 Live, from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering Informatica World 2018. Not to you by Informatica. Okay, welcome back everyone. It's theCUBE's exclusive coverage of Informatica World 2018. Live here in Las Vegas at the Venetian Hotel. I'm John Furrier, co-host with Peter Berners here. For the next two days of wall-to-wall coverage, our next cast is Jerez Menendez, Senior Vice President and General Manager of the Master Data Management Group within Informatica. He's got the keys to the kingdom, literally. Welcome back, good to see you. Thank you for having me. The key of all this, pun intended, is the data and cataloging is looking good. There's a lot of buzz around cataloging and what you guys have is core products. Your customers love the product. The world's changing. Where are we? What's the update? So catalog is extremely important, not just to enterprise data, the entire landscape by itself, but it's equally very exciting for MDM because what it has the potential to do is completely transform the way in how quickly people can get value out of MDM because a combination of metadata and artificial intelligence through machine learning is what can create self-configuring, self-operating, even self-maintaining Master Data Management. And that's extremely important because in today's world, the digital world that we live in, the explosion of data, the explosion of data sources, the new kinds of data that MDM is being asked to master, correlate and link with is becoming so huge that it's not humanly going to be possible to manage, curate this data and you need to have AI and ML and that underlying metadata awareness that the catalog brings in order to solve these new problems. So Suresh, after you came into Cuba last year, you left and I said, there was a question I should have asked him. I'm going to put you on the spot. If you could do it, if you could create a new term for this Master Data Management where it's going, what would you call it? Yeah, Master Data Management has been around not for very long, about eight or nine years, but it doesn't begin to describe what the kind of problem that we're trying to solve with today. The only one that I can think of is 360s. It's more about getting the complete holistic view of all of the business critical entities that you as an organization need to know. So whether 360 is traditionally being used around customer, but it's not only about the customer. You need to understand what products the customer owns. That means you need a 360 around a product. You need to understand how those customers interact with employees, you need an employee 360, you need an asset 360. How can you even begin to do householding if you don't do a location 360? I want to build on that. So in many respects, it's the ability to sustain the context of data for different personas, for different applications, for different utilizations. So in many respects, master data management really is the contextual framework by which an organization consumes data. If I got that right. Absolutely. It is another way to describe that would be, it is what delivers the consistent authoritative description where you have the semantics being completely differently described in all of these cloud applications. We've gone very far away from the days maybe 10 years ago, where you had a handful of CRM and ERP applications that you needed to disambiguate this information. Today I think I was reading this morning that an organization on average has 1,050 different cloud applications and three quarters of them are not connected to anything. And they're describing, creating, authoring information around all these business critical entities. So MDM is becoming more the center of this ultra connected universe is another way that I would look at it. It's also a key part of making data addressable. We talked about this last year, but something that I've observed that's been happening in that next year is that the storage vendors, right, have been radically changing their view. They're going to be have storage, but their data layer is sitting in all the clouds. So that's interesting. So that means that they're seeing that there's a data abstraction kind of underneath the informatica, if you will. So if that happens, then you have to be working across all the clouds. Are customers seeing that? Are they coming to you saying that or are you guys getting out front? How do you view that dynamic? Customers are seeing that, have been seeing that for the last two to three years as they have started taking these monolithic, very comprehensive on-premise applications to a fragmented set of applications in the cloud. Where do they keep a layer where they have all this business critical data in one place? And they're beginning to realize that as they move these things to the cloud, these applications are moving to the cloud, it's going from one to a couple of hundred. And master data is being seen as that layer that basically connects all of these pieces of information together. And very importantly for a lot of these organizations, data that's proprietary to them, that they don't want necessarily locked up in an application that may or may not be there a couple of years from down the road. Value shifting from say, Kamati, even I saw last week with the guys from NetApp who are a great solid-state tribe, they're going to have, but the value's up top of the data is, and they have the data stored. So why not facilitate? And now you guys can take it and integrate it into the applications, into the workloads. How is that going with respect to, say, catalog or the edge, for instance? I mean, how does a customer, how should a customer think about MDM? If they have to architect it out, what's the playbook? So the number one thing is where the catalog comes in is first of all to try and identify in this highly fragmented universe you now have as to where all your fragments of master data reside. This is where the catalog comes in. It gives you, in one Google-like tech search, tells you where all your customer master attributes are residing across the landscape. Third party on premise in the cloud. Catalog will also now tell you what the relative quality is of those attributes. And then by applying AI and ML to it, we're able to now figure out how those pieces of data can be transformed, cleansed and rich, and brought into MDM. The catalog has a role to play within MDM. What are the most appropriate matching and linking rules? What are the most appropriate survivorship, trust rules that you need to apply? And how do you secure all of that data that's now sitting in MDM? Because it's now in the cloud and data security and protection is top of mind for most of them. AI read in MDM because last year Claire was announced. We've seen, certainly with GDPR, that AI will play a role in machine learning and AI. It's all kind of coming together. The relationship between MDM and AI, natural to me seems like it's natural. How do you guys see the fit between AI and MDM? It is fundamental to MDM. And where we've begun our investments in AI and ML is one of the most core capabilities around MDM, which is being able to recognize potential duplicates or detect non-obvious relationships across this vast set of master data that's coming in. So we've applied AI and ML, and we'll see a demo of that tomorrow, unveiled here in Vegas, is using machine learning on top of the world's best matching algorithms in order to infer what are the most appropriate strategies in order to link and discover these entities and build the relationship graph without a human having to introspect the data. So one of our predictions is that over the course of the next few years, companies are actually going to start thinking about networks of data. That data is going to get the network formation treatment that devices and pages and identities and services have gotten in the past. It does seem as though MDM could play a very, very important role in, as you said, identifying patterns in the data, utilization of the data, what constitutes a data node, what constitutes an edge, number of different ways of thinking about it. Is that kind of the direction that you see? First of all, do you agree with that notion of networks of data, and is that kind of the direction you see MDM playing in the future? Absolutely, because up until now, MDM was used to solve the problem of creating a distinct node of data, where we absolutely had to ensure that whatever it is that the node was describing is actually the entire complete comprehensive entity. Now, the next step, the new frontier for MDM is now about trying to understand the relationships across those nodes. And absolutely, MDM is both about that curation, the governance, which is very important for GDPR and all of the other initiatives out there, but equally importantly now, being able to understand how these entities are related across the graph of all of those nodes now. So weave in the role that security is going to play, because MDM can, well, let's step back. Everybody has historically figured that either data is secure or it's not, largely because it was focused on a device. And if you had a device and secured the device, all this data on that device got equally secure. Now, as data is much more in flight, it's all over the place, it's a lot of different sources. The role that security plays in crafting the node and privatizing data and turning it into an asset is really important, but it could really use the information of MDM to ensure that we are applying the appropriate levels of security and types of security. Do you see an evolving role between MDM and data security? I would actually describe it differently. I would say that security is now the core design principle for MDM. It has to be baked into everything that we do around designing MDM for the future, because like you said, we've again gone away from a handful of sources, bringing data into MDM in a highly protected on-premise environment with a very limited number of consumers. Now you have thousands of applications delivering the data to MDM, and you've got thousands of business users, tens of thousands of them, applications, all leveraging that master data in the context of those interfaces. Security has never been more important for MDM. So this again is another way of a security, and I want to bring catalog back again. Catalog is going to automatically tell the MDM configuration developer that these are pieces of data that should be protected. This is PII data, this is health data, this is credit data, so that security is implicit in the design of those MDM initiatives. I think that's huge with cloud and connected edge in the network, that's critical. I got to ask you, I know we're tight on time, I want to get one more question in. Define intelligent MDM, I heard that term. What does that mean to you? You mentioned security design in the beginning, I get what that is, but I heard the term intelligent MDM. What is the definition of that, what does it mean? It really means MDM that is built for three new imperatives. One is being able to scale to what I would call digital scale, it's no longer enterprise scale. It is about being able to make sense of interactions, relationships, and being able to use the power of the catalog and AI and ML in order to connect all of these dots because connecting these dots is what's going to deliver immense business value to those organizations. Facilitate the rise of the business user and their requirements, intuitive interfaces that allow them to perform their day to day interaction with MDM, and finally, time to value. Intelligent MDM should be up and running not in months or years, but in weeks if not days. And this is where the power of catalog, power of machine learning can make this a reality. That's a great clip, I'm going to clip that, that's awesome, and then putting it in action, that's the key to success. Sir Ash, thanks for coming on, great to see you. Thank you very much. I've always got the keys to the kingdom. Literally, MDM is the center of it, all the things going on, data from cloud, edge computing, all connected. I'm John Furrier with Peter Burris, bringing all the action here at Informatica World 2018. We'll be back with more after this short break.