 Live 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. This is theCUBE's exclusive coverage of Informatica World. I'm John Furrier with Peter Burris. Our next guest is Greg Hansen, who's the Vice President of EMEA Cloud. Welcome to theCUBE. Thank you very much. So obviously, and outside the U.S. Cloud has challenges. We all know the data challenges, but really the explosive nature of SaaS is growing everywhere. But also the global requirement is beyond boundaries. So I want to get your first take with data. How has that come up for you with the new Enterprise Cloud? Because you're talking about having data move around all over the place. Yes, yeah. So I mean for us in EMEA, there are some specific kind of geopolitical issues that are causing adoption of cloud to be slightly slower in parts of our region. So Middle East, for example, Russia, that tends to lag behind in terms of adoption. But now in the U.K., specific use cases, there's quite a rapid adoption of cloud. And certainly my perception is that every business in three to five years is going to be what I call a hybrid organization that has to adopt both cloud and on-premise in order to retain competitiveness moving forward. I think for us on the data side specifically, I think one of the barriers to adoption of cloud is in EMEA specifically is more about regulatory. And a lot of the SaaS vendors, including Informatica, generally have kind of data hoisted out of North American data center for some specific countries in EMEA. That does pose as a problem. Regulatory generally speaking, or regulatory specifically the data or both? To the data. So there are various different legislative frameworks in the different countries but the EU will govern legislation for the European marketplace as a whole. There are things like the safe harbor statement which governs how you can store and use data, et cetera in North America. But even so, there are specific countries like Germany, for example, U.K. where it becomes increasingly difficult to sort of move data outside of the continent. So the natural question that comes to mind is, okay, I'm driving in my car and I'm on the phone and I, or on an airplane for that matter. I haven't got some IOT. You can't do that in EMEA. You can't drive with your phone. I'll speak your phone or my A.I. assistant that's driving for me while my car's driving itself. But I cross the border into Germany. Is that use case now problematic with IOT and data? Has it already kind of resolved regulatory? Where does the data get stored? Is it a telco issue? Who owns that problem? Yeah, so I think, so long as it's within the EU marketplace itself, so the country's all around Germany, you're driving into Germany, you'd be okay with that kind of framework because they're governed by the same legislative framework. But outside of that, we've got specific issues. If you were to cross borders and go outside of the EU, like into Russia, for example, that certainly would pose a problem, for sure, yeah. On the on-prem side, what's going on in EMEA on-prem, there's obviously cloud is on the radar that's on their road map, so we've seized a lot of activity there, but is there public cloud with Amazon more experimental still? And how's the data fit into that? So you just have a really interesting integration with Amazon, for instance, as one cloud. So, what's the on-prem scenario? Because if they're not moving as fast because of those concerns. Yeah, it's an interesting point, actually, because in truth, when I talk to people, people's first view of cloud is software as a service vendor. That's what kind of comes to mind when it's cloud. But the reality of most of the conversations that I have with CIOs or line of business managers is that their first priority in cloud is to move to frameworks like Amazon, so platforms as a service, rather than software as a service, potentially. For the reasons that I gave you earlier on around legislative framework, that I can't say. So platform as a service is certainly something that we're helping to, because for that, even though it might be kind of your typical ERP applications, but just in a cloud wrapper in the cloud, you've still got a big, huge migration process around that because you don't want to move redundant data. You want to retire data that's got redundancy, so you want to pay, get the cost benefits of cloud by not moving too much data that you really don't need in the cloud. Yeah, and then the thing also we can imagine, I can imagine the adoption trends you're talking about, obviously cloud trend, how's it impacting the partnerships and the channel in particular in Europe? Because we heard earlier, the channels where the innovation's happening, both within Informatica and potentially new channels. So, obviously that's going to be an accelerant I would imagine to cloud adoption and vis-a-vis data. What's the update on the channel partner strategy? So I think what we're seeing emerging now with the adoption of cloud is a whole new set of new technology or ISV vendor partnerships as well that will start to form. We're starting to see specific partnerships emerging around solutions, for example, in vertical industries. So people developing solutions that are big data in the cloud where you can have a common analytical framework for a specific use case for a vertical. And obviously Informatica can help in terms of sourcing and making sure all the data is collected to service that big data initiative. So that's certainly one thing. But then in the background, we've seen a lot of consolidation of partners. You know, the bigger SIs have acquired a lot of the smaller kind of boutique shops, which is problematic because you build a relationship and then that changes overnight. But there's still a lot of partnerships out there in the cloud world that we can exploit. Are you selling mainly products based in the cloud or are you also responsible for products that help customers get more out of the cloud? I think both, to be perfectly frank. I mean, still a large proportion of our business in EMEA is on-premise led. But the fastest growing part of our business is the cloud side of things. So we're doing both. We're helping people shift with their digitization strategy in the movement to cloud, while supporting them in that journey by providing all the relevant integration, quality mastering, masking, security services that they need on-prem as well. So now that Google and Amazon have largely validated the idea that cloud is a very, very definite option for businesses of all sizes. We're starting to see an increasing rush. It's almost like the gold rush. Get an early position. Try to build your customer bases up as fast as possible. Multiple different perspectives. Amazon, pure infrastructure. Other companies, Salesforce for example, much more of an application down. There's going to be a lot of variation in how different clouds handle different things. And as you said, there's going to be, there will be hybridization of the cloud, but that's going to require a high degree of integration. And data integration especially is going to be important because the cost of physically moving data from one place to the other is non-trivial in computing. What role is Informatica going to play at making it easier for customers to choose the right cloud provider based on geography, price, competencies, all these other things, and not have to focus their decision on data? So I mean, the first thing you heard our CEO yesterday talk about Informatica being the Switzerland of data. And that's quite important to people when they're thinking about making the leap to cloud because they want to know that what they're investing in in terms of a cloud infrastructure can help them with whatever their future journey may be. And in the cloud world, you might want to swap ecosystems, for example. You might want to select a specific vendor. And one of the things that Informatica does with its neutrality is, first and foremost, provides all the connectivity and services that you need to get data in and out with all the reusable components around quality, mastering, profiling security that I've mentioned before, for whichever ecosystem you want to load in and out of. I'll say another thing about the adoption of cloud that I find is quite interesting myself and how we're helping with the journey to cloud because I foresee that a lot of the mistakes have the past in terms of the integration world have been made again with cloud. And I think it's because if you look at the cloud adoption side, you'll find that a lot of cloud adoption has been driven by line of business managers rather than IT, which is historically where the movement of data has been generated from. And that is causing a unique issue in my mind because we're starting to see the evolution of a lot of point-to-point style connections again between different software as a service providers in the cloud, cloud to ground, and so on and so on. And in reality, we're regenerating a problem that we solved on the on-premise world five to 10 years ago. And now Informatica's got a great solution to do that as well. We had what we call a data integration hub which primarily was on-premise. And now we also have all that capability in the cloud which is a great offering to help organizations make sure they don't make that mistake again and re-engineer that hairball that they is so costly and removes all the agility from what should be a cloud agile framework. Well, those point-to-point connections also, you had control of both termination points and in the cloud, you don't. You very rarely have control over all the termination points which makes it even more problematic. Having said that though, that the need will be a broadly distributed set of integration points, nonetheless, that are administered by a common set of capabilities. Master data management being one of the key issues as well as the actual messaging technologies responsible for moving the data around. Is Informatica or just do you anticipate that Informatica is going to take a lead on getting some of these cloud providers to start to publish some of their frameworks, their data models, their conventions, et cetera, regarding data, how they administer data and whatnot, into a common MDM-like framework so the stuff maps out of the box or closer out of the box and therefore sustained synchronization over an extended period of time. What do you think? Is that something that's on the horizon? I would love that to happen but I can't see that happening anytime soon. I think that the pace of growth, the pace of development that's going on in the individual software as a service vendors that I'm finding is that they're quite inward looking when it comes to their own development and building out of their own solution. So I don't see much in the way of standards and interfaces to help that kind of commonality across different software applications in the cloud, for example, which would help with that kind of commonality. It probably takes some sort of open standards body to be formed and I'm not yet aware of any particular body that's going to be responsible for that at the moment. But it's an interesting thought, it probably should be happening. As you get more cloud adoption, it probably will. Well, you get more, I mean, one of the, again, one of the beauties of cloud and in-memory databases and a number of other technologies is that we can conceive of increasingly complex applications that can do, you know, more rich things. And that's going to be extremely difficult to do, however, as you said, if we are maining down in the weeds, even though we're in the cloud on some of these integration issues and constantly have to maintain those things. It would be interesting to see, obviously Informatica has taken the intrepid step of putting a stake in the ground and saying we are about data. And that's going to require a fair amount of thought leadership and a fair amount of investment over the course of the next few years. One of the places where the rubber might meet the road for you guys is to start identifying some of those circumstances in which those metadata elements are more easily published into a good, perhaps, class of MDM frameworks. So it'd be interesting to see if you guys can actually help pull that off. I think one of the things that we're specifically doing around metadata as well, there's a whole new framework called Live Data Map, which Informatica is introducing, which you may be aware. I mean, for me, that's a game changer as well. Because if you think about how data moves, how data is used, when it comes to regulatory compliance, specifically across a hybrid where you've got lots of fragmentation of data, that for me is a must moving forward for especially highly regulated industries. So I think that's going to be increasingly important for us and then it's about what we start to do with that, how we leverage that kind of platform or framework. And I think the future is very bright in that space for us for sure. Talk about some of the investments your customers are making because actually they have customers too. So they're trying to do the digital transformation. Where are they making their investments? Where do you see the most activity? In terms of software as a service? In general, in terms of going to digital transformation, they have customers. So I'll see that within Informatica and the data, where are the investments in the data specifically? Where do you see the sequences or a pattern? You see people putting their toe in the water, they jumping in the deep end? Are they sinking? So for me, in a data space, still nothing's changed in the sense that you still need people, process and technology. So we've kind of talked about the technology in one sense in terms of the adoption of Cloud, Informatica, SaaS. We've talked about that. One of the key things is though, is people as well in organizations because I think when you start to take this digitalization journey, you really need to think about the organizational DNA and the culture associated to data. And for me, it's very important that organizations really associate a value to data. And people are starting to get it. Companies are starting to get it. They're starting to invest in roles that just didn't exist five to 10 years ago, Chief Data Officer, Data Stewards, Data Scientists. Those roles weren't there five to 10 years ago, but they are now. And the CDR is playing an increasingly important role at a C level, which highlights the importance of data to an organization. I think there's a Gartner study that came out this year that basically is talking about organizations competing based upon customer experience. And really, it's data that's the differentiator moving forward. It's not so much a product or a price anymore. It's the data that differentiates and the service that you provide associated to that. Yeah, and the invention is an engineering act, but the innovation, which is the changing of behaviors of people and getting a social grouping to evolve how they do things is more of a marketing or a social act. And one of the key things that has to happen is we have to present what the target looks like so people have a North Star that they can point themselves towards. What role do you think Informatica is going to play or let's step back, putting it specifically in your domain, in Europe. What role does Informatica intend to play as being perhaps not the North Star itself, but a guide to that North Star as Europe tries to deal with so many different issues regarding data ownership, data privacy, nationalization, all those other issues? Yeah, so I mean, for us, it's about providing the services, first and foremost, the services that organizations want right now. So I mean, particularly in Europe, what's becoming increasingly important is things like the security of data. We've got a very strong story around that, which is talking about the fact that data needs to be secured at source rather than focus on perimeter-based security and firewalls and things like that. So we've got some new and elegant solutions to put in front of the people like the CDO or the CFO who's really concerned about data breaches. We talked earlier on about how important it is to differentiate yourself in terms of customer experience. One of the big key differentiators, I think, is how much you trust your vendor, your provider. As a bank, I've got to have 100% faith in the organization I'm working with. And so things like security services that we're providing are helping organizations to meet the requirements of their customers. So services-wise, that's certainly something we're doing, but for us, again, it's about being that neutral player, whatever they want to do in the future, whether they want to stay on-prem and nice and secure or whether they want to adopt cloud, whether they want to adopt big data, whether they have to help them with whatever journey they decide to go on. For the AMIA customers out there, for Informatica and potential customers that might be watching this, who aren't here at the event, take a minute and share the exciting things going on here. What's the big notable announcements, insights, activities, hallway conversations that would be worth sharing for the folks interested in Informatica in the AMIA market? Yeah, well, with my parochial hat on, because I'm responsible for cloud specifically, there's been quite a lot of announcements in for AMIA cloud specifically. So new assessment fixed capabilities for data quality in the cloud, new connectivity in the cloud, and whole new release of the cloud platform, which has various benefits on top of it. Data integration hub in the cloud, which solves that fragmentation problem that we talked about earlier on, the spaghetti, making sure that you've got a one publish to many subscribe, and that's been very popular in the conversations around the water coolers or the hallways that people have been picking my brains over that as well. So certainly that's from the cloud perspective, but generally speaking, one of the things that I found really positive is purely the number of people here as well. That's fantastic to see, the number of people physically who've spent time and effort to come and join us here at Informatica World. And then some of the other announcements, the CEO positioning, the data 3.0, which I think is, again, is a differentiate for us. It just really strengthens our message around, that's what we do, you know, it's our focus. It's our DNA. We should open up more dialogue with customers at a different level of the organization. Exactly, yeah, so if you can, my meetings with CDOs, my meetings with data officers, digital officers, that's all strengthened by all the messaging of the company around data 3.0 and Informatica being the data company, essentially. And where are you based out of, London? I'm based now in Maidenhead, which is close to London. In the UK, yeah, so not quite as fancy as London. So when we open up our international office, we'll come and pay you a visit. As the queue goes to Europe, it's like a movie. You've got an adventure. We were in Dublin for a Hadoop Summit. We interviewed some of your folks there in the UK office, so always good to connect. Greg, thanks so much for coming on the queue and sharing your insight with us and sharing the data. Enterprise Cloud is on the horizon, June 1st, shipping. This is theCUBE, shipping the data to you right here live in San Francisco for Informatica World 2016. I'm John Furrier with Peter Burris, you're watching theCUBE. Hi, this is Chris Devaney from DataRobot.