(several people talking in tandem)
>> Narrator: theCUBE Alumni.
(upbeat music)
Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE.
Covering Informatica World 2018.
Brought to you by Informatica.
>> Hello everyone, I'm John Furrier for theCUBE; we are here
live in Las Vegas for Informatica World 2018.
My co-host, the next two days, wall-to-wall coverage
is Peter Burris, head of research at Wikibon
sitting on theCUBE.
We're here for Informatica World, here in Vegas.
We were in San Francisco previous years.
Big table being set here with the role of data we've covered
in the past, in the role of data.
Certainly, we've been talking about on SiliconANGLE
and researching it on Wikibon.
Security, data, IoT, center of cloud infracture, AI
and then, emerging technologies like Blockchain
and other things.
This is where the action is.
Peter, we've been looking at Informatica
over a couple of years and the arc and change
is around data, cloud; you've got the international
component with the GDPR,
booming front and center this month.
And then you've got data as a competitive advantage
You're seeing companies organized around data,
but you can't ignore the explosion of AWS
putting the stake in the ground with the numbers
they're getting with the cloud.
Microsoft as yours dominance with the install base
of Microsoft now making a play in cloud.
And you've got Google Cloud, and then international
volley by a variety of cloud players.
Huge cloud scale, IoT Edge, data.
I mean these guys are...I mean are they caught
in the crosswinds, do they have a tailwind, headwind?
Informatica, are they positioned?
What's your take?
>> Well, Informatica is amongst that handful of companies
that was on a knife's edge as the marketplace
started moving towards the cloud.
And when the move to the cloud, from a software company
standpoint, is also associated with a move from a
traditional business model, which is we sell our software
or you give us money up front and that's how we pay
our sales guys, to a services orientation which
is we're going to work with you in a services mentality
and expect that we're going to operate over time.
So, Informatica was on that knife's edge,
they had a good product set in the sense that they foresaw
that data was going to become more important and
they are a good data company.
They've got a great suite of data management tools
that's very relevant to today's marketplace.
But in a manner of respects, the question was
were they going to step up and be one of the companies
that successfully transitioned to the cloud and a
services model or were they going to try to fight against it
with product set and they have been making that transition
and it seems to be going quite well.
We first heard about it a couple of years ago,
last year we saw it accelerate with some of the new
initiates that they had and their incorporation of AI
into their suite and our expectations this year we'll
see, it's already even further.
>> It's interesting, time is a great equalizer
to who is right on the vision.
We hear a lot of visions and people putting out statements
of intent with their organization.
You see who pivots and who shifts and who zigs and who zags.
Informatica a few years ago, really understood
the horizontal scalability of the cloud and the data
needs to move around very freely,
but they also understood the challenges of governance.
So, as we look at applications and the cloud and
potentially de-centralized applications,
data is more critical than ever that it be exposed
and be addressable but yet compliant.
This is a hard challenge.
You're researching this and it reveals itself
in the IoT Edge,
to the data center and hybrid multicloud.
How are companies thinking about data as it has
to be frictionless horizontally,
but yet, managed with compliance?
>> Well, we wrote a piece a couple years ago that
clearly stated that a digital business is one that
uses data as an asset, and that's it.
All this other transformation stuff is noise
unless you're focused on the role that data is playing
in your business.
In fact, we believe pretty strongly,
that the whole notion of digital business transformation
is the process by which your organization acknowledges,
recognizes what it means to have data as an asset.
You're culturally setup to do it.
You're organized to take advantage of it and
very importantly, you're institutionalizing your work
around what it means to use data as an asset.
So, that's been our perspective for a long time.
Companies today continue to be half-and-half.
Certainly, companies like Amazon, AWS, those digital native
companies, absolutely have got this.
They are very much focused on the role that data is playing
as the centerpiece asset for their businesses.
A lot of the incumbents that are trying to move into
and take on some of those digital threats,
are also starting to recognize this.
We've heard at a number of different CUBE events
over the past few months, that an acceleration in the,
at least the talk track, about the role that data's going to
play out of a variety of different big companies.
So, right now, most of the enterprises
that we're working with are still a little bit behind,
you get some arguments about it.
You know, well what about this, what about that?
But increasingly there's at least an acknowledgement
that data as an asset, generating returns on that asset,
the differences in how you generate returns on that asset,
is going to become a feature of all enterprise strategies.
>> I've been hearing in hallway conversations,
that over a variety of the events that we've gone to,
and a patter's kind of merging when it comes to data.
Whether you're talking to a CEO of a company or the
Chief Data Officer or even a CIO,
the questions that come up, certainly on GDPR exposes this
and the law that's going to be enacted this month,
where's the data, what's it worth,
and how do I organize around it?
So, again to your point about you've identified
the digital business transformation...
And a lot of times the conversation is,
I don't know all of them.
So, this is the question I want to explore with you,
here this week: where's the data, is it important,
is it worth anything, and how do I organize my business
around it, both architecturally because you've got
the cloud right there as an accelerant potentially
or it's a double-edged sword, it could hurt you.
>> Yeah, absolutely.
>> So, John what we've been talking about with our clients
is this notion of data zoning, and the idea basically
is kind of an architectural construct.
Do you say, okay, what is the value proposition,
what activities are essential to delivering
that value proposition, and then where is that activity
going to be located and what do I need to get data processed
with that activity.
So it's kind of a forced process and this notion of
data zoning presumes that increasingly
businesses have to think about the physical realities
of data; latency, bandwidth, intellectual property,
governance, legal considerations, as you mentioned
like GDPR, but also the costs of moving data are very real
and when you start talking about public cloud,
can be off the charts expensive.
So, those five considerations are going to be essential
to how companies think about their data and how they start
institutionalizing work around it.
So, it's a absolute crucial focus that people have to
emphasize and there's going to be some technologies
that alleviates some of the pressures that they have,
but the bottom line is the issues of cost,
regulation and law, the latency and bandwidth,
and intellectual property control are not going to go
away and they will guide people's data choices.
>> Intellectual property, zoning of data,
these are things that scare me if I'm a data person
and let me throw something at you.
So, everyone's talking about the ecosystem.
Oh we've got to have an ecosystem strategy.
Certainly with cloud you have now diverse sets of sharing,
we've seen the security, they're sharing data.
So, this notion of sharing, which gives the collective
intelligence, and makes data worth more and have more
context, as we talk about in theCUBE all the time.
At the same time, more sources of data are coming in
from potentially customers, partners;
this is a mashup, this is a fusion of data.
This is a challenge.
What are you hearing from companies on how they're
posturing for ecosystem partnerships?
Is it just APIs, is it just...?
I mean, how are they thinking about this and is
Informatica poised for that?
>> Informatica, let's start with the second question,
Informatica's poised for it, but every company's
going to face some challenges.
There are a lot of different sectors of the industry
that are looking at this and saying,
and licking their chops saying,
man, I can make a lot of money there.
But if we step back a little bit,
the first thing is that, you're right,
there is a mish mash and that's a feature of data.
Data can be combined, it can be copied,
you can do things with data without destroying data.
It's like a biological catalyst, right?
>> Yeah.
>> It's very important to remain very cognizant of that,
but when we think ultimately about where this is going,
there's going to be a relationship between data protection,
being able to locate data where it needs to be,
at the same time, protect it; being able to move data
with some degree of facility, stage it
predictably around the enterprise so it's in the zone
where it needs to be to support an action.
And our expectation ultimately is that we're going to see
an increasing merging of the issue of security
and data management because ultimately,
the challenge of data is not, it is how do you privatize
because it is so easy to share.
So, one of the key concepts is going to be
moving a security orientation from restricting access
to appropriately sharing as you mentioned with business
worlds, and security becomes kind of the mindset,
the approach of how you go about privatizing
your data assets and then subsequently,
protecting them and then, putting them
where they need to be within the enterprise so you can
support the abilities.
>> And it's also enabling developers, in AI for instance,
you see with the trend in machine learning
which is a gateway to AI, which we're all seeing.
Next generation analytics are dependent upon this.
Fundamental, whether whatever architecture.
Whether its cloud infrastructure or edge of network,
next generation analytics have to have a feed,
have to have the ability to use machine learning.
I mean look at...
>> It's not just next generation analytics.
>> Today.
>> It's next generation applications, right?
>> Bingo, yeah.
>> So, it's how do we incorporate some of those
new capabilities within applications so that
what we talk about, is we talk about systems of agency.
And the idea is how am I going to let technology
act on my behalf?
So, we can think in terms of automation which is
a process oriented, but IoT, with its models
and what we call, or augmentation, with its human
data interaction, human application interaction,
new styles of it, are very data first.
And so ultimately what we're talking about again
is these new styles of applications where either
we're doing something based on a model at the edge
or human beings are given options to choose from
and those options are crafted by the system itself.
And that is an enormous set of implications, so for example
we talk about Blockchain.
Blockchain means a lot of things to a lot of people,
but fundamentally, one of the things
that becomes interesting about Blockchain is
the degree to which in a computing system,
an accounting system doesn't need incentives.
You tell it to do something, it does it.
An edge application also doesn't need incentives,
it operates according to the model
and the specific conditions.
But when you talk about some of these
high value applications with human beings,
you have to incorporate incentives into how that they work.
And Blockchain has the potential to provide a very powerful
way of conceptualizing how you make human beings
strong agents within these systems without undermining
that notion of agency with the
appropriate set of incentives.
>> And also the ability to disrupt, intelligently,
the inefficient systems.
You always talk about inefficiency is an opportunity
to make it more efficient with intelligent data and insights
this is essentially the theme at Informatica.
Twenty-five years they've been doing data,
but now, more than ever, supporting kind of these use cases
that are emerging very quickly.
Intelligent data and insights drive ton of value
from analytics to applications.
>> Well let's go back 25 years,
Informatica started on the basis of acknowledging
or recognizing that OLAP, that new class of analytic
systems was going to require new technologies.
This is a company that's always had good data jobs
and good data people.
It's a magnet for smart people with an orientation
towards data and that's why it's remained relevant.
Now again, this is not a given,
there's still a lot of change on the horizon.
The world does not have enough data scientists,
the tooling for supporting some of these rich applications
has a long way to go, there's a lot of net computer science
that has yet to be developed.
But if you think about the handful of companies that are
going to be likely in the mix, making some of these changes,
leading the way, Informatica's in that group.
>> We got to wrap it up for the kick off.
We're going to start day one.
Final question, well I'll start it by saying,
I think that Informatica has a great opportunity ahead
and they've got challenges.
They've got great product people, they have to engage the
ecosystem; if they can effectively
bring the product into the market with a robust ecosystem
while enabling intelligent data for
insights in a way that applications, machine learning
can take advantage of it and scale it,
I think they've got a great opportunity.
If they don't forge those relationships,
and take the draft of the cloud, then I think they might
have some challenges.
>> I think that's accurate.
One thing I'd add to that John,
is that they will have to demonstrate to the ecosystem
they have and they want to build,
that the transition front product to service
is good for everybody.
>> Yeah.
>> If they can do that, if they can move that,
because that's a big part of the cloud,
if they can be a, again, a magnet within the cloud
for attracting data related companies and innovation
and entrepreneurs, then this is definitely
a company to watch.
>> We said it last year, whoever can crack the code on
letting data grow organically and be intelligent,
while maintaining governance and compliance which could
slow things down, that is the secret sauce.
Whoever cracks that code
will certainly go to the next level.
This is theCUBE, breaking down Informatica World
starting day one of two days of wall-to-wall coverage.
I'm John Furrier, Peter Burris.
More live coverage after this short break.
(upbeat music)