 Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering Informatica World 2019. Brought to you by Informatica. Welcome back to theCUBE, everyone. We are in the middle of two days of coverage of Informatica World here in Las Vegas. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, along with my co-host, John Furrier. We are joined by Ansa Shaqeran. He is the executive vice president and chief customer officer at Informatica. Thanks so much for coming on theCUBE. My pleasure to be back on theCUBE. Great to see you. Thank you. So, let's talk about your role as the chief customer officer. Last year, you announced this change from a customer service model to a customer success model. How has that been? How have you implemented it and how's it going? No, we have a great opportunity ahead of us. You see a number of enterprises embarking on a data transformation journey. As we offer the best products, it was quite apparent we had to take the services to the next level. We had to take the services and connect them to customers' business value. So we are blurring the lines between the various services functions, support, professional services, university, customer success. We want to abstract them and along with our products, we want to offer the best value to the customers. It's very simple. We sign up a new customer. The first thing we want to do is to work with the customer and define the success plan. What does success mean to them? Success, in two words, business outcomes. It's not about go-lives. Other business users adopting and realizing value. That's where Informatica is very different from other enterprises and I think that's going to further fuel our growth in the future. Also, you've been in the industry a very long time. Informatica, many, many years. How many years? 23. Okay, so I'd consider you a historian of Informatica. I call Bruce Chisholm, I never saw myself as a historian. You've seen the transformations. Talk about what's going on now because certainly going private affords a lot of good things in the public eye anymore in terms of shot clock earnings and on being on that treadmill. You guys really did a lot of digging into innovate. Now, four years later, you're starting to see the fruit coming off that tree in the form of good catalog decision with the catalog, cloud early, AI early, the horizontal scalability of the infrastructure now and one operating model. Interesting kind of tailwinds for you guys. What's going on? How do you talk to customers who have kind of been living in a, I won't say living in a cave, but they've been not as on the front end as you guys have been. I think when you use the word innovation, it's just not about products. As a company, we have been innovating. Along with the products, we have been innovating on all friends, being at the services. We used to have a major release every four years on services. We have shortened the cycle to two years. As a company, we are now offering all our products on the cloud. What does it mean? What does it mean in customer support? We are having to redefine the entire delivery model end to end. You heard in the conference, eight trillion transactions we process in a month that was grown three X just in a year. We have so much data. It's all about what is the information we can glean from these transactions. We have over a billion interactions with the customers every year. How can we put these transactions and interactions packaged in the form of, we have the best telemetry products. We are leveraging data to better serve the customers so that we can try them, accelerate their business outcomes. When I started off, we were one product portfolio company. We had PowerCenter. Now we are the leader in six categories. And our user base is now not only IT, business, and opportunity for us. The other thing that's a perfect storm for innovation that's also happening is the absolute validation that SaaS business models have agility benefits, meaning you can take risks using data, understanding data to get big rewards if scaled properly with clouds. So the role of data in pure SaaS has been proven. Enterprises are recognizing that. Not that easy, but still that's the path that people are now seeing clear visibility to. You guys are going after that. What's your take on that? I think when it comes to SaaS, I think customers realize they should be focusing more on their business processes and let that push the technology side to the vendor, try to partner with the vendor and how they can leverage on the technology side. That's where Informatica has put in a number of programs around that. Imagine a scenario. I'll give you a quick scenario. There's always this risk of putting this data in the cloud. What if you were to say, and there's upgrades every quarter. You know, we push a lot of features and there's always the worry is something going to break. We're going to come out of the programs, going to guarantee that we're going to foolproof the upgrades. Your stuff will work better, faster with every upgrade. That's the kind of what customers- I guarantee that it won't break basically. So that's the kind of programs we're going to offer to our customers. We're going to have for a DI at scale. MDM is coming on the cloud. You saw the demos we showed yesterday. I think we're redefining our model and you're not going to push the envelope further on that. Are customers asking for that assurance or is it more of you guys going to make that a table stakes because it's an opportunity for you? Both. I mean, within the company, our philosophy is very simple. I'll say in equation CS equal to IS. Customer success is equal to Informatica success. In my humble opinion, we both need each other. Just like data and AI, a symbiotic relationship. So I want to get back to what you were saying in terms of how you are defining this customer success, working together with customers to define the business outcome and then working to see, okay, how do we get there? You have a lot of great customers, many in the Fortune 500 and 100. Tell us a little bit about what you've seen over the past year in terms of maybe without naming names or name names if you want to, but in terms of how these companies have seen a difference since you've changed this model. So we sell a platform, I think with the only vendor which offers a platform for data management. There are a number of vendors with point solutions, Informatica's the only vendor which offers the Intelligent Data Platform. Customers buy into the vision because data is, everyone is looking to leverage the power of data. As they buy this platform, they work with us to see how should they approach. It's not, you know, this blueprint needs to evolve. We need to define the building blocks, how should they start with the catalog, should they validate where their assets are. You know, where we're trying to push the services frontiers, it's not around technology. How can we help on the business processes side as well? We just, it's a big journey we're going to undertake and I think that's going to pay off big. I can quote a number of examples. You know, I was sitting in a meeting this morning with a large bank and meeting up with the chief data officer as she kind of laid out her data strategy and we discussed how Informatica is going to play a role. They are depending on us and now we're going to keep our commitment. We're going to deliver on that promise we have made to them. How many customers you guys see really thinking about the data location storage where on premise versus cloud or are they more thinking differently around knowing that they're going to probably store it everywhere or somewhere. Can you share any insight into what the trends are there with your customers? Very, Informatica is uniquely positioned as, there's future workloads which go to the cloud. It's hard to change systems of working. There's always going to be data in the premises. That shift, if something is working, customers don't quickly share it, all right? So, we see future workloads going to the cloud, traditional workloads, even we have a number of large clients still on mainframes. We offer the best products on mainframes as well as much. You just don't get much press. This is the end to ending benefits that you guys are. We go all the way, we cover the entire gamut of the data spectrum. What's the key enabler to make that happen? Is it the catalog? What's the big? The catalog is the big, I think the last year that was a turning point with the catalog coming in. And now through professional services, we offer a lot of workshops at no cost to our customer and how they should put their strategy as well. One of the things that I'm hearing from you is the importance of really understanding the business in addition to the technology. I'm interested to hear how you hire. I mean, obviously we hear so much about the importance of technical talent and the problem of the skills gap in Silicon Valley and beyond. But you obviously are looking for candidates who also really get the business. So what are the kinds of things that you're looking for and what kind of problems do you see in terms of the candidates that you're getting for your open roles? I mean, customer support could be a hard job. We really want to, we look for people who want to make a difference. And if you have that attitude, you get plenty of opportunities to make a difference. Now, with so much talk about AI, service automation, chat bot, robotics, you know, at the end of the day, employees are still the core of the offer. I think the current trend is don't forget the people. The technology is not going to replace the people overnight. So I think we have a fabulous team at Informatica of customer support professionals. Our average retention rate is in the mid 90s. So we hire the best people and they stay with us because this is a great platform. They move around products, but as long as we can give them that spectrum to grow over time as they serve customers, they build the tribal knowledge and they can serve them better, right? So we look for, I mean, there's a lot of data scientists coming in. We look, we always hire from colleges, groom them. You know, I started off that way. I was still with the company 23 years. I want to give that chance for the rest of the team as well. So how many other folks in the company have been there that long? That's a long time. You've been there a very, very long time. There are, you'll be surprised at the number of people who have been long timers at Informatica. That's a great company. How do you maintain the startup mentality? I mean, you were there when it was three years old and now it's... I think personally, what drives me is the fear of failure. You know, having set the bar high, you have to push. And if you want to keep at that pace, you need to have the startup mentality. We have a number of projects in flight and some you have to have that mindset. And now we're a distributed team. We have to keep that spirit going throughout. And like I said, that's coming back to my equation. Customer success, equally Informatica's success. That's what we believe as a company. You said CS is IS and customer success is. I mean, right? There you go, wow. You made it sound even better. So just getting back to that, one of the biggest problems in the technology industry is the skills gap. Are you finding enough people to fill the roles you have? We do not have a problem hiring. The ramp up time, we have a good enablement program, which is good. Take the space of big data. The whole industry landscape changes every six months. So it's that mindset you need to have. Even I have the mindset today. I come in thinking I'm going to learn something new. Learning never stops. So that, you know, you just got to keep learning every day. And I'm not setting expectations. I want people to groom them. I want people who learn on their own. They have to. They have to keep pace with the current technology. Any skills and kids in school that might, or parents watching with their kids in high school or elementary school, what disciplines can they turn up, turn down? You think would make them successful in the future of how the data's going to impact society. A lot of new jobs coming out that don't have degrees for. I mean, Cal Berkeley just graduated their first inaugural class in data analytics. It's just to tell us how early it is. So still, you go back to sixth grade. You go back into high school. Kids are looking to, you know, they're gamers. They're into tech. They want to dial up some. When I went to high school in 1984, I was the first batch of computer science and we learned basic programming. Things have really changed. My girls don't want to do computers. But it is something which we have to evolve constantly. I mean, but. Any classes that jump out at you that think. That's important. Science is hot, you know. It's hot. And, you know, with all the emphasis, we have a number of initiatives within support to leverage AI ML as well. And I talked about it in the last year's program, but there's going to be a skill-scap in some pockets always. You fill that, there's going to be another pocket. Just kind of be constantly pushing at it. So thank you so much for coming on theCUBE. It's a pleasure being on you. Thank you. Thank you. Great job. I'm Rebecca Knight for John Furrier. You are watching theCUBE's live coverage of Informatica World. Stay tuned.