 Hello everyone, welcome to this CUBE Conversation here in Palo Alto, California. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE. We're here with a very special guest, Amitwalia, CEO of Informatica, newly appointed CEO about a month ago, a little over a month ago, had a product before that, been with Informatica since 2013. Informatica went private in 2015 and has since been at the center of the digital transformation around data, data transformation, data privacy, data everything around data and value in AI. That made great to see you and congratulations on the new CEO role at Informatica. Well, thank you, always good to be back here, John. It's been great to follow you and for the folks who don't know you, you've been a very product-centric CEO. You're a product-centric CEO, as they call it. But also now you have a company in the middle of the transformation. Cloud scale is really mainstream. Enterprise is looking to talk multi-cloud, hybrid cloud. This is something that you've been on for many, many years. We've talked about it. So now that you're in charge, you've got the ship, the wheel in your hands. Where are you taking it? What is the update of Informatica? Give us the update. Well, thank you. So look, business couldn't be better. I think to give you a little bit of color where we're coming from the last couple of years Informatica went through a huge amount of transformation, all things trying to transform a business model, pivoting to subscription, all things heavily bet into cloud, the new workloads as we talked about and all things new like AI. To give you a little bit of color, we basically exited last year with a billion dollars of ARR, not just revenue, so we're a billion dollar ARR company. And as we pivoted to subscription, our subscription business for the last couple of years has been growing north of 55%. So that's the scale at which we are running, multi-billion dollars. And if you look at the other two metrics which we keep very clicked near and dear to heart, one is innovation. So we are participating in five magic quadrants and we are the leader in all five magic quadrants. Five on five as we like to call it, Gartner Magic Quadrants, very critical to us because innovation in the tech as you know is very important. Also customer loyalty very important to us. So we again were the number one in customer sat from a TSIA survey. And Gartner publishes the vendor ratings. We basically have a very strong positioning in that. And lastly, our market share continues to grow. So last IDC survey, our market share continue to grow in with the number one in all our markets. So business couldn't be at a better place where we are at. I want to get into some of the business discussions. But first on the magic quadrant front, it's very difficult for the folks that aren't in the cloud is to understand that to participate in multiple magic quadrants what many, many do is hard because clouds horizontally scalable magic quadrants used to be old IT kind of categories. But to be in multiple magic quadrants is the nature of the beast, but to be a leader is very difficult. Cause magic quadrant doesn't truly capture that if you just appear play and then try to be clouds. So you guys are truly that horizontal brand and technology. We've covered this on theCUBE. So it's no secret, but I want to get your comments on to be a leader in today in these quadrants you have to be on all the right waves. You got data warehouses are growing and changing get the rise of snowflake. You guys partner with Databricks again machine learning and AI changing very rapidly. And there's a huge growth wave behind it as well as the existing enterprises who were transforming analytics and operational workloads. This is really, really challenging. Can you just share your thoughts on why is it so hard? What are the some of the key things behind these transfer analytics? I guess you can do if it's just analytics and cloud. Great, but this horizontal data play is not easy. Can you share why? No, so yes. First, we are actually, I would say a very hidden secret. We're the only software company. And I'll say that again, the only software company that was the leader in the traditional world, traditional workloads legacy on premise. And we are the leader in the cloud workloads. Not a single software company can say that they were the leader when they were started 27 years ago. And they're still the leader in the magic quadrants today. Our cloud by the way runs at 10 trillion transactions a month scale. And obviously we partner with all the hyperscalers across the board. And our goal is to be the Switzerland of data for our customers. And the question you ask is a critical one. When you think of the key business drivers, what are customers trying to do? One of them is all things cloud, all things AI is obviously there. But one is all data warehouses are going to cloud. We just talked about that moving workloads to cloud, whether it is analytical, operational, basically we have front and center helping customers do that. Second, a big trend in the world of digital transformation is helping our customers, customer experience. And driving that, fueling that is our master data management business, so on and so products behind that. But driving customer experiences, big, big driver of our growth. And the third one is no large enterprise can live without data governance, data privacy. And this is the thing today, right? You got to make sure that you deliver good governance, whether it's compliance oriented or brand oriented privacy and risk management. And all three of them basically span the business initiatives that feature into those five magic quadrants. Our goal is to play across all of them. And that's what we do. Pat Kelsinger said a quote on the cube many years ago. He said, if you're not on the right wave, you could be driftwood. Meaning you're going to get crashed over. A lot of people have, we've seen a lot of companies have a good skill and then get washed away if you will by a wave. You're seeing like AI and machine learning, we talked a little bit about that. You guys are in there and I want to get your thoughts on this. Whenever there's executive changes, there's always questions around, what's happening with the company? So I want you to talk about the state of Informatica because you're now the CEO, there's been some changes. Has there been a pivot? Has there been a sharpening focus? What is going on with Informatica? So I think our goal right now is to scale and hyperscale, that's the word. I mean, we are in a very strong position. In fact, we use this phrase internally within the company, next phase of great. We're at a great place and we are chartering the next phase of great for the company. And the goal there is helping our customers. I talked about these three big, big initiatives that companies are investing in. Data warehousing and analytics, going to the cloud, transforming customer experiences and data governance and privacy. And the fourth one that underpins all of them is all things AI. I mean, as we've talked about before, right? All of these things are complex, hard to do. Look at the volume and complexity of data. And what we're investing in is what we call native AI. AI needs data, data needs AI, as I always said, right? And we are investing in AI to make these things easy for our customers to make sure that they can scale and grow into the future. And what we've also been very diligent about is partnering. We partnered very well with the hyperscalers like whether it's AWS, Microsoft, whether it's GCP, Snowflake, Great Partner Awards, Databricks, Great Partner Awards, Tableau, Great Partner Awards. We have a variety of these partners. And our goal is always customer first. Customers are investing in these technologies. Our goal is to help customers adopt these technologies not for the sake of technologies, but for the sake of transforming those three business initiatives adopted. You brought up, I was going to ask you the next question about Snowflake and Databricks. Databricks has been on theCUBE. Ali, a great friend of ours. And he's got chops. I'm not standing for Berkeley. He'll kill me with that. He's a cow, I'm standing for it. But Databricks is doing well. They made some good bets and it's paying off of them. Snowflake, a rising star. Frank Slutman's over there now. They are clearly a choice for modern data warehouses as is Erebus Redshift. How are you working with Snowflake? How do you take advantage of that? Can you just unpack your relationship with Snowflake? It's a very deep partnership. Our goal is to help our customers as they pick these technology choices for data warehousing, for example, where Snowflake comes into play to make sure that the underlying data infrastructure can work seamlessly for them. See, customers build this complex logic sitting in the old technologies. As they move to anything new, they want to make sure that their transition, migration is seamless, as seamless as it can be. And typically they'll start something new before they retire something old. With us, they can carry all of that business logic for the last 27 years, their business logic seamlessly and run natively in this case in the cloud. So basically we allow them this whole from to and also the ability to have the best of technology in the context of data management to power up these new infrastructures where they are going. Let me ask you the question around the industry trends. What are the top industry trends that are driving your business and your product direction and customer value? Look, digital transformation has been a big trend. And digital transformation has fueled all things like customer experiences being transformed. So that remains a big vector of growth. I would say cloud adoption is still relatively in its early innings. So you love baseball, so we can still say what? Second, third inning, as much as we'd like to believe cloud has been there. Customers moved with their analytical workloads first, still happening. The operational workloads are still in its very, very infancy. So that is still a big vector of growth and a big trend that we see for the next five plus years. And you guys in the middle of that because of the data. Absolutely, because if you're running a large operational workload, it's all about the data at the end of the day. Because you can change the app, but it's the data that you want to carry, the logic that you've written that you want to carry and we participate in that. I've asked you this before, but I want to ask you again, because I want to get the modern update because pure cloud born in the cloud, like startups and whatever it's easy to say that, do that, everyone knows that. Hybrid is clear now, everyone that sees that as an architectural thing. Multi-cloud is kind of a state of, I have multiple clouds, but being true multi-cloud a little bit different, maybe downstream conversation, but certainly relevant. So as cloud evolves from public cloud, hybrid, and maybe multi or certainly multi, how do you see those things evolving for Informatica? Well, we believe in the word hybrid. And I define hybrid exactly as these two things. One is hybrid is multi-cloud. You're going to have hybrid clouds. Second is hybrid means you're going to have ground and cloud interoperate for a period of time. So to us, we sit in the center of this hybrid cloud trend. And our goal is to help customers go cloud native, but make sure that they can run whatever was the old business that they were running as much possible in the most seamless way before they can at some point cut over. And which is why, as I said, I mean our cloud native business, our cloud platform, which we call Informatica Intelligent Cloud Services, runs at scale globally across the globe by the way, on all hyperscalers at 10 plus trillion transactions a month. But yet we will allow customers to run their on-prem technologies as much as they can, because they cannot just rip the bandaid over there. So multi-cloud, ground cloud, our goal is to help customers, large enterprise customers manage that complexity. Their AI plays a big role, because these are all very complex environments. And our investment in AI, our AI being called clear, is to help them manage that as in an as automated way, as seamless a way. And to be honest, the most important thing for them is in the most governed way, because that's where the biggest risks come into play. That's where our investments are. Let's talk about customers for a second. I want to get your thoughts on this because at Amazon re-invent last year, December, there was a meme going around that we started on theCUBE called, if you take the T out of cloud native, it's cloud naive. And so the point was is to say, hey, doing cloud native makes sense in certain cases, but if you're not really thinking about the overall hybrid and the architecture of what's going on, you kind of could get into a naive situation. So I asked Andy this and I want to ask you, Andy Jackson, I want to ask you the same question as that. What would be naive for a customer to think about cloud? So they can be cloud native or operate in a cloud. What are some of the things they should avoid so they don't fall into that naive category? Naive being, I am doing cloud for cloud's sake. I mean, so there's kind of this perception that you got to do cloud right. What's your view on cloud native and how does people avoid the cloud naive label? It's a good question. I think to me, when I talk to customers and hundreds of them across the globe, as I meet them in a year, is to really think of their cloud as a reference architecture for at least the next five years. If not, I mean, technology changes. Think of a reference architecture for the next five years. And in that, you got to think of multiple best of breed technologies that can help you. I mean, you got to think best of breed as much as possible. Now, you're not going to go have hundreds of different technologies running around because you got to scale them, but think as much as possible that you are best of breed, yet settle to what I call a few platforms as much as possible. And then make sure that you basically have the right connection points across different workloads will be optimal for different, let's say cloud environments, analytical workload, and operational workload, a financial workload. Each one of them will have something that will work best in somewhere else, right? So to me, putting the business focus on what the right business outcome is and working your way back to what cloud environments are best suited for that, and building that reference architecture thoughtfully with a five-year goal in mind, then jumping to the next most exciting thing, hot thing, and trying to experiment your way through it that will not scale would be the right way to go. Yeah, it's not naive to be focusing on the business problems and operating it in a cloud architecture. This is what you're saying. Okay, so let's talk about the customer journey around AI because this has become a big one. You guys have been on the AI way for many, many years, but now that it's become full mainstream enterprise, how are the application software guys looking at this? Because if I'm an enterprise and I want to go cloud native, I have to make my apps work, apps are driving everything these days and you guys play a big role. Data is more important than ever for applications. What's your view on the app developer DevOps market? So to me, the big change that we see, in fact, we're going to talk a lot about that in a couple of months when we are at Informatica World, our user conference in May, is how data is moving to the next phase. And it's what developers today are doing is that they are building the apps with data in mind first, data first apps. I mean, if you're building, let's say a great customer service app, you got to first figure out what all data do you need to service a customer before you go build an app. So that is a very fundamental shift that has happened. And in that context, what happens is that in a cloud native environment, obviously, you have a lot of flexibility to begin with that, bring data over there, and DevOps is getting complimented by what we see as data ops, having all kinds of data available for you to make those decisions as you build an application. And in that, the discussion you and me are having before is that there is so much data that you will not be able to understand that, investing in metadata. So you can understand data about the data. I call metadata as the intelligent data. If you're an intelligent enterprise, you got to invest in metadata. Those are the places where we see developers going first and from their ground up, building what we call apps that are more intelligent apps of the future, not just business process apps. Cloud native versus cloud naive, conversation we were just having is interesting. You talk about best of breed. I want to get your thoughts on some trends we're seeing. You're seeing even in cybersecurity with RSA coming up, there's been consolidation. You saw our Dell just sold RSA through a private equity company. So you're starting to see a lot of these Shenny new toy type companies being consolidated in because there's too much for companies to deal with. You're seeing also skills gaps, but also skills shortages. There's not enough people. That is true. Now you have multiple clouds. You got Amazon, you got Azure, you got Google GCP, you got Oracle, IBM, VMware, now you have a shortage problem. True. So this is putting pressure on the customer. So with that in mind, how are the customers reacting to this and what is best of breed really mean? So that is actually a very good point. We all live in Silicon Valley. So we get excited about the latest technology and we have the best of skills here, even though we have a skills problem over here, right? Think about as you move away from Silicon Valley and you start flying and I fly all over the world and you start seeing that if you're in the middle of nowhere, there is not a whole lot of developers who understand the latest cutting edge technology that happens here. Our goal has been to solve that problem for our customers. Look, our goal is to help the developers, but as much as possible provide the customers the ability to have a handful of skilled developers, but they can still take our offerings and we abstract away that complexity. So that they are dealing only at a higher level. The underlying technology comes and goes and it'll come and go a hundred times. They don't have to worry about that. So our goal is abstract away the underlying changes in technology, focus at the business logically here and you can move, you can basically run your business for over the course of 20 years and that's what we've done for customers. Customers who have invested with us have run their businesses seamlessly for two decades, three decades while so much technology has changed over a period of time. And the cloud is right here scaling up. So I want to get your thoughts on the different clouds. Obviously Amazon, web services, number one in the cloud, hyperscaler, we're talking pure cloud that got more announcements, more capabilities. Then you got Azure again, hyperscaler, trying to catch up to Amazon, more enterprise focus of doing very, very well in the enterprise. I said on Twitter, they're mopping up the enterprise because it's easy to have an install base there. They've been leveraging it very well. Satya Nadella has done a team done a great job with that. You got Google, trying to specialize and figure out where they're going to fit Oracle, IBM, everyone else. As you'd have to deal with this, you're kind of an arms dealer in a way with data. I would love to say that. You know, not an arms dealer. That's a bad analogy, but you get my point. You have to play well, you have to. It's not like an aspiration. Your requirement is you have to play and operate with value in all the clouds. One, how is that going? And what are the different clouds like? Well, look, I always begin with the philosophy that it's customer first. You go where the customers are going. And customers choose different technologies for different use cases as teams fit for them. Our job is to make sure our customers are successful. So we begin with the customer in mind and we solve from there. Number two, that's a big market. There is plenty of room for everybody to play. Of course, there is competition across the board, but plenty of room for everybody to play. And our job is to make sure that we assist all of them to help at the end of the day our joint customers. We have great success stories with all of them. Again, with in mind, the end customer. So that has always been Informatica's philosophy. Customer first, and we partner with critical strategic partners in that context. And we invest, and we've invested with all of them. Deep partnerships with all of them. They've all been at Informatica. Well, you've seen them. So again, as I said, and I think the easiest way, we obviously believe they do the search and end of data, but keep the customer in mind all the time and everything follows from there. What is multi-cloud meat to your customers? If your customer's centric, obviously, we hear people say, yeah, I use this for that. And I get that. When I talk to CIOs and CSOs where there's real dollars and impact on the business, there tends to be a gravitational pull towards one cloud. A lot of people are building their own stacks. The in-house development has shifted to be very DevOps cloud native and then we'll have a secondary cloud, but they recognize that they have multiple clouds, but they're not spreading their staff around for the reasons around skill shortages. Are you seeing that same trend? And two, what do you see as multi-cloud? Well, it is multi-cloud. I think people sometimes don't realize they're already in a multi-cloud world. I mean, you have so many SaaS applications running around, right? Look around that. So whether you have Workday, whether you have Salesforce.com, and I can keep going on and on and on, right? There are multiple, similarly multi-platform clouds are there, right? People are using Azure for some use cases. They may want to go AWS for certain other native use cases. So quite naturally customers begin with something to begin with and then the scale from there, but they realize as I talk to customers, they realize, hey, look, I have use cases and they're optimally set for some things that are multi-cloud and they'll end up there, but they all have to begin somewhere before they go somewhere. So I have multiple clouds, which I agree with you by the way and talking about this on the Qvalot, is multiple clouds and then this interoperability among clouds. I mean, remember multi-vendor back in the old days, multi-cloud, it kind of feels like a multi-vendor kind of value proposition, but if I have Salesforce or Workday and these different clouds in Amazon where I'm developing or Azure, what is the multi-cloud interoperability? Is it the data control plane? What problems are the customers facing and the challenges that they want to turn into opportunities? Multi-cloud. See, I've got an example. One of the biggest areas of growth for us is helping our customers transform their customer experience. Now, if you think about an enterprise company that's thinking about having a great understanding of their customer, now just think about the number of places that customer data sits. One of the, one of our big areas of investment capabilities is CRM, product called Salesforce.com, right? Could customer data sits there? But there could be where ticketing data sits, there could be where marketing data sits, there could be some legacy applications, the customer data sits in so many places. More often than not, we realize when we talk to a customer, it sits in at least 20 places within an enterprise. And then there is so much customer data sitting outside of the firewalls of an enterprise, right? Clickstream data, where people are partner data, partner data. So in that context, bringing that data together becomes extremely important for you to have a full view of your customer and deliver a better customer experience from there. So it is, the customer- Is that the problem? It's a huge problem right now. Huge problem right now across the board where customer like, I want to serve my customer better but I need to know my customer better before I can serve them better. So we are squarely in the middle of that helping and we being the Switzerland of data being fully understanding the application layer and the platform layer, we can bring all that stuff together. And through the lens of our customer 360 which is fueled by our master data management product we allow customers to get to see that full view. And from there you can service them better, give them a next best offer or you can understand the full lifetime value of a customer, so on and so forth. So that's how we see the world and that's how we help our customers in this really fragmented cloud world. And that's your primary value proposition. It's a huge value proposition. And again, as I said, always think customer first. Amit, you got your big event coming up this spring so looking forward to seeing you there. I want to get your take as now that you're looking at the next great chapter of Informatica. What is your vision? How do you see that 20 mile stare out in the marketplace as you execute, again, your product oriented CEO because your product chops now you're leading the team. What's your vision? What's the 20 mile stare? Well, as simple as possible we're going to double the company. Our goal is to double the company across the board. We have a great foundation of innovation we've put together and we remain paranoid all the time as to where and we always try to look where the world is going, serve our customers. And as long as we have great customer loyalty which we have today, have the foundations of great innovation and a great team and culture at the company which we fundamentally believe in, we basically right now have the vision of doubling the company. That's awesome. Well, really appreciate you taking the time. One final question I want to get your thoughts on. You know, Silicon Valley and in the industry starting to see Indian American executives become CEOs, you're now CEO of Informatica. Congratulations, Arvin over at IBM, Satya Nutella. This has been a culture of the technology for generations. I remember when I broke into the business in the late 80s, 90s, this is the pure love of tech and the meritocracy of technology is at play here. This is a historic moment and it's been written about but I want to get your thoughts on how you see it evolving and advice for young entrepreneurs out there, future CEOs, what's it take to get there? What's it like? What's your personal thoughts? Well, first of all, it's been a humbling moment for me to lead Informatica. It's a great company and a great opportunity. I mean, I can say like it's the true Americans dream. I mean, I came here in 1998. I mean, as a lot of immigrants did, didn't have much in my pocket. I went to business school. I was deep in loans and I believed in the opportunity. And I think there is something very special about America and I would say something really special about Silicon Valley where it's all about at the end of the day value. It's all about meritocracy. The color of your skin and your accent and you know, those things don't really matter. And I think we are such an embracing culture typically over here and my advice to anybody is that look, believe. And I genuinely use that word and I've gone through stages in my life where you sometimes doubt it but you have to believe and stay honest of what you want. And look, there is no substitute to hard work. Sometimes luck does play a role but there is no substitute to hard work and at the end of the day, good things happen. As we say that for the love of the game, love of tech, your tech athlete, love to interview and congratulations. It's been great to follow your career and get to know you and Informatica. It's great to see you at the helm. Thank you John. It's a pleasure being here. I'm John Furrier here at the Cube Conversation in Palo Alto. Getting the update on the new CEO from Informatica, Mitt Wally, a friend of theCUBE and of course a great tech athlete and now running the great company. I'm John Furrier. Thanks for watching.