 Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering Informatica World 2018. Brought to you by Informatica. Hello everyone, welcome back. This is theCUBE's exclusive coverage at Informatica World 2018 here. Live in Las Vegas at the Venetian Ballroom, I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE with Peter Burris, my co-host this week, analyst at Wikibon, chief analyst at SiliconANGLE on theCUBE. Our next guest is Sanjivora, Group Technology Officer at Centure, in charge of incubating new business, growing new businesses, handling the talent. Great to have you on. Thanks for spending the time coming on. Pleasure, it's my pleasure to be here. So we have a lot of the Centure interviews go to thecube.net type in a Centure, you'll see all the experts. And one of the things we love about talking with a Centure is you guys are in the front lines of all the action. You have all the customer deployments, global system integrator, but you've got to be on top of the new technology and you get really smart people. So thanks for spending the time. So I got to ask you, looking at the landscape of the timing of Informatica's opportunity, you got data, which is not a surprise for some people, but you got GDPR happening on this Friday. You got cloud scale on the horizon. A lot of interesting things are going on right now around data and the impact of customers, which is now pretty much front and center. What are you guys doing with Informatica? What are some of the things that you guys are engaging with them on? And what's important to you? Look, we have a very deep relationship with Informatica for many years and we have many, many joint clients in the market and we are helping them sustain their businesses and also grow their businesses future, right? In future. And I think, and there's a lot going on, there's a lot going on sustaining the core of the business and improving it on a continuous basis by using new technologies and, you know, like today's keynote when Anil talked about the new stuff. I mean, there's a lot of things actually clients require or our customers require for just sustaining their core. But then I call something in the new, which is basically how you're building your new business models, how you're disrupting the market in your industry, what's new around that. And in that piece, I think that's where we are now started working with Informatica to see what are the pieces we need to bring together to the market so we can generate, so that we can help clients or customers to, customers to really leverage the power of technology. And I'll tell you, there are four areas of discussion broadly so that, you know, you get a sense and we can deep dive depending on what you want to see, right? The first one is I think the customers have now data warehouses, which are data 2.0 as it was sold in the morning. So there's still a 15 years old data warehouses, they're not in the new. So a lot of customers and a lot of organizations, large organizations, including some of organizations like ours, they're investing right now to make sure that they get to data 3.0, which is what Amit was saying in the morning, which is around the new data supply chain. Because without that, you cannot actually get real-time analytics, right? So you can't generate insights analytics unless you actually work on your data's infrastructure layer below. So that's one area where we are working with them. That's where the cloud comes in. That's where the flexibility of cloud comes in there. The second piece is around data compliance and governance because, guess what? I mean, there are regulations which are coming up now which are towards data privacy and data protection. And the data infrastructures which were built 15 years back actually do not handle that so effectively, right? And being polite. But yeah, I mean, it wasn't built for it, it was didn't have to think about it. It was built for that, exactly. So now, the point here is that now there is a regulation coming in. One of them is GDPR, Global Data Protection Regulation. It impacts all the global companies who deal with EU residents. And now they are looking at how they can address that regulation and be compliant with that regulation. And we believe there's a great opportunity for them to actually invest and see how not only comply with regulation but actually make this a benefit for them and make the next leap towards building a next level of infrastructure for them and data, right? And that is doing a lot of the data engineering, actually getting data right. And that's the third piece. So the first two are this. So one is infrastructure, second is compliance. And the third piece, and by the way, they're all interrelated finally, but I'm just saying it depends on from where do you want to begin your journey, right? And the third piece is around, I think you got it right, it's about quality of data. But actually it is not quality, we call it data veracity. It's much beyond quality. We talk about more completeness and also things like provenance, integrity and security along with it. So if we, and it's very much business context relevant because what's happening is you may have heard the stories that clients have invested in data lakes for years now. It's been there for like eight, nine years, data lake concepts and everybody talks about it. Throw everything into the lake. And everybody says throw into the lake and then become data swamp. That was last year's theme. That was last year's theme. And the reason is because it's not at IT's failure. IT actually is pretty advanced. The technology is very advanced. It's that business is not as involved as it should be and is not able to trust the data. And that's where your point comes in, whether you have the right data and trust the data with you. So we had Toyota on earlier and they said, one of the customers said, we had this 2008 post crisis thing and then they had all the stuff channel and they had product on the channel and they had the data. They actually had the data. They didn't have access to it. So again, this is like the new data center, you know, data first get it right. And so with GDPR we're seeing people saying, okay, we got to get this right. So that's engineering involved, governance, application integration. This is all now a new thing. How do you guys advise your clients? Because this is super important and you guys are on again, on the front edge. As a CTO group, you got to look at the new tech and say, okay, that's baked, that's not baked, that's new, that's old, throw container around it. You know, how are you sorting through the tools, the platforms, there's a lot of stuff out there. Oh yes, absolutely. And there's a lot of stuff and there's a lot of unproven things as well in the market. So the first and foremost thing is that we should understand what the context in the market right now. The first question is, is everybody ready for GDPR? The answer is no. Are they, have they started into the journey to get, have they started getting into race track, right, on the road? Yes, yeah, it depends on maturity of that organization. Some people have just started building a small strategy around GDPR. Some people have actually started doing assessment to understand how complex is this beast and regulation. And some people have just moved further in the journey of doing assessment, but they're now putting up changes in their infrastructure to handle remediation, right? Things like for example, concern management, things about things like deletion, like it's could be a very big deal to do, right? And so they are making changes to the infrastructure that they have or the IT systems to manage it effectively. But I don't think there's any company which probably can claim that they have got it right fully end to end, right? So I think that's happening. Now how are we addressing, I think the first and foremost thing, first of all we need to assess the maturity of the customer or the organization. Like we actually talk to them first and understand where they stand, right? Usually we have various ways of doing it. We can have a chit chat and meet the personal responsibility in that company. It could be a chief data officer of a company. It could be a CIO of a company. It could be a chief operating officer of a company. It could be a CISO of a company, depending on who has a baton in the C-suite to kind of handle this properly. So it's different for company, right? So every company has their own hierarchy or need or entry point. There are companies have different entry points, but we are seeing more of the CISOs and CIOs playing a role in many of the large organizations. And our clientele is very large companies, as you know. But we see most of these players playing that role and asking for help and asking for having a meeting, starting with that. In some cases where they have not invested initially, we talk to them, we assess them very quickly. Very easy, quick assessment, probably in a couple of days a day, and tell them let's get into what we call as, we have something called as assessment as step one. And that takes four to six weeks or eight weeks, depending on the size of their application suite and the organization. And we do it quite fast. I mean, initially we were also learning. Like if you had asked me the question of 12 months back, we had an approach. We have changed approach and evolved that approach now. We invested hugely in that approach itself by using a lot of machine learning to do assessment itself. So we have now a concept called data discovery. Another concept called knowledge graph. I mean, that's software driven with either machine learning or largely computer driven, with human, obviously human and computer, both together. But it's not only human. Traditional approach would have been to do only with humans. Yeah, I've been thinking a long time. And that's a change. That has changed with the new era and technology advancement that even for things which are like assessment, could now be done by machines as well. Machines are smarter enough to do that work. So we are using that right now. But that's a step one. And after that, once we get there, we build a roadmap for them. We ensure that their stakeholders are agreeing with the roadmap. They actually, you know, embrace the roadmap. And once that's done, then we talk about remediation to their systems. So you mentioned veracity. One of the, and you also mentioned, for example, the idea of the, because of GDPR, deletion. Which itself is a veracity thing. So it's also having verifiable actions on data. So the challenge that you face, I think when you talk to large customers, and John mentioned the Toyota, is the data's there, but sometimes it's not organized for new classes of problems. So that's an executive issue. Because a lot of executives don't think in terms of new problem, new data, new organization. You guys are speaking to the top executives, CISOs, CIOs often. But how are you encouraging your clients, your customers, to think differently so that they become data-first, which is kind of a predicate for digital business transformation anyway? So I think it's a great question. I think it depends again on whom you're talking to in the organization. I have a very strong perspective, my personal view is that data is an intersection of business and technology. It is not a technology, it's not a business. It's an intersection of both, especially this topic. It has to be done in collaboration between business and technology, very closely in terms of how you can drive merit out of your data, how you can drive advantage out of your data. And having said that, I think the important thing to note down is that for every, when you talk about data veracity, the single comment I will make that is very, very, very contextual to business. Data veracity is very, very contextual to business that you're running. Well, but problems, right? Because for example, Toyota, so when the Toyota gentleman came on, and this is really important, the manufacturing people were doing a great job of using data. Lean is very data-driven. The marketing people were doing a great job of using data. The sales people were doing a great job of using data. The problem was the problems that Toyota faced in 2008 when the credit crunch hit were not limited, they were not manufacturing problems, marketing problems, sales problems. They were a holistic set of problems. And he discovered, Toyota discovered, they needed to say, what's the problem? Recast the problem? And what can we do to get the data necessary to answer some of these crucial questions that we have? I think you hit the nail. I can tell, I mean, I think you're spot on. And the one way we are doing right now and noticing that is through what we call is our liquid studios. I'm just giving liquid studios. Liquid studios. Liquid studios. And I tell you this concept, I started, I don't know if you've heard about this from extension before. It's a great story. We started this thing a couple of years ago. Take a minute to explain this. To explain this. Take a minute to explain that. It's important. Explain liquid studios. Okay. So liquid studios. So when we were thinking about these things where we were talking to multiple clients stakeholders, exactly the point. They may be working in silos and they may be doing a great job in their department or their function. But they're not talking across enterprise. As to how they can, if you are doing great work, can I use your work for my advantage and vice versa, right? Because it's all sharing data. Even inside enterprise, forget about outside enterprise, right? And you will be amazed to know how much sharing happens today within the enterprise, right? And you're smiling, right? So what we did was we came to this concept and technologies are very new and very advanced and many of the technologies we are not using beyond experimentation. We are still in the COE concept. Well, that's different than enterprise-wide deployment. Like if you talk about ERP today, that's not a COE, that's an enterprise-wide deployment in most of the companies. It's all there. Like you run your finance on ERPs, right? Most of the companies, big companies. So we felt that technology is advancing. The business and CIOS, they all have to still agree on a concept and define a problem together. And that's where the studio comes in. So what we do is it's actually an extension facility, very innovative and creative space. It's unlike an office. It's very much like new, new thing. It's like very differently organized, structured to generate creativity and good discussion. And we bring in customers there. We have a workshop with them. We talk about the problem for one or two days. We use design thinking for that, very effectively. Because one thing with design thinking brings on table is agreement on a problem. In a very nice manner, without confronting. In a very subtle manner. So in two days time frame, you get to a good problem situation, good problem definition, and then the studio can actually help you do the POC itself. Because many times people say, well, I understand the problem. I think I kind of get your solution of what you're proposing. My people also tell me something else. They have a different option to propose. Can we do it together? Can I get a confidence that I don't want to go and enterprise wine deployment and put my money unless I see some proof of pudding? But proof of pudding is not a PowerPoint. It's an actual working mark. It's not? It's not. And that's where the studio comes in picture. Because you won't believe that we do this two days of workshop without any PowerPoint, like without any single slide. So it's creative, it's very agile, very... It's all whiteboarding, come and talk. It's more facilitation, more facilitation now. More human interaction. And that's why you open up everybody saying, what is the overview? What is the overview? We use a lot of post-it stickies to kind of get there. I think the business angle is super important. I want to get your thoughts, because there's a lot of problems that can be solved once you identify them. But we're hearing terms like competitive advantage. Because when you solve some of these problems, these holistic problems that have a lot of interplay, where data sharing, whether it's internal and or external with APIs or cloud native, you start thinking about competitive advantages, being a data first company. We've heard these terms. What does that mean to you guys when you walk into an executive briefing and they say, look, we've done all this work, we've done this engineering, here's where we're at, we need help, but ultimately we want to drive top-line results, be more competitive, and really kind of move with the shift. This is more of a business discussion. What do you guys talk about when you have those conversations? I think we... So first of all, data was always a technical topic. Do you agree, like if you just go back 10 years back, data was always a CIO discussion? Well, unless you're in a regulated industry, like financial services or... Or I guess I'd say this, that the notion of getting data out of a system or getting data into a system was a technical discussion. But there was, we've always used data from market share growth, et cetera, but that was relatively simple, straightforward data. And what you're talking about, I think, is getting into considerably greater detail about how the business is really operating, and how the business is really working, am I right? You're right, considering data as an asset and a discussion in terms of how you can, how can you leverage it effectively? That's what I was saying, and so it has definitely got a one more level upstature in the discussion, in the companies and organization. And what we're saying is that's where the business comes in effectively and say that, help me understand. And by the way, the reason I'm saying, the reason I was making that comment is because if you have ever seen people explaining data 10 years back, it is very complex explanation. Schema, is this data thing? And it's very hard for a business guy to understand that. Like if I'm a supply chain lead, I don't get it, it's too complex for me. So what we did, I'm just letting you know how we start the discussion. The first and foremost thing is we tell them, we're going to solve the business problem to your point. That's what we think, right? And every company nowadays, they want to lead in their industry. And the leadership position is to be more intelligent. Yeah, and they got it, and it's got to hit the mark. I mean, we had Graham Thompson as the CIO here at Informatica, and he was saying that you go to a CFO and ask them, hey, where's the money? They'll go, oh, it's over here. And they get this out. They know where it's stored at risk management. They say, where's the data? You mentioned asset. This is now becoming a conversation where it's like, certainly GDPR is one shot across the bow that people are standing up and taking notice is happening now. This data as an asset is a very interesting concept. When I'm a customer of yours, I say, hey, censure. I have a need. I got to move my organization to be data first, but I got to do some more work. What's my journey? I know it's different for customers. I mean, where it's top down or bottom up, we see that a lot, but how do you guys take them through the journey? Is it the workshop, as you mentioned in the assessment? Take us through the journey of how you help customers because I'm sure a lot of them are sitting out there going now, they're going to be exposed with GDPR. It's like, wow, are we really set up for this? So I think in the journey, it's a very good question that you ask. The journey can start depending on the biggest pain they have. And the pains could be different on the maturity of that particular organization, right? But I can tell you where we are. I can tell you what client conversation we are having in a very simplified manner. So they do understand the journey. But yes, when we engage with them, there's a process we follow. We have a discovery process. We have a studio process to kind of have a workshop, get into a POC, get into a large-scale deployment solution. That's a simple thing. That's a more sequential in nature. But the condition is around four areas. The first and foremost area is many companies actually don't have very well-articulated data strategy. They have a very well-articulated IT strategy. And when you go to a section in IT strategy, there's a data component in that, but that's all technology, about how do you load, how do you extract those things. It talks about data architectures and it talks about data integration, but it doesn't talk about data as a business, right? That's where it's not there, right? In some companies, they do have, to your point, yes, some companies are always there in data because of regulatory concerns and requirements, so they always had an organization or function which taught data differently than other industries. And those industries have more better strategy document or more organized in that space. But guess what? Now companies are actually investing. They're actually asking for doing help in data strategies. That's one entry point which happens, which means, hey, I understand this, I understand governance is required, I understand privacy is required, I understand this is required, I also understand that I need to move to new infrastructure, but guess, I can't just make investment in one or two areas, can you help me build my strategy and roadmap as to what should be my journey from now till next three years, right? How does it look like? How much money is required? How much investment is required? How do I save from somewhere and invest here? Tell me, save to innovate, right? That's a new concept, right? Because I don't have so much that you're asking for, so help me gain some savings somewhere else. That's where cloud comes in. You know, make sure. So that's one entry point. The second entry point is totally on where the customers are very clear, they actually have thought through the process in terms of what they want to go. They actually are asking very specifically saying, my, I do have a problem, no infrastructure. Help me move to cloud. Help me, that's a big discussion right now. Help me move to cloud, right? That's one which I call as new data supply chain. That's my language, which means that- I like that word actually. Yeah? I'm making your supply chain, my supply chain in business term, I have to explain business, it's different. Technical, it's different. Technology, I can explain all the things that you just mentioned. In business, I explained that there are three C's of supply chain, capture it, curate it, consume it. And they say, oh, I get it now. The data supply chain is interesting too when you think about new data coming in, the system has to be reactive and handle new data. So you have to have this catalog thing. And that was something that we saw a lot of buzz here at the show, this enterprise catalog. What's your take on that? What's your assessment of the catalog, impact to customers, purpose at this point in time? I think it's very important, especially for the customers and large companies who actually have data all over the place. I can share some examples. We were talking to one of the customers who had 2600 applications and they want to go for GDPR. We had a chat with them and we said, look, they were more comfortable saying, no, no, let's not use any machine. Because when you talk about machine, then you have to expose yourself a bit, right? And I said, look, the machine is not going to be in my place, it's going to be in your boundaries of firewall. But they were a little more concerned. They said, let's go with the manual approach. Let's do that. It's your call. We can do that as well. But guess what? 2600 applications, you can't discover manually. It just not possible. You need help. A lot of data is streaming in. I guess I'm just answering your question. The data catalog is extremely important. If you really want to get a sense of where the data is residing because data is not in one or two applications all over the place. Well, I'm impressed by the data catalog's positioning. But then also when I look at the Azure announcement they had, Informatica had, you're essentially seeing hybrid cloud playing out its real product. And so that's an easy migration to bring in some of those BI tools, bring in some democratization into the data discovery. Rajiv, thanks for coming on theCUBE. Really appreciate it. Love the work you're doing. I want you to take a minute just to end the segment out to explain the work that you do. You have two roles. Real quick, explain your two primary roles. You've got the incubate new stuff which is hard to do, but entrepreneur love the hard problems, but also you're doing talent. Take a minute to explain real quickly those two roles, super important. Okay, the first one is basically that in my role I look at any ideas that we can incubate as a business and we can work with an extension, different entities with an extension to make sure that we go to clients in a much more cohesive manner and see how we can have an impact to our top line. And that's a big thing because we are in services business and we have to be very innovative to come to know how do we increase or increase our business. Any examples that you can share that stuff that you worked on? So one is right now I'm spending a lot of my time in on fueling our data business itself. We just recently launched our data business group, right? We have our market going in the positions is called as applied intelligence, which you may be aware, which includes data analytics, advanced analytics, and then artificial intelligence all put together when we can solve. And you guys got a zillion data scientists. I know that you guys have been hiring high really really strong. It's a very strong team, but what I feel is that the data is a critical foundation, really critical foundation for intelligent enterprise. You can't become an intelligent enterprise unless you have right data to your point. And right data means curated data in the set and fashion that can help you become draw more insights from your enterprise. And that's possible if you invest in data strongly in supply chain of data strongly. So that's why we are fueling that. So I'm just letting you know that I spending most of my time right now to enhance our capability, enhance our power and on that and go to market with that. The second thing which I'm investing right now, which is there are a few more ideas, but one more which could be very useful for you to know is while companies are moving to the new, they have to also, they have to rely on their people. Ultimately, the companies are made of people like us. And if you are not retooling yourself, you cannot reimagine the future of your organization as well. And so the people's their own skills, their job functions. So I'm working on a concept called workforce of the future. How can, only for large companies, large companies, how can they transform their talent and their even leadership as well so that they're ready for the future and they can be more relevant. And this is the argument we always see in theCUBE. Oh, automation is going to take jobs away. Well, I mean, certainly automating repetitive tasks. No one wants to do those, but the value is going to shift. That's where the opportunities are. Is that somehow you see that future workforce? Absolutely, it's going to be complimentary. We have Paul Daughty, whom you know was the Chief Technology Officer of Accenture Technology, Accenture, Accenture as a firm. He's a Chief Technology and Innovation Officer for Accenture. He has recently written a book called Human Plus Machine. Exactly talk about the same concept that we actually all of us believe very strongly that the future is all about augmenting humans together. So their task, which machine should be doing and their task, which human should be doing and the task, which both of them do collaboratively. And that's what we are trying to do. Collabor, we're doing it here in theCUBE, here at Informatica World. Rajeev, thanks so much for spending your time. Sajeev, thanks for coming on. Sajeev, thanks for coming on. Sorry, my bad, a little late in the day, but we're bringing it out here at Informatica World. This is theCUBE. I'm John Furrier with Peter Burris, here with Accenture inside theCUBE here at Informatica World in Las Vegas. Be right back with more coverage after this short break. Thank you.