 Live from San Francisco, it's theCUBE, covering Informatica World 2017, brought to you by Informatica. Welcome back, everyone. We're here live in San Francisco. This is theCUBE's exclusive coverage of Informatica World 2017. I'm John Furrier with SiliconANGLE theCUBE. My co-host, Peter Burris, head of research with SiliconANGLE Media, also general manager of Wikibon.com. Our next guest is Albert Powell, who's the Enterprise Information Management Global Lead, we're at Accenture Analytics. Welcome to theCUBE. Thanks very much, good to be here today. She's sporting the sideways A, not to be accused of SiliconANGLE, red A, which is the other way around. Great to have you on. That would be the accent on the future, our moniker. So, great to have you on. Accenture Analytics, a lot of people may or may not know huge investment in data science. You guys doing a lot of work and integrating in with customers, not just on the management consulting side, but a lot of the architecture, a lot of the delivery, essentially managed services across the board. So yeah, there's a lot of architecture going on. So I got to ask you about the data-powered enterprise vision that you have, because that's the theme that you guys have. What does that mean, first of all? And has it relate to Informatica World? And ultimately, the customers just trying to get to the cloud, lower their costs, increase their top line. What's the digital transformation connection? Boy, lots of questions in there. So, to us, in the digital revolution that's happening right now, the expectations on companies are just growing exponentially, right? You've got customers, you've got shareholders, business partners, you've got stockholders that all have so much more insight on companies. They want more and they're putting so many more demands on companies today. So it's causing disruption in the industry. We all know about the Ubers, we all know about going from print media to digital media, but you've got companies like John Deere that they sell tractors, right? But they're moving toward a platform-based company now where they're now working with farmers, they're working with agriculture, helping to support. So when you've got that as a different business model, you've got that coupled with the explosion in data. So the statistics, Amazon, I think they took six years to get their first trillion. Now it's the next trillion they got in one year. By the year, I think 2020, 1.7 megabytes of data is going to be created per person per second. These are staggering numbers. And when you put those two together, I personally think that the next big wave, the next big value proposition for clients is going to be data and harnessing the power of that. And when I look back over my 28-year career, I go back to the ERP days. That was the big wave, right? You had to be on Oracle or SAP or People Software, JD Edwards. I think right now we're just starting in this phenomenal wave of opportunity. You mentioned replatforming or platform approach. The word replatforming is an industry buzzword, but that really is an impact to IT, business operations in person now, and ultimately the business model. This is like a serious impact. It really is. And that's where this data-powered enterprise comes in. We're trying to work with our clients to figure out how to harness this value proposition, unlock the data that they've got stuck in their systems, the dark data, wherever it may be, and unleash that and try and gain business insights from that. All right, take us through the playbook because, okay, I buy it, I see the train coming down the tracks, it's really high speed. I got to move to the new model. You look at Amazon, it's a great proof point. Hockey sticks is 2010. No doubt about it, it's just one tell sign. I want to move. Now I got to be careful. If I move too fast, I get over my skis or over-rotate whatever metaphor you want to use, but how do I get there? What are you guys doing with clients and what's the strategy, playbook? You know, the biggest thing we try and do is, you know, the relationships we have with clients are long-term, you know, trust-based relationships. And when we go in, we're not selling a product. We're trying to help them drive business value. So what we typically do around the data space is help them figure out what's the strategy, what's the vision, where do they want to go? They may think they need a data quality solution and MDM solution, but you know, we come in and we talk to them and we realize, what are you trying to get out of it? Where do you want to go? And layout a vision, set of guiding principles. And that framework oftentimes helps them drive, you know, within the next one, two years, a much more sustainable set of growth as opposed to trying to do a point solution. So typically we'll start there, but you know, we'll also come in if they're hemorrhaging, if they're bleeding, if they've got major problems, or if they're trying to hit, you know, a strategic objective, procurement spend analytics or, you know, growth or disruption in the market. You know, those are the type of things that, you know, we'll come in and talk to them about to start with. Is there a mindset, obviously there's a mindset shift, but given that certainly if there's certain rooms on fire, you take care of those first. I get the critical piece of it, because sometimes it is mission critical right out of the gate. But is there an architectural mindset? Is there a building blocks approach? Has there been a shift in how to deploy and iterate through in an agile way that you've seen a pattern that's emerged? Yeah, I mean, obviously cloud is a big, you know, with everybody today. And the hype out there is everybody's moving everything to cloud. And in reality, you know, a lot of our clients, they've invested a lot in these data centers. So they're reticent to make the leap. So we're working with them to, you know, help and Informatica has been phenomenal with some of the tools and solutions that they have to help them pull over to, you know, cloud-based solutions. And, you know, most of our clients right now, they've got a hybrid architecture. They're moving in that way. They've got some stuff they want to keep, you know, close and tight. They've got some stuff that they want to move. But between open source with the new subscription models, for instance, and Informatica has, it's a game changer for our clients, because now they're able to get solutions up faster, quicker, and we do a lot of work with our liquid studios to help them pilot those type of solutions. But it's still got to be in service to some outcome or to some idea. Absolutely. So that suggests that one of the challenges I think people have been having in the big data universe is this disconnect between what we want to do and implementing a dupe on a cluster. And that notion of how do we actually introduce some of the concepts of design into that process so that we can see realistically and practically, and in a way that can be executed, a process to go from the idea down to the actual implementation. So use cases are a big issue. Getting developers more involved and active is a big issue. But what is the role of design in this process? So one of the things that we've shifted to is we have a set of innovation centers where we'll bring clients in and we may start with a workshop or two, to talk to them about the capabilities. But very quickly we evolved that into design thinking sessions to really get draw out what's the real challenge they're trying to find? Because half the time, they think they know what the problem is, but they really don't and we help them uncover that. And then from a design standpoint, we do a lot more prototyping now where we'll go through and actually build in a matter of weeks a real time capability that they can go take and run with. We have this thing called the Accenture Insights platform where we've negotiated with a lot of partners such as Informatica to have their tools, their software in a hot, ready, cloud-based environment where again in a matter of a couple of weeks we can stand something up and they can see it, they can touch it. It's no longer the big capital investments to go start these type of projects. But it has to again be something that people can touch and can play with and start themselves to start saying well yes it works here, it doesn't work here, so they can start iterating on it. It's a way of increasing the degree to which iteration is the dominant feature of how things roll out. Ties back to the use case. As you guys think about the tooling that's available from Informatica elsewhere, how does the tooling, is a tooling robust enough at this point to really support that process or is there still some cracks in, or still some holes we have to fill? Yeah, you know, I almost feel like the technology is there, right? We can do so much. The challenge that I run into when I meet with a C-suite, I always ask the question, what's your holy grail question? If you knew this piece of information, how would that be a game changer? Eight times out of 10 I hear, if I knew sales by quarter, by region, that it was accurate, oh, I could really do something. That's not your question, right? The question should be who should I acquire? When is a customer going to walk out of a store? What's the weather going to be? What's the minimum amount of water I need to put in a plant to have it grow in a drought situation? And those are the kind of questions that we're trying to draw out from our clients. And again, these design thinking sessions help us drive to that. Is that liquid studios and the innovation center is the same thing you mentioned liquid studios? What is that, real quick? They are. So again, the whole idea behind these studios is instead of doing, starting with a massive project or driving a massive five-year RFP for a program, again, get in in a liquid fashion, very agile, very prototypical, build something. Very fluid. Exactly, right. So that they can see, touch, feel and manipulate these things. And then from there, they may want to scale that up and they may do it themselves, oftentimes they'll partner with us. So you're partnering in the real-time requirements definition of what they're trying to do. Correct. Well, it must be work and I saw on Twitter, essentially received the Informatica Ecosystem Impact Award last evening. Yes. Congratulations. Thank you very much, appreciate that. Very excited. And where did that come from and why is that important to you guys? Obviously the recognition from Informatica, you guys doing well with that. Now Informatica is a very, very strong strategic partner of ours. I mean, we've worked with them for the last 18 or so years. I personally been involved with them the whole time. And the company has vision. When you talk to Anil, you talk to Ahmed, who was just on, the vision that they have for their products, they know where they want to go. And the reinvention that they've done here with the new branding, the new marketing, a lot of our clients had traditionally thought of them as more of the power center. And more of the- The plumbing. Exactly. I'll say it. And we keep challenging them. It's like, why aren't you bigger? Why isn't everybody using you? Because I think the toolset is robust enough right now. And again, it's finding these use cases to be able to apply this. Well, they made a big bet. I mean, the joke in Silicon Valley right now in infrastructure companies is plumbers are turning into machinists as kind of an analogy. But now with machine learning, you're starting to see some of the things that they've made a bet on. That's flowering. And it's important. And I think they made some good bets and they'll be on the right side history, in my opinion. But I want to ask you a personal question because you mentioned waves. And you mentioned the ERP waves and the software wave of the mini computer, which then became local area networks, internet working, et cetera. Basically the premise of what IT has turned into. With now, the disruption that's going on. How is it different? Because Informatica seems to be on that same software cycle in a new way. What is different about this new world order that's different than those days, the glory days of rolling out SAP implementations or Oracle, ERP and CRMs, shorter time cycles. What are the things that you're seeing that are key, things that customers should be at pay attention to that need to avoid and things they should double down on relative to this new wave of software? And how does Informatica fit into all that? Sure. The ERP wave was critical and it was the way to get everything under one umbrella. Very important, right? But today, the idea of single instance, companies can't keep up, they can't do that. So it's the nimble, it's the agile. I'm really excited about Informatica is that they've got the end-to-end solution, which is phenomenal, but they've also got the piece parts. And there's a lot of our clients that they're trying to integrate multiple ERP systems together, they're trying to integrate multiple platforms. So MDM is becoming much more important today. Data governance, absolutely critical out there. And they've had a gap, frankly, in data governance for years. And their acquisition, their axon tool, again, it's a game changer out there and a lot of our clients are, you know, aggressively looking at that and trying to do that. So when we talk- How is it changed again for some of your clients? Give an example. You don't have to name the customer, but in the use case basis. No, everybody needs, you know, we talk about the need for governance, right? And it comes into, you know, whether it's paper-based, whether it's automation, some way to get processes standardization and so forth around governance and get people accountable. The tools that have been out in the market, there are some, they're good, but they're not integrated. There's no interoperability between them. And what I like about axon now is they can sell it as a single point solution. Great way to get in the door to client. But they can also then integrate that with all of the other platform pieces that Informatica has. And that tie is really powerful. Well, governance also plays a role when you think about, for example, the idea that we want greater distribution of data, data is going to be more distributed. We want some visibility into that data through metadata and Informatica's talking about that. But we heard in the healthcare conversation this morning and others that one of the big barriers is do I have access? Do I have rights? Do I have privileges to this data? And governance has to follow that process where people know in advance, what rights do I have? What access do I have? Am I using it properly? Am I breaking rules? That notion of governance can't just be centered on compliance and regulation. It has to be moved into more of an asset management approach. Do you agree? I agree. And the way we look at governance, it's expanding now. It's not the traditional data owner, data steward, data operator anymore. It's not the central group. It's a corporate set of responsibilities. And we're rolling governance now out to the end user. So how they are looking at data and interacting with data. Because data is now, it's a utility. It's something that everybody touches, everybody uses, not just an IT thing anymore. So when you take that, and again, you take the expanse of that into security, as you talked about. Secure source, for example. The play on tying the two of those together. Very powerful solution. And even with an Accenture, we're tying our data, our governance, our security practices much more tightly together as a single unified solution. How does the AI machine learning, because we're here in Claire, their new interface. See Alex out there on Amazon. Other voice to mean Google IOs announcing. Neural nets that train computers. Certainly it's a lot of buzzwords out there. Does that make the master data management and the MDM and the data quality more relevant or less relevant? I think just as relevant as it's always been. There's a lot of people that sit and say that the traditional data stuff is, that's a commodity now. And again, machine learning is absolutely essential AI. We need that because we're scaling so much bigger out in industry today. But MDM's not going away. The integration between platforms. The need for good data quality. And I think we almost took a shift in the industry to the buzzwords, right? It's all about big data and AI and everything. And in some ways, we almost left the traditional behind. And now we're coming back to realizing that you need good data to power the different data sources you've got, the big data and everything else that then needs to be scaled. And that's where the machine learning AI continues to. And freed up for developers who have a DevOps mindset, don't want to get into the nuances of being a data wrangler. The patterns of data usage are going to be important in thinking about MDM. Because at the end of the day, you're not going to have copies of everything. You're going to have relationships increasingly. And MDM has to be able to capture that too. Exactly. All right, final question I've got to ask you. What's the future for you guys? What do you guys see? Because you guys are always got the top brains in the industry working on things. What is a center's view of the future? What's the most important things coming down after this wave? Or is it this wave, just multiple sets? And to your clients, what are the top three things? Or top things that you guys see as future waves or items that you're working on? You know, again, this data wave right now, again, it's the most exciting time that I've ever had in the career. And I see the growth that we're doing. And you know, at Accenture, we have a lot of investment in research and development. We've got a team of data scientists that's out trying to mind data, figure out what the insights are that are out there, the liquid studios that we're pulling together. And as we talk to our clients, it's all about the art of the possible. It's not so much trying to sell a tool or a solution. That's obviously important. But where can we take you? What are things that the industry hasn't thought of yet that we can take you as a company and help you disrupt into a new business market? Reimagining the future. Thanks for coming on. I'll appreciate Alper Powell with Accenture Analytics. Exciting this time in the industry. I would agree data is certainly intoxicating at one level, but really great value opportunity. Thanks for coming on theCUBE. Thank you very much for your time. And sharing the data with us as we analyze here on theCUBE. More great coverage after this short break at Informatica World 2017. I'm John Furrier, Peter Burris. We'll be right back with more.