 From the CUBE Studios in Palo Alto in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is a CUBE Conversation. Hello everyone, welcome to this special CUBE Conversation here in the Palo Alto Studios of theCUBE. We have our quarantine crew and we are here getting all the stories and all the top news, information from experts and thought leaders in the industry and we're here for a special interview as part of Informatica's digital virtual event happening. We have Tracy Newell as the president of Informatica CUBE Alumni. Great to have you on remotely, normally you're here in person or we're in person. Thanks for coming on. It's great to be here, John. We're virtually together, happy to spend time together. Yeah, and we're in a really tough crisis situation with COVID-19, there's a lot of discussions around strategies, how to manage it, get through it and grow beyond it. But business needs to go on and this has been the theme. You've got to kind of stabilize your base, move forward, but a lot of people are looking at either retrenching or rethinking with coming out of this on the other side. You guys have a digital virtual event happening, we still got to get the word out. You are the president of Informatica. You guys have a value proposition that is core to the future, it's data and it's been something that we've talked about for years on the CUBE around data's value and now this is now apparent to everybody in this COVID crisis. You're talking to customers all the time. What are they thinking? It's not just an industry inside baseball kind of inside the robes conversation. This is now mainstream. What are you hearing from your customers? Yeah, so it's certainly been interesting times. Digital transformation has been a CEO in boardroom discussion now for several years and customers have known for a while that the key to having a real strong transformation is data, they've got to have high quality data to make the right decisions. And what I've been hearing from clients, I've spent a lot of time over the last six, eight weeks while we're in the midst of this situation talking to customers that are thriving that are retailers quickly trying to stand up e-commerce sites because their customers are trying to meet them virtually and they're just not equipped for that. And so data is key when it comes to e-commerce, of course. And yet there's other customers that know that they do have to reimagine, they have to replan, they have to reorganize coming out of this situation. And even though some of these clients have been hit pretty hard economically, they're all saying data is the most important thing to make sure that they make the right decisions and the right calls. So literally, CDO for a Fortune 100 manufacturer said data is more important today than it was 60 days ago because we've got to make the right decisions. It's interesting, we were joking on theCUBE just last week around the term virtualization which was kind of VMware invented and that enabled Amazon to be a cloud, right? So without virtualization, all that value wouldn't have been realized in that whole wave. But now when you think about virtual living which we're all kind of doing, this interview here is an illustration of that. The virtualization of life and companies is now happening. So when we come out of this, it's going to be a hybrid world. People are going to not ignore what just happened. They're going to see the benefits. E-commerce to your point has grown in the past eight weeks faster than it has grown in the past 10 years. I just saw our stat come out. So now we believe that the world is going to be accelerated on this digital side quickly, not just a talking point, but as we go physical and hybrid, this is going to be a double down situation. So what are the challenges in that? Because obviously it's a complex world digital, it's not easy, you know, just video stream, it's community, it's data. What are the challenges? What are the core challenges that customers have to solve to execute through this new reality? Yeah, so many customers are, as I said, rethinking and replanning. There's a large oil and energy company where the CIO said, you know, I want to be data center free over the last few years and we're talking about why is that? And this move to cloud is simply accelerating given the current situation that people are in. And why is that? Well, for certain they're trying to improve analytics, they're trying to innovate and they're doing an outstanding job. And yet at the same time, every time they can sunset one of those legacy applications that's sitting on promise, they can save millions and millions, if not tens or hundreds of millions of dollars as they start to exit the data center. So we see a huge move to cloud. It's complex because they have to make sure, again, a large insurance company said, you know, we're sunsetting our cloud data warehouse, our data lake, and by the way, we're using that to close our books every quarter so we can't get this wrong. And so, you know, from our standpoint, we built most of the on-premise data warehouse and data lakes. We're pretty good at this stuff, but we're very focused on helping our clients here. It's interesting. You're going to see a lot of core thinking around what's important going forward and doubling down around it. I just did an interview for a developer audience and I asked, what's the reality that you think comes out of this? And the answer was, you know, microservices and cloud native and automation is here to stay. It's definitely been validated. There's really no debate there. You guys have had this intelligent and automation fabric product in the environment out there. It's one of the value propositions of Informatica. How does that fit into all this? And can you give some examples of customers and or prospects that take advantage of this and how it relates to being positioned to help going forward? Great question. So we believe that automation and AI is critical for clients to have a data-driven strategy because data's everywhere. It's fragmented. So you can't solve this by sheer muscle. You've got to have AI and machine learning underlying everything that you're doing around your data strategy. So our strategy's been simple for a long time. If you buy one from one family category in Informatica, we believe that you should choose the best of breed and Gartner thinks that we're best of breeding in all categories that we play in. But if you have a second or third product, you should get the benefits of AI and machine learning. So examples would include the American Medical Association. You know, clearly it's such an important client to serve these days. They're using our data quality, our data integration and our master data management tools to ensure that they are privacy but also accurate data at the same time. It's interesting the at scale problem that we're seeing in the current environment we were just talking about earlier is exposes the value of data because we're lurking at home. This is an edge of the network. There's still data being processed. You need security. So the complexity now doesn't change the need for governance and compliance. All these things are still available. So it seems that the game is still the same but yet now more complexity has been surfaced from this. What's your thoughts on this? I mean, you've been talking to customers pre-COVID, pre-pandemic and now you're going to be doing during and post. There's more complexity, but the game doesn't change. You still got to do all these things. So the importance of making sure you have a holistic data strategy is more important now than ever before. So again, when I talk to clients, some as we've mentioned with e-commerce, they're saying I've got to have a 360 degree view of acts, my customers, my partners, my suppliers, CFOs want a 360 degree view of their supply chain so they can do better vendor management than ever before. And yet at the same time, as we mentioned, they're trying to modernize their data as they move to cloud improve analytics. And of course, you can't accomplish either one of those objectives if you don't have a strong governance strategy. So this concept of an intelligent data platform is really resonating with clients. I have a large GSI and our briefing center back when we were doing that a few months ago and they said, gosh, we would need 20 companies to do what you do and that you got to have a platform play and it's all going to be backed through AI machine learning to make sure you're making the best decisions. You know, platform business is not for the faint of heart and you know, I've looked at we build platforms certainly in the cube on small scale but the difference between a tool and a platform are two different things. Platforms enable change and create value that and it's more, you create more value than you delivered for the partner that's building on top and that seems to be the tenant of platforms but this, whether it's cybersecurity or data, this has been a ton of tools, right? So you got a tool for this, you got a tool for that. So this has been one of those things we, again, we've talked with Amit and you guys for on the cube many years about in this big data world. As you move to a platform, what are some of the analytic challenges that the customers need to be thinking about to solve because you're starting to see the bifurcation of a nice to have versus core. You know, the analytics 360, you mentioned business 360. Hey, who doesn't want a 360 degree of view of their business, but is it a nice to have or is it critical? So these are the kind of conversations I'd love to get your thoughts on Tracy. Nice to have versus critical and what are the key problems to solve for analytics? Yeah, so when you think about analytics, really frankly, any decision that clients are making right now, you've got to make sure that this is truly the most important, you know, it's got a business case behind it and it's the most important place to be spending your dollars these days. What I'm seeing with clients just last week, a large airline, you can imagine, they spent, they invested heavily in data governance and data privacy because they know that it's important to have an analytical and clear view to who are their customers and how do they make sure they protect the privacy of the customer as well. They build on their loyalty program. We just last week saw a large auto manufacturer, again, investing heavily in this area of data governance and privacy. One of my favorite stories came from a CDO who's in oil and energy. Again, another industry making tough choices right now. And they said, you know, I want my data to be like pouring myself a glass of water. And I looked down and I said, what does that mean? And she goes, well, if you go pour yourself a glass of water, you don't curate the water, test the water and prep the water. And of course that's what all these expensive data scientists are doing. They're spending all their time trying to understand the data. And so CFOs are getting tired of two reports showing up on their desk to answer one question and the reports say something else, which one do you believe? You've got to have a trusted and really strong analytical approach to making the decisions that clients are going to be forced to make coming out of the situation. And the data's integrity has never been more important. I love the water example because it's really a lot of flow. You've got fast flowing data. You've got real relevance, maybe slow data, but it's relevant. You've got clean data. You've got dirty data. I mean, think about the old database, database days, cleansing data. It's a term, data wrangling. Totally makes sense. This is the outcome that they want. They just want to have the application side's dealing with the data as fast as possible, most relevant. So it is like water. But to make that happen, you've got to have the processing behind the curtain. This is the hard part. Can you just illustrate some thinking around how you guys helped do that? Because, okay, you've got a platform, but if you're making the water clean and flowing, on tap, if you will, what goes on to make that happen? Take me through the pitch there. What do you guys do? Yeah, so we think every enterprise in the future is going to want to invest in a data marketplace and so what we announced in December as part of our overall governance solution, which again is tied into the entire intelligent data platform on all that we do across helping customers to modernize their products with master data management. We're heavily invested in cloud native solutions with all the major hyperscalers and then combined with our governance solutions. We've announced that a data marketplace where the very business-friendly application that the data scientists can use, they don't have to be data engineers or data wranglers and yet it's also a place where people can go to have a clean and trusted view. It's all back by machine learning and AI so that data scientists can see, where did this data pull from? Based upon, you ask this question, then you might also want to look over here to get a different answer to your question, understand what's been certified, who certified the solution, all those questions, you know, we always say you can ask the internet anything. How come you can't ask your own company anything and trust the information? And that's what we've announced with our governance solutions and the clean enterprise data marketplace. I love data value, it's always been one of my, close to my heart from day one. Maybe back when theCUBE started in 2010, when Hadoop hit the scene, we saw the value of data. I always felt it was going to be part of the applications and now more than ever, these kinds of things like trust, real time and being programmable. I mean, let's start thinking about automation. You're really talking about programmability, right? So that, you know, you got to have the efficiencies. I think you guys have got a really interesting value proposition there. Great, great stuff. Yeah, well, in your example on the new big data, we're seeing a repeat in history again. When everyone built the on-premise scale warehouses and data lake, they used informatics that automate and to build that scale. And then we did it again, when people moved to big data and they started investing in Hadoop and Cloud Air and Heartworks, now Cloud Overforce, we helped to accelerate that automation. That's exactly what we're doing again in cloud. So, you know, most CIOs are trying to, again, sunset legacy applications and the faster you can speed data ingestion at scale, but also understand data quality and data integrity at the same time so that you don't move your on-premise data, data swamp into the cloud, that's expensive. We can really help to look at this holistically and solve these problems for customers faster. Well, Trace, it's great to see you. I wish we could be there in person, but there's no personal event. You got a virtual digital event happening. It's going to be ongoing. It's digital, so it's 365 days a year, more ongoing. Take a minute to talk to your customers that are out there. Since we have you on camera, let's automate the value proposition. What's the update on Informatica? What's the pitch to your customers and prospects? What's new with Informatica? Why Informatica? Your core value proposition and why they should work with you. Yeah, so we've been serving our customers for 25 years and the reason why we have such loyalty, we surveyed five of the Fortune 100, over half the global 2000. The reason why customers come back and speak on our behalf, literally thousands of customers speak on our behalf, it's humbling, is because we have the best intelligent data platform in the market and we also understand our customers aren't buying software. They're buying a business outcome and we have more people and customers' success to enable customers to be successful in all of these journeys we've talked about today. And so I'd like to encourage everyone to attend ClareVue, which is our new conference series, it kicks off on May 20th. And ClareVue being Clare is our AI engine, is a Netflix-like experience where you can learn more about all the areas where we can help you in the items we've discussed today. So for clients that are looking to save money by sunsetting legacy apps, we can help accelerate your move to the cloud and improve analytics while you also build a data governance strategy and culture into your environment. So we're really excited about John and it will be an ongoing series so that based on what you learn and what you like, we'll recommend future sessions for you to help you be successful coming out of this current situation. Tracy, thanks for that great insight. This is John Furrier here inside the CUBE studios for an update with Informatica's digital conference. Take a look at it, check it out online. Join the community, be part of those thousands of customers that they have and check it out, give them feedback. Again, we're remote, we're virtual, the Virtual CUBE. I'm John Furrier, thanks for watching.