise of what you just said in order to have happen on that data competency model which I love by the way is that data's going to be free. You have to have the ability for data to move around. How do you guys enable that to happen because that becomes the key to success for making that building block approach versus another project based data? Right, it's this democratization concept that we hear so much about is a very simple thing. It's just getting the data connected to the people who need to make decisions and get value from it and so data integration, a very old world concept is something which is still the transformational thing for everything we're trying to accomplish which is just getting the right data in the hands of those that need it at the right time, at the right latency, in the right context and that's not as easy as that sounds, but that's the goal. What's the key enabler for that? Is that the MDM? Is that the system, the platform? I haven't figured that out yet. Yeah, it really depends on the use case. That early use case might simply be data integration. Let's get that data move from systems A, B and C into target system Z. It's just a very focused path. Then when you talk about the hub model, whether it's data integration hub or master data management to get the master data, then you're really trying to synchronize and a whole published subscribe thing saying we have a shared service of trusted master data that all of these consuming processes and systems can now subscribe to so they're all using the same information to make different decisions. That's a technology answer. I think that the other big part of the answer I want to confirm this with you is that knowing what data is required is a big piece of this. I think one of the big things we're seeing happening in the industry right now is as we conceptualize data as an asset is what are we going to do? Okay, we're going to do this financial resource, this people resource, this whatever else resource, we're also going to need this data. And master data management is a way of helping identify where that data is, how it's applied, et cetera. And so that's a big part of the question is having a culture and an orientation that starts with what do we need? Let's go find it and let's utilize it with governance in mind. Is that accurate? Absolutely, our methodology in terms of helping customers prioritize, you know, it's not the big bang, you can't do that old traditional boil the ocean of all data is relevant. No, all data is not equally relevant. And you start with your strategic imperatives that your board of directors and your CEO as stated as your corporate objective and you identify what are the key processes that run our business that support those key imperatives? And what data supports those key processes? You're scoping your tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of attributes into a very consumable dozens or hundreds of pieces of data that are truly running your future of your business. That's a very consumable manageable amount of data to govern and to actually put through. And we've also heard in other places that increasingly folks are going to figure out what data needs to be thrown away. One of the biggest challenges is that the data that we think we need today or the data that we don't think we need today may turn out to be data that's crucial tomorrow. And that's one of the other big challenges associated with master data management is data does degrade. You have to sustain investments at an appropriate level in anticipation or create future options for how you're going to use that data. So how is master data management and data quality tooling from Informatica helping folks conceive of that stream of potential value that comes out of data? Right, one of the things when you talk about master data management, you've got entities or a customer or a product or asset or whatever. There's lots of attributes though that are associated with it. Transactional attributes or other attributes captured in different systems. And that's one of the values of our live data map part of our platform, this discovery based paradigm that's actually looking at data usage and context. And it's actually could inform the stewards that are managing your master data management. It's like you've got some attributes associated with this domain that are getting a lot more usage and a lot more volume and a lot more interest from users. And you might want to consider including this in your hub and sharing it as a resource. So again, the ability to have kind of discovery based recommendations saying, we're seeing a spike in usage of these attributes and you're not mastering them. Or if you're not mastering them, you're not sharing them or associate them to your master data, that's your golden record. Maybe this should be part of it. Yeah, because one of the biggest challenges, I mean agile development is proven or it's taught us that as we develop, we also need to create test so that we can do that in cycle. And a similar type of thing is happening around in the data world. As we find data, as we catalog data, as we pull data in and operate on it, we also need to throw off those metadata elements that ensure that we are not only storing it and managing it properly, but also not violating other intellectual property commitments that might be in place. How is third-party data coming into this notion of master data management? Yeah, no, it's huge. Now, you know, there's certainly from a data quality perspective, there's a lot of third-party data enrichment and validation type things like Informatica's data as a service. But when you talk about, you've got our announcement around our intelligent data lake and our marketing data lake. A lot of the data that's really part of this marketing analysis is third-party consumer segmentation data, social data. And suddenly, you have to figure out from a governance and an MDM perspective, how can you associate some of this segmentation level data or social relevance data to your master data that came from your transactional systems? And obviously, the whole social MDM capability that we have is very key to creating that relationship and not just the relationship between Rob Carroll's LinkedIn profile and Rob Carroll's transactional profile, but also who are my friends, who am I influencing? Am I talking to that I can, that is also a customer? And you also want to know about that relationship. So using things like big data relationship management in our big data world allows you to find those non-obvious relationships and get value from those as well. Rob, I got to ask, I have a couple minutes left. I want to get your thoughts on the developer ecosystem. Everyone, the coveted developer ecosystem, everyone wants to win the developers. Not the developers can be won as objects, but in the hearts and minds of developers, they're driving the cloud native. They're driving a lot of the digital transformation apps. So last week SAP did an announcement with Apple, IBM's done an announcement with Apple. You're starting to see that piece developing nicely. Data 3.0 implies that it can be used in the developer process. You get the big, you have the data, the hub, the digital, what's it called, the digital integration hub. Which really is poised for SaaS apps. What's the impact to developers? What's Informatica's current position? Are you guys directly engaging them? You look at them as more of they're getting downstream benefits of the data hub. How is the data being part of their development process? Yeah, now what it comes down to is developers are going to be able to leverage their existing skills with Informatica and Informatica Cloud to be able to do new things faster, which opens up their ability to gain new skills and to work on new use cases. And a developer wants to be able to be introduced to the latest and greatest. They want to be able to have an opportunity. Is that a direct relationship? You guys have a developer? Is that more of a downstream benefit they get from Informatica being deployed, say with the B2B Gateway or in Amazon or whatever? I'm speaking of Informatica's developer ecosystem, which is a very broad-based community that is very loyal and has really bet a lot of their careers on our stack and our ability to give them new skills and our ability to allow them to take on, be able to use those skills, but work on a big data project. They're using those skills. And they're building SaaS apps, that developer community? Right, and it's not always the same developers. There's a different ecosystem of, because a lot of the SaaS apps is going to line up business IT. They're doing differently versus the shared service IT that might be building out data management platforms for an enterprise. Do you see that collision coming or that connection? We see more and more of a handshake going on where that SaaS app's been deployed, whatever it might be, but we still have data quality concerns and we still have to figure out how can we get master data from other apps visible in this app? So suddenly, even though they've deployed the app, they still then need to consume those shared services just because it's in the cloud, doesn't change the formula of if you have a new application or your employees or customers or someone is accessing, you need to get the data to them and you need to be trustworthy. It doesn't change any of that. So that gives them opportunity. So they're still robust, they still got the developer community for Informatica's community, ongoing, still being nurtured and built. And growing as our platform grows, giving them the opportunity to learn new skills in the whole data management space. They're all things data for us, all things data for them as well. So what's going on inside of Informatica? Share with the folks out, there's some color around, obviously, Anil's now the CEO, he's on theCUBE last year, and two years ago at AWS re-invent where it was really clear that cloud game was going on. He was the chief product officer, now he's the CEO. A lot of change going on, a lot of lift inside Informatica. Share some color what's going on with the company. Yeah, I hope you can tell from the buzz at Informatica world, everyone here is incredibly passionate about our opportunity and very excited. And being here with our customers, there's nothing better. And we just see we have great board of directors, great new leadership that's just motivating everybody because we just see this is our opportunity to kind of own the data. Because we're the only company, as you mentioned, to kick things off, that has 100% commitment to making people successful with their data. It's a hobby for almost everyone else. And so we just feel this is our opportunity to shine. We might not think it's a hobby. Yeah, I don't know if it's a hobby. What I would say is it's hard. And most companies, most folks still don't know what it means to look at data and say, that's valuable, we have to take care of it. They can see the value in how it's applied, but that's different from seeing the value and investing in it in anticipation of it being applied. It's clearly not a hobby for our customers, as I was saying in the vendor community. So they might say, hey, we have to deal with data. It's kind of like a part of their app. It's not necessarily a holistic platform view. Which is why the Switzerland comment you hear from Anil is the fact that we want to just support whatever choices you make as a customer, whether whatever database, whatever deployment style, whatever application, whatever visualization tools, our goal is to be able to support wherever you're going and get you the data you need within those environments. It's just when you bring up hobby, because most people say that data geeks love data, they would do it for free, because it's a labor of love at some level, but there's real strategic value in data. I think data, we're all in this industry for quite some time. It's gone from the geeks to the boardroom. It's these folks, these passionate evangelists of data are now getting their day in the sun. Which is a wonderful thing. Well, it's now prime time. People who love data, we all know they are. We're data geeks. We love data at Silicon Angle in theCUBE and our CrowdChat app that we built. But when you see start bubbling up to the top, it's prime time. You're not like a, you know, back in the corner, like in that movie office space, the stapler guy kind of stuck in the basement. You're not a basement organization anymore. You're moving really, really close to all the action. That's where the value is created. No better place to be because these folks know what to do. Now they're actually getting permission to do it. I still think there's a lot of work left to do because there's still a lot of people who say, data is what I put on my storage or my flash drive or data is what I put in my database manager or data is what I process on my server or data is what I move over my network or data is what I blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, put in the envelope in my middleware. There is still a lot of work to be done that says to get to convince people that data is more than the sum of all those different activities and what you spend on security. It actually is something that we have to treat as a resource that has make or break implications for the business. And that's still, we're still a ways away from that. Don't you think? Yeah, we're on that path. And I think one of the things that, it's Informatica's job. Our job is to educate our passionate data evangelists on how to talk about the business benefits and the business outcomes that data can derive. It's not about the data. It's never been about the data. It's about what data can do for your business. And that's the story that we have to teach our customers and we've been working hard at this for many years, but we have to keep doing it, is teaching them how to evangelize their data investments the right way to their business leadership. And the product architecture will also drive a lot of value and that will, people will trample to the doorstep. Anyone who can pull it off, you guys look good looking good. So, Rob, thanks so much for sharing the insights here in theCUBE, really appreciate it. This is theCUBE live in San Francisco for Informatica World, special coverage. I'm still going to go to theCUBE. We'll be right back. You're watching theCUBE. Hi, this is Chris Devaney from DataRobot. My name is...