 Live from San Francisco, it's theCUBE, covering Informatica World 2017, brought to you by Informatica. Hey, welcome back everyone. We are here live in San Francisco for Informatica World 2017, exclusive CUBE coverage of the event, Informatica World 2017. I'm John Furrier with my co-sp, Peter Burris, general manager, head of Wikibon Research at wikibon.com. Our next guest is Greg Hansen, Vice President of EMEA Cloud and DAF data as a service. Welcome back. Good to see you again, CUBE alumni. Good to see you. Yeah, thank you very much. Good to be back. Back for year two, we are year three for coverage. Exactly. So last year we had a great conversation. I think you laid out pretty much the playbook. A lot's happened in the past, it breaks, it happened. But Cloud in outside of North America is a tricky game because there's a lot of different countries. I was at the EU and other parts of the world there, but it's really a regional issue. And you've seen a massive expansion of the Cloud guys. We have Amazon sponsorship here, Google now has Spanner globally. What is the landscape like given Brexit, obviously that was a political thing, has ramifications, but also the regional expansion of the Cloud players has been pretty significant over the past year with announcements coming. I can't even keep track of them all. How's that impacting your business? So it is quite fragmented across EMEA. I mean, our region is EMEA and Latin America as well. And it's a huge geographical region. And across that geographical region, it's very different in different countries. So the EU as a whole, there is, Cloud is very hot in the EU at the moment. There's a large adoption. I think we've passed that point of no return, past the tipping point, as you should say. And every enterprise customer I talk to is now, it's not when they're going to, or if they're going to adopt Cloud, it's when. And usually they're already on a journey that we can help them with. But then in some of the far-flung regions, where the maturity of Cloud is less so, where the presence of Amazon or Microsoft or even ourselves is limited, like Russia, for example, or the Middle East, there's not that same kind of infrastructure. So the desire and the demand for Cloud in those regions is less. But the large majority of our geographical region, Cloud is a huge topic for every single customer. What's the state of the art right now in your territory with Cloud? I mean, obviously from an informatic perspective, you have a view, but also in Cloud adoption, hybrid, clear. Public Cloud does use cases of that a lot on premise with hybrid. What's the key state of the art right now for Informatica and the Cloud players? I think there's fabulous opportunity for Informatica. It really is a hot topic. So, and there's two ways that we can deal with that. I mean, there's the enterprise space, which Informatica has been ruling for 20 years now. But Cloud gives us a huge opportunity to go into new market sectors as well, that we've really not been in before. Mid-market opportunities, and you'll no doubt see a lot of the partners around the event here that we've got that allow us to address customers that we simply weren't addressing before. We had an enterprise sales force. And if you think about those mid-market organizations, they're the organizations that are really going to drive the Cloud adoption as well in countries like Italy and Germany, where you very quickly get down to small and medium-sized enterprise. Cloud is huge in those organizations, in those countries. So there's a great opportunity for us to go after that mid-market sector as well as the enterprise. But increasingly in the digital business, we were talking about this earlier in one of the other segments. In the digital business, you have greater distribution of data, greater distribution of function, and almost inevitably, the ecosystem is going to be comprised of big enterprises, but also mid-market companies. They're going to have to work together. So it's not looking at the enterprise in the mid-market in isolation. Increasingly, the enterprise is going to be acknowledged as a way of extending your influence into a lot of different customers, or a lot of different domains, both through partnerships as well as through customers. How is Informatic going to facilitate that kind of a new approach to thinking about business as a network of resources? Well, one of the great things about the cloud infrastructure itself, if we roll back and think about 10 years ago when all our products were on-prem, it was very difficult for us to understand what our customers were doing with our products. We had to go and talk to them, speak to them on the phone, visit them to understand what their use cases were. Now in cloud, that world has changed, because if you think about one of the things that Informatic is well known for, it's metadata. So operational metadata, technical metadata, we can actually see what our customers are doing with our products. We can understand the use cases, and that becomes a crowd sourcing in terms of how you can replicate, how you can industrialize, how you can reuse a lot of that type of integration, which is enabling us to create new wizards, new accelerators, which are common across the marketplaces and use cases. So it's really a phenomenal change over the last two years, which has been brought on by that ramp up of cloud adoption that we've seen globally, to be perfectly frank. Okay, take a minute, Craig, to talk about this DAS. I think a DAS, I think it like cellular distributed antenna systems, but I mean, it's an acronym. It's data as a service. Data as a service. But what does it really mean? Take a minute to just break that down. What does that mean to the customer? What's the product? What's the offering? It's important, obviously data is the key, and people want it as a service, so take a minute to just explain what that means and the impact. Yeah, it's important to understand what Informatic means by data as a service, I think. And our data as a service product lines are pretty much concentrated and focused on increasing the quality of data. So high performance quality of data. If you think about, you know, digital transformation as a topic which has been talked all around in rooms and corridors around this event here this week. Fundamentally, data is really the key foundation of that digital transformation. But I would say, high quality data is key to the success of digital transformation. So, and that's what our DAS products can enable us to do. So, what do you think about looking at the data? How does the customer engage with DAS, those days of service? So, the typical use case is that you could have address verifications and we have products that support multiple different countries and regions, more than 240 countries. So, if you want to get high quality data about customers, which everyone is, you know, ultimately wanting to do these days to effectively cross-sell and upsell, we can provide a global facility to do that. But you can fix data in batch orientation, but what's much more effective is actually plugging into the applications. So, it becomes seamless to an end user. So, they're using Salesforce.com, they're using another application, and it's embedded into the application. So, it runs in the background. When they enter a poor address, for example, it will correct it and it will validate email addresses and phone validations. We've got a customer in Germany just as an example, one-on-one, which is an internet service provider in Germany, they've got 7.7 million customers. And one of their biggest problems is the inaccuracy of data. And that prevented them billing. Prevented them onboarding the customer first and foremost, then it prevented them billing, which is a pretty serious problem for an organizer. I'm moving to Germany. So, by implementing the DAS products, what they enable them to do is make sure that when they enter data into a system, that it was high quality, it was correct at the point of entry. Which, by the way, is seven times cheaper to do it there rather than try and fix it downstream. So, it's an important product set for us to support high quality data for that digital transformation journey. So, you're not buying and selling your customer's data. What you're using is this is a service to enhance the quality of your data. Yeah, it will fix data, and it will also enrich data that they've already got. That's an important distinction, John, because a lot of people talk about data as a service, they say, oh yeah. Data cloud. I'm going to monetize my data by giving it to the marketplace. And we all know that you could put a good data, you give that data to a good data scientist, they're going to re-engineer your customer real quick. That's people worry about the privacy. So, back down to the drivers for your business. What are the drivers for your business in EMEA? Yeah, certainly clouded option, which we've already talked about, is a huge growth market for us in EMEA. But there's other things happening locally in the EMEA marketplace. GDPR, general data protection regulations that are coming up. That is a hot topic on the lips of all our customers right now. And let me take a minute to describe what that means for people who maybe are not familiar with it, because it's generally an EU thing, but it affects every organization that wants to sell into the EU. And it came on the back of the Google Right to be forgotten ruling, where really what we've got to do is we've got to provide a framework where a customer can say to an organization, I want you to forget me. And obviously they need a central library, they've been able to manage it from a single point. That is an extremely complex thing for an organization to do. It's a particularly an enterprise organization. Forensics is what it is. Exactly. And if you think about how to approach that, I think Informatica is a unique position to help organizations deal with that type of issue. Because I know one of the announcements today, I think Ronan, who was on before me, was talking about Clare, our Clare buoyancy and our artificial intelligence, but it's all about that unification of metadata. That's a great example of how that, a good use case of where that can be deployed. Because if you think of the fragmentation of data that we've got across many clouds on premise, how do you understand even where all your customer data is? And that's what the unified metadata can provide. It can go out, collect all the metadata from all these different vendors, index it, catalog it for you. We've been in business 20 years. We know what customer data looks like. We know what product data looks like. We can categorize it and index it for you. And then you can search it. So you can identify where your risk is, where your customer data is that's at risk. You can do something about it. And now with the most recent acquisition that we made last year in terms of Diacu, which was a missing piece for me in terms of how do we expose that to business users to actually engage in the governance process. The new Diacu acquisition of Axon. Really fills that gap for us. And I think we've got a really good stack to help us with that. You've got product chops. We've talked about them in the past. The brand, this new brand is out there. You're seeing some branding, brand value. Good for the partners, good for business. So with that, I'll ask you my final question, which is what's different from last year? A lot has changed in 12 months. Just in a short 12 months, certainly in the product side, we saw some awesomeness in the products. Always had good product folks at Informatica World. Which is why I love doing this conference. But the brand challenges were there. What is Informatica? So what's different now from last year? The big highlights. Really, for me personally, and I've been here Informatica quite a long time, I think it's quite refreshing. We had quite a lot of change in terms of our C level in Informatica. That's really breathed new life into the organization from my own personal perspective. There's a huge refocus and a drive on our fantastic new product sets that we're releasing here today. And internally in the organization, there is a big motivation. There is a new kind of culture and new resurgence almost in terms of where we feel we're going to be in the next five years. Because we're looking at the product portfolio. We're looking at the outlook in terms of our growth and our strategy. And it's a great place to be right now. And sales always helps when you get good sales and everything. And I'm sure you've seen the figures, et cetera that we've been doing. But I can't see that changing. I think the market is changing. Amazon's stock price and sales and net income over the past year. And really inflection point was right at end of 08, being at 09. But really the real kick up on the hockey stick, which they have, has been around 2010, halfway through 2010. And then it's just pretty much straight up massive shift. This is a wave. Cloud is here. Yeah, and I think Sally Jenkins, our CMO earlier on this morning, I think she put it exactly right. Informatica, in my view, we've been a little bit too conservative in terms of shouting about how good we are. And I think we're pretty much one of the hottest pre-IPO companies that are out there right now. So if you look at our product set, the leader in six market segments, that's a great place to be. I'm excited about the future. And going private, we've talked to Neon. I've talked to all the top executives. It's just a great, close the curtain, open the doors back up again when you're ready. Easy to retool. Certainly as a private company, no pressure on the 90 day shot. Cock Jerry Held, board member, was talking about how that makes things go really smooth. That's right, yeah. I mean, imagine trying to make that journey towards subscription when you're a quarterly, based organization. It's helped with the product development. It's helped with the commercial modeling as well. And it's an exciting place to be right now. It's always good for management to be focused on not with that window of every 90 days, which really is 60 days, because you've got 30 days to prep for the earnings call. But focusing on real product innovation, Michael Dell did it at Dell Technologies. Now EMC, a lot of great stuff. Greg, thanks for coming back on theCUBE and sharing your insights. And when we're in EMEA, we're going to come by and say hello. And certainly we'll keep in touch as we expand theCUBE out to in Europe. Look forward to it. Thanks so much. It's theCUBE live coverage. I'm John Furrier with theCUBE, with Peter Burris with Wikibon. We'll be back with more live coverage here in San Francisco at Informatica 2017. After this short break, stay with us.