>> Announcer: Live from San Francisco, it's the CUBE.
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-host, Peter Burris,
General Manager, Head of Wikibon Research at Wikibon.com.
Our next guest is Greg Hanson, Vice President of EMEA Cloud
and DaaS, Data as a Service.
Welcome back, good to see you again, CUBE alumni.
>> Good to see you, yeah thank you very much.
>> Year two, or year three of our coverage.
>> Exactly.
>> So last year, we had a great conversation.
I think you laid out pretty much the playbook.
Lots happened, in fact Brexit happened.
But cloud in outside of North America is a tricky game
because there's a lot of different countries.
We got EU, and other parts of the world there.
It's really a regional issue,
and you see in a massive expansion.
The cloud guys, we have Amazon, sponsorship here,
Google, now expanded globally.
What is the landscape like?
Given Brexit, 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 'em all.
How is that impacting your business?
>> So it is quite fragmented across EMEA.
Our region is EMEA and Latin America as well.
It's a huge geographical region.
Across a geographical region that'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 past that point of no return,
past the tipping point, as you should say.
Every enterprise customer I talked to is now
it's not when they're going to,
or if they're going to adopt cloud it's when.
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?
Obviously, from Informatica perspective, you have a view
but also in cloud adoption, hybrid, clear,
public cloud, there's use case for that,
a lot of on-premise with hybrid.
What' 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.
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.
You no doubt see a lot of the partners around the event here
that we've got that allowed us to address customers
that we simply weren't addressing before.
We had an enterprise sales force.
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.
There's a great opportunity for us to go
after mid market sector as well as the enterprise.
>> But increasingly in the digital business,
we were talking about this earlier in one of your 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.
>> Greg: That's true.
>> So it's not looking at the enterprise
and 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 your customers.
How is Informatica going to facilitate that kind of a new
approach to thinking about business
as a network of resources.
>> One of the great things about the cloud infrastructure
itself, if we reel back and think about 10 years ago,
when all our products were on-prem.
It's very difficult for us to understand
what our customers were doing with our products.
We have to go an talk to them,
and 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 at Informatica
is well-known for is metadata.
So operational metadata, technical metadata.
We can actually see what our customers are doing
with our products.
We can understand the uses cases.
That becomes a crowd sourcing in terms of
how you can replicate, how you can industrialize,
how you can you 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 really a phenomenal change over the last two years,
which has been brought on by that ramp of cloud adoption
that we've seen globally to be perfectly frank.
>> Okay, take a minute Greg, to talk about this DaaS.
I think of Daas, I think of like cellular distributed
antenna system but let me, it's an acronym,
it's Data as a Service.
>> Greg: Data as a Service, yeah.
>> Peter: 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?
>> Greg: Okay.
>> 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 Informatica means
by Data as a Service, I think.
Our Data as a Service product line,
pretty much concentrated and focused on increasing
the quality of data.
So high performance, quality of data.
If you think about digital transformation as the topic,
which is being talked all around in rims
and corridors around this event here this week.
Fundamentally, data is really the key foundation
of digital transformation.
But I would say high quality data is key
to the success of digital transformation.
That's what our DaaS product can enable us to do.
So if you think about--
>> Peter: How does the customer engage with DaaS?
(faint statement)
>> 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 to our customers,
which everyone is 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, you can fix data in batch orientation
but what's much more effective is actually plugging
into the applications.
So become seamless to an end user.
So they're using Salesforce.com
or they're using another application,
and it's embedded into their 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 verifications.
We've got a customer in Germany, just as an example,
1&1, which is an Internet service provider in Germany.
They've got 7.7 million customers.
One of their biggest problems is inaccuracy of data.
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 organization.
>> Peter: Yeah, I'm moving to Germany.
(laughs)
>> So by implementing the DaaS products,
what they enabled 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 trying to 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, sorry John,
you're not buying and selling your customers' data.
What you're using-- >> No.
>> Is this is a service to enhance the quality.
>> Greg: Exactly.
>> Of your data.
>> 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 talked about Data as a Service,
they say, "Oh yeah, I'm going to monetize my data
"by giving it to the marketplace."
We all know that you give that data to a good data scientist
they're going to reengineer your customers pretty quick.
>> Exactly.
>> That's what people are worried about, the privacy.
So back down the drivers for your business.
What are the drivers for your business in EMEA?
>> Yeah, certainly cloud option which we already talked about
is a huge growth market for us in EMEA.
But there's other things that happening locally
in EMEA marketplace, GDPR,
General Data Protection Regulations that are coming up.
That is a hot topic on the lips of
all of our customers right now.
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.
It came on the back of the Google Right To Be Forgotten
ruling where really what we've got to do,
we've got to provide a framework,
where a customer can say to an organization,
I want you to forget me.
Obviously, then need a central library.
They'll be able to manage it from a single point.
That is an extremely complex thing for an organization
to do, particularly an enterprise organization.
>> John: Forensics is what it is.
>> Exactly.
If you think about how to approach that,
I think Informatica is in a unique position
to help organizations deal with that type of issue.
Because, I know one of the announcements today,
I think Ronen, who was on before me
was talking about CLAIRE, our Clairvoyancy,
and our artificial intelligence
but it's all about that unification of metadata.
That's a great example of how a good use case
of where that can be deployed.
'Cause 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?
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 our customer data looks like.
We know what product data looks like.
We can categorize it and index it for you.
Then you can search it.
So you can identify where your risk is,
where your customer data is at risk.
You can do something about it.
Now, with the most recent acquisition that we made
last year in terms of Diaku,
which is 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 Diaku acquisition of Acson,
really fills that gap for us.
I think we've got a really good stack to help customers.
>> You got product chop, we talked about in the past.
The brand is 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 of change in 12 months.
Just in a short 12 months, certainly in the product side,
we saw some awesomeness from 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.
>> For me personally, and I've been here at Informatica
quite a long time.
I think it's quite refreshing.
We had quite a lot of change in terms of
our C-level at Informatica.
It's really breathe 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.
Internally, in the organization, there is a big motivation.
There is a new kind of culture,
a new resurgence almost in terms of where we feel
we're going to be in the next five years.
'Cause we're looking at the product portfolio.
We're looking at the outlook in terms of our growth,
and our strategy.
It's a great place to be right now.
Sales, it always helps when you get good sales
and everything.
I'm sure you've seen the figures et cetera
that we've been doing.
But I can't see that changing.
(fast crosstalk)
>> Amazon's stock price and sales, and net income
over the past year.
Really the inflection point was right at '08,
end of '08, beginning of '09,
but really the real kick up on the hockey stick,
which they have, has been around 2010,
halfway through 2010, and then just pretty
much straight up, massive shift.
This is a wave, cloud is here.
>> Yeah, I think Sally Jenkins, our CMO,
earlier on this morning.
I think she put it exactly right.
In Informatica, in my view, we've been a little bit
too conservative in terms of shouting
about how good we are.
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.
So I'm excited about the future--
>> Going private, we've talked to Anil,
and talked to all the top executives.
It's just a great close the curtain,
open the doors back up again when you're ready.
Easier to retool.
Certainly as a private company,
no pressure on the 90-day shock
Clark Cherry 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 for the product development,
it's helped with the commercial modeling as well.
It's an exciting place to be right now.
>> So it's good for the management to be focused
on not that window every 90 days.
But it's really 60 days, when you got 30 days to prep
for the earnings call.
But focusing on real product innovation,
Micheal Dell did at Dell Technologies, now EMC.
Lot of great stuff.
Greg, thanks for coming back on the CUBE
and sharing your insights.
>> Nice, great to be here.
>> When we're in EMEA, we're going to come by and say hello.
>> Absolutely.
>> Certainly, we'll keep in touch
as we expand the CUBE out to in Europe.
>> Look forward to it.
>> Thanks so much.
It's the CUBE, live coverage.
I'm John Furrier with the CUBE
with Peter Burris, Wikibon.
We have got more live coverage here in San Francisco
at Informatica 2017, after this short break.
Stay with us.
(enlightening tune)