 Live from San Francisco, it's theCUBE, covering Informatica World 2017, brought to you by Informatica. Hey, welcome back, everyone. We're live here in San Francisco for Informatica World 2017. I'm John Furrier with theCUBE, SiliconANGLES flagship program. We go out to the events and extract the signal from the noise. My co-host for the next two days is Peter Burris, general manager of Wikibon Research. You can find that research at wikibon.com. And our next guest is Deepak Katala, a big data architect, enterprise business intelligence strategy and planning with Dell EMC. Dell, welcome to theCUBE. Thank you so much. For Dell Technologies, it's a big company now. You've got a zillion brands. We just came back from two days at Dell EMC World in Vegas. A lot of action going on in your world. But you're here at Informatica World. You are the distinct winner of the Innovation Honorary Award. Tell us about that. That was last night. Yeah, exactly. It was really good. It was great to be there. And part of the Honorary Awards and things like that. It's been really interesting that the evolution of big data is coming into maturity at Informatica. And we use a lot of Informatica products to be successful in the big data side. So you're a customer in this case with Informatica. You're a customer of this. Yes. All right. So how are you guys using Informatica? So Informatica, we use, you name it and we have so many products that are out there for Informatica right now. So we started our journey back in 2007 with Informatica Power Center. And as we evolved in different silos and different data sets that got into our site, we got a lot of structured and unstructured data. And the thirst of big data also started growing tremendously. So we have a Hadoop platform and we have a data lake today that we harvest a lot of data that's coming from different source systems, structured, unstructured, semi-structured data. So we needed a tool and technology that can help us to actually use our existing skill sets and the army of the people who knows Informatica from the days of 2007 till today that we have kept inside. So we wanted to leverage that skill set than training a bunch of new folks in the big data platform and starting them from scratch. Deepak, Hadoop was supposed to change the world and actually kill Informatica. All the press said, oh, Informatica and big data, Hadoop. Hadoop is just one element now of the big data space or how we wanted to describe it. Data lakes are also defined, I don't like the term data lake because they become data swamps if you don't use the data hence Informatica. But my question is, as data is getting laid out whether it's Hadoop or in the clouds, making it relevant is a real architectural challenge. Can you share your insight into how do you guys look at that data architecture? Definitely, right? So like anybody else, like, you know, we also face the same problem of we got a lot of data that we put in our data reservoir or data lake, whatever you want to call it. And then over the time, we realized like, oh, okay, now what do we do with this data? What is the value, how we can extract it, right? And that's where the whole tools and technologies around this whole ecosystem comes into the play, which actually provide that value to actually get the data value extracted from it. So Informatica is one of the tool that our choice was after doing some of the bake-offs and going through a process of proof of concepts and we identified, yeah, this is the stage that we have to make a conclusion to say that we want to go with Informatica because of too many reasons that I can speak about. But one of the major reason was like, you know what, I can say, I can do the same existing skill sets of what we have in-house and improve on top of it. So Deepak, the concept of data management used to be associated with managing a file, managing a database, effectively, managing the tools that handle data. As we're hearing it increasingly applied in the digital universe, and I presume at Dell as well, the notion of data management is starting to extend and generalize a little bit differently. How do you see data management? And the next question I'm going to ask you is, and from an architect standpoint, what's the relationship between what you do from an architecture standpoint and how you envision data to be managed? So what is data management to you? So the data management is basically like, you know, what's harvesting your data, right? So basically like I said, data is coming in different forms and you wanted to go and get the data consumption happen from different sources and different silos that we have over time. And then now we are in a situation like, you know, what, okay, what kind of data exists? What is the metadata? What is the governance around it, right? So those are becoming more and more important as we move and getting matured in this whole data management perspective. So it's looking at data across applications and across tools to try to increasingly treat data as an asset that can be managed just like a plant can be managed. Have I got that right? Exactly, so now we have to realize that now data is an asset, you know, that's where the value is. You know, your business and your stakeholders, everybody's looking at your data to extract value out of it. So does a data architect then, again, a data architect used to be the person who laid out the database manager and whatnot. Do you see your job now more as design plus implementation with an eye towards performance ensuring that people understand how to use data, making sure that things can be governed. What is the emerging and evolving job of a data architect in this new era of data management as managing data assets? So traditionally with the relational databases, it worked pretty well for the data architects, whatever they are doing, and it worked pretty well. But the thing is with the new changes that we are going with the fast evolving technologies that we are having and the amount of data that we are getting in different forms, you know, it always gets challenging that it's not just the data architect. It has to be co-ed together with some of the solution architecture together to see how we have to go and consume all this information, but at the same time, how we are providing value out of it. So the tools that Informatica's providing are helping you do that? Yes, the tools and Informatica definitely helped us starting from the power center side, which is more inclined towards relational databases. Today we use big data management tools on our side, which actually is helping us to be the same kind of value that it provided with the power center. Now we can provide the same value out of a Hadoop platform. So as you look forward over the course of the next few years, do you anticipate that the assets, the data assets that you're creating within Dell are going to be applied to, you know, how developers are going to do things differently, how users are going to do things differently? How do you see the data architect and data management serving these different consumers of data within Dell? So the overall end goal is like, you know, the business satisfaction, right? Like the business is trying to get the value out of the data yesterday. So you know what you need to be so fast enough to deliver the stuff to the business. So one of the major capabilities that we are looking at is to have the self-service capabilities for the business stakeholders so they can actually go and do themself rather than, you know, waiting for the IT or being a bottleneck for them to deliver what they want. So I'm going to ask you about this award. Dell was recently selected as the grand prize winner of the Informatica $1 million software and services big data ready challenge. Now was that cash prize? I mean, Michael Dell just spent $69 billion on EMC. You could probably use, no, I'm only kidding. Was that cash or was that first product services? No, it's not the cash. It's just one of the honoree award that we got as, you know, Dell being a proactive customer of you guys who actually got in the services and the software that actually we are looking at Informatica Data Integration Hub and Informatica Intelligence Data Lake which actually will provide the self-service capabilities and the integration at a single point. So you'll apply, so the objective of the self-service capability, the outcome is that you seek, you use the Data Integration Hub and some free, for a period of time, some free software, some free services to build that pilot and then roll it out to the organization. Exactly, so the whole idea is to show the value out of these tools and technologies that Informatica has been investing and helping the whole ecosystem to improvise the standards. So Deepak, I got to ask you, we had some of the execs on earlier and they were talking about, oh, data's the heartbeat of the organization, you know, kind of cliche, but kind of accurate. We believe that to be true. Certainly data's the center of the action. But then it brings up the whole data conversation. Who's the practitioner? Do you have heart surgeons? And then what about the hygienist? You know, you got to have data hygiene. So the big data ready challenge is interesting because it's always been a challenge to go from pilot to production but then also it's the readiness around an organization's ability to even understand what the hell do they have, how do they use it, and then really how do they take it to the next level, the mastery of doing the data. So certainly there's different skill sets. So how do you look at that analogy and how would you organize teams around that? Because in some cases there's a heart surgeon needed, you got to redo some surgery on the company relative to the data strategy. And sometimes it's just know your hygiene, brush your teeth if you will, kind of concept of being ready, your thoughts and reaction to that. So yeah, initially we also start like, you know, the simplicity is just to get the data and put it in one place, but it's not. It's just one part of the whole equation. But you will have so many things like data governance, data quality, data security, because you know, you might have a PII data that you want to secure it and you might have something like web logs which don't need security. So everybody has a play in this, it's not just the one thing that, you know, that you have the data ingestion done and then you know, you're good. So it's not that the case, it's always the maturity happens in different stages. So the hiring and organizing a team, there's specialty, right? You're going to have the more skilled folks and then some of the, you know, day-to-day, maybe an analyst or, you know, citizens data wrangler, you know, these things going on. Your thoughts on organizing and the teams around data. Yeah, so one of the team is that we are saying, looking at is that we are harvesting a lot of data scientists internal to a Dell. That's because, you know, there are other guys that we rely on mostly to see that, you know, to extract the value of the hidden stuff that we are not able to see as of today. And to do that in an effective manner, we need to know how to unleash those guys and be self-sustained by themself so they can improve the quality and provide the value to the organization. For the folks that have been following Informatica over the years, they were once a public company, the data warehouse was all the rage, now it's real time, all kinds of landscape changes in the marketplace. What's Informatica all about today? Informatica is no more just data platform. I think it's expanding its wings to do more stuff, especially on the big data site. Now you have this Informatica data integration hub and you're talking about having this data lake, intelligent data lake and things like that, which is going to be introducing a lot of machine learning algorithms and things like that. Having this whole metadata concept that is matured over just the metadata manager. And right now it's going very huge because of the different big data platforms are coming together. It's not only the big data platform. Big data platform is a very loose term to me. It's just not the Hadoop. It could be, at Dell we have so many different technologies come together and we call all of them as a data platform for us, big data platform for us. Hadoop is just being one of the component to it. So what you're saying basically is there's no silver bullet? Yes. Indeed, there's no magical answer. But there are skills. Yes. And so increasingly what you're looking to do is saying what are the outcomes? What are the objectives? What are the skills we need to get there? And then let's look for tools. You today are lining up nicely with Informatica. Exactly. So as you think about the next steps that you're going to take, where does the function of a data architect go within Dell and what kind of recommendations would you make to those users out there who are thinking about how they want to optimize their skills, their use of their skills in a data analytics world? Yeah, sure. So the data architecture, like I said previously in the relational data warehouse kind of stuff, it was pretty straightforward. But now we are seeing that data architects are getting more and more mature in getting this data into semi-structured data and improvising that how the data fit actually get ingested in the right manner so that we can really, is it like three and a half or whatever, is it like you cannot have a data silos anymore, it's like what do you need to bring in all data sets together to actually make a meaningful answer to it? At least make it possible to bring them together. Exactly. We had a lot of cost and a lot of pain. Yes. You may not have to bring them all together. As you said, it's not all about putting it all on the data lake, it's about making it possible to acquire it. So you have to know where the data is, you have to be able to acquire, you have to be able to reformat it on the fly, all those other things to serve your customers, especially in a self-service world. So where does this go? How is this going to drive, what recommendation would you give to companies who are looking to accelerate their use of these new technologies and new approaches? I would say this to everybody that, what here to your customers, here to your business, there are the visionaries for you to, like there is no single person that in the organization that knows every domain. So you need to be very well aware of your SMEs, of different data domains that you have, and make sure you pull all these resources together to actually start contributing to the organizational wide impact. So start with, be true to your business, your customers. Focus on finding data. Yes. And then focus on bringing the appropriate level of integration, not putting it all in one place, but so that your customers can be matched to the data that they need. Exactly. Our DPAC final question, just your thoughts on the show here. Again, 3,000 people and growing every year, the new rebranding, Informatica going into the cloud world, automation, you're seeing Claire, this new AI meets data, what's your thoughts? I think this is phenomenal approach that Informatica is taking right now, and I'm glad there's no, like you said, there are 3,000 people here, really interested to know what's going on and how things are evolving with Informatica. So it's a really great show to be here and I think I'm very glad to be part of it. Congratulations on your award for the Big Data Ready Challenge, a grand prize winner, a million dollars worth of product. Knocked down some of that purchase price, but I'm sure you guys are a big customer. Thanks for coming on and sharing your insight as a customer of Informatica. It's my pleasure. It's theCUBE, I'm John Furrier, with Peter Burst, more live coverage in San Francisco, the CUBE at Informatica 2017. We'll be right back after the short break, stay with us.