>> Announcer: Live from San Francisco, it's The Cube
covering Informatica World 2017,
brought to you by Informatica.
>> Hey, welcome back, everyone.
Live here in San Francisco for Informatica World 2017.
This is The Cube's exclusive coverage.
I'm John Furrier with SiliconANGLE and The Cube.
My co-host, Peter Burris with Wikibon Research.
Our next guest, Justin Donlon, the
Business Applications Manager, Carbonite;
a customer of Informatica, welcome to The Cube.
>> Thanks, it's great to be here.
>> So you've done a lot of interesting things.
We were just talking before you came on camera.
>> Yeah. >> Really hard.
Moving to the cloud was really easy.
>> Right, it helped us big time.
>> So tell us about some of the interesting things
you've got going on.
>> Okay, well, this is a great use-case
which we've been speaking about here at Informatica World.
We sell through a number of distributors
and through probably 8000, 9000 partners,
but two of our distributors.
We didn't have an e-comm way of interacting with him
so we built up this manual, semi-manual process.
We actually called it the manual, automated, auto-process.
(laughing) That's what we called it.
So we built up this process and we just thought
we can't keep going like this.
We had received a purchase order in email,
send it over to sales ops
then open it, validate it , does this make sense?
They agree, sign it off, pass it onto finance.
Finance would open it, say, "yep, makes sense,"
key it into our great playing system, (mumbles),
pass it on to provisioning.
This is for a SaaS product that we sell.
It's just not scalable at all.
>> John: A lot of touch points through there--
>> Too many touch points and a delay
for something that should be instant.
So we spoke to these distributors and said,
"What do you have, what can we do?"
We didn't have any options for API integration,
so they said, "Well, we've got EDI," so we said,
"Okay, first question, what does that stand for?"
(laughing)
'Cause we were a cutting-edge company, you know
and everything that we do is kind of,
>> So 1980s. >> Yeah, I know.
Kind of bleeding into it. so we kind of did our homework
a little bit and found out what EDI is electronic--
>> John: Where do we sign up for it?
>> Yeah, Electronic Data Interchange
and then we said, "How are we going to do this?"
We kind of looked around a little bit,
spoke to our partners at Informatica and I said,
"You know, we've got a EDI-capability in the cloud."
So we said, "Great, let's do a POC,"
so we did that POC, banged it together pretty quickly,
which is the beauty of a SaaS offering,
or the beauty of the cloud, and as we were building this up,
we were working with our counterparts at these distributors.
These guys who lived and breathed EDI for all their partners
and at some point, I just thought you know,
we're building this thing up,
I don't have anything to compare it to.
How do we know if we're even building the right thing?
We're just going on what we think seems to be making sense
so I phoned him up one day and I said,
"Listen, would you mind just taking an hour
"and let me walk through what we're building here?
"Let me just show you what we're building.
"See if it makes any sense."
And so he said, "Sure, I'll be happy to do that."
He knows EDI back to front and as you mentioned just now
it's a very complex, very in-depth, old-school
kind of system, old-school, we're processing transactions.
I showed him what we'd built out
and (mumbles) leveraged Informatica,
Salesforce as a front-end.
There's a really, really kind of bolted on solution,
but we managed to put it together in a few months.
I showed him each part and at some point,
or at many points, I was waiting for him to interrupt
and say, "Well, hang on a second, why are you doing that?"
But he didn't, he was silent through everything.
So I thought, "Okay, what have we done here?"
And so I turned it over to him and I said,
"What do you think, is this okay?
"Are we doing the right thing?"
And he paused for a second and then he said,
"Yeah," he says, "this is actually quite an elegant solution
"that you've built out in a few months.
"This is what has taken us 10 years to mature into."
>> John: He was mad!
>> I think he was a little mad and for me,
it was just a big sigh of relief
as I thought, "Okay, we're actually are on track,"
and we've actually been able to do something
really quickly and elegantly through a SaaS product,
through these cloud offerings.
>> That's a great use case of Informatica.
You've taken something that's hard and cloud made it easy
for you to do and you had no baggage.
In this case, it was a green field for you.
What other end-to-end examples are you guys working on
because data is now going end-to-end
and sometimes it's multi-vendor, of course,
but cloud's going to help you.
You got there, anything you got else going on?
Into any IOT, big data stuff you happening?
>> IOT, well, more especially, big data is becoming
more and more important to us.
As we've kind of grown through our consumer business,
Carbonite started out as a consumer product,
and as well over one and a half million consumer subscribers
and is moved into the very small business,
then into this kind of SMB space and a little bit
into the enterprise space, and as we've been doing that,
we need to understand what we're doing,
especially at very small business
through the enterprise space.
We've acquired these companies.
One of the key things we need to do
as we acquire companies is identify opportunities
for cross-sell and for up-sell,
and in order for to do that, we've got to get
that data into one repository where we can figure it out
pretty quickly.
So that's a huge initiative at Carbonite at the moment
is building out our data vault and our data legs
and getting some accurate and good data governance
as we fee this data into these data vaults
with our analytics team.
>> Peter: That's on the operational side?
>> Yeah, that's on the operational side.
>> So what Carbonite does is as a service to your customers,
which is, I'm not going to say it's standard,
but it's some really value-complex,
complex things that you do.
Has the engineering that you've done there
informed the process by which you're starting to
re-engineer in your digital footprint
on the operations side?
>> I know that there are conversations that
kind of happened between engineering on the product side
and the analytic side, but I think we'd love to see
more of that discussion happening.
Often what happens in any company, I think,
is that you get the silos as we know,
but the more that we can facilitate these discussions,
I think the better it will be for us.
>> Peter: So as you look at the Informatica Tool Care,
the presence of, where are you starting,
where do you anticipate you're going to use more
of some of these tools, whether it's Power Center
or MDM, et cetera, as you try to do this,
as you try to replicate the experience you just had
with EDI and the cloud transaction manager?
>> That's a really good question.
We've used application integration, so real-time
application integration, which is a tool called ICRT.
We've used Informatica Cloud Services, which is kind of
batch-transferring of information to and fro.
We've just, with EDI, implemented B-to-B gateway,
which is for that connectivity with partners.
And I think one of the key things for us moving forward
is going to be data governance.
As we have these different sources and different companies
coming in, we've got to make sure that we govern
and steward and ship it, and can I say sheriff,
the data into its rightful homes accurately.
We're trying to do that at the moment
and we're doing it through spreadsheets and SharePoint
and Lucidcharts and diagrams and Visio.
One of the tools which I saw, which is
an Informatica acquisition, Informatica Axon
is a data governance tool.
It doesn't store any data, but it just helps you
manage and control your data.
I think that's going to be crucial for any company
which is working at amalgamating systems
and data from various sources.
>> John: What's the biggest challenge
with data integration?
One of the things, this is, companies have different views
of the problem and opportunity.
What's the biggest challenges that people have?
>> You know, this is going to sound silly,
but one of the biggest challenges that we have right now
is just defining our data, defining what this term means.
Even just this week, we've got one term, Sale Type,
and still we're trying to figure out
exactly what that means.
That's one field that we want to be able to present
to the business and we're still saying,
"Hang on a second, what about this scenario?"
I think that's the biggest deal is just to have
a uniform definition of your different metrics
and KPIs and attributes across the business.
>> If you do that, you're going to first,
you got to find the sources, you got to understand
the degree to which synonyms are or are not synonyms,
and then you got to go through the social engineering
of getting people to agree so it is clear, for example.
Do you see that as a facilitator for this process?
>> I think it will be, I definitely think that will be,
especially with the self-discovery or
the intelligence structure discovery.
I think that's going to be an exciting thing to see.
>> I really like that intelligence structure discovery.
That is just, that's not available in today's market.
>> Yeah, that's right, but I think we've stepped away
from that, I really do think so.
>> You guys are. >> Yeah.
And as an industry I think we are,
with Informatica, partnering with Informatica.
>> With Informatica, how are you guys working through
(mumbles), you guys as a customer?
What specifically are you guys doing with them?
Sounds like that EDI thing is an enabler.
What else are you working with them on?
Share some specific--
>> Yeah, that's right.
It's still, at this stage, it's kind of the, it's all cloud.
We don't have any on-prem Informatica,
so it's all the cloud stuff, and we use it extensively
for our cloud systems, our cloud business applications:
Markelo, Salesforce, Zuora, NetSuite.
Those are the four big ones that we're using
and those are the same (mumbles), I guess.
So we're using Informatica to bridge the gap between
these different systems a lot
and so that's our kind of bread and butter
with Informatica at the moment.
>> John: How about developers onsite
for data and dealing with data?
How do you guys organize staff and skillsets?
Is it mostly engineering?
Is there data analysts, data science, how do you guys?
>> Yeah, good question.
We've got engineering, which kind of sits on the product.
Then we've got IT business applications,
which is where I fit in, and that's a combination of
kind of business analysts as well as developers
who build out this, a lot of the systems,
and then we have an analytics team.
The VP of analytics with Advanced Analytics,
analytics platform, Data Lake, Data Vault,
and so with those are the three big groups
that we look at where Informatica splits across
the different groups.
>> Now you guys are pretty solid with Informatica,
happy with them?
>> Yes, very much so.
>> Yeah, we've got a great partnership with them.
Every time we've bought, it's not because
it's been a hard sell.
(mumble), We've said, "Okay, we need that,"
"and this is what we need."
>> John: So not a hard sell.
How long you been a customer, just curious?
>> Almost three years.
>> John: So you're not legacy Informatica.
You're not locked in?
>> No, I'm not, I've never even seen the on-prems.
I've never even seen Power Santa, I hope to never see it.
I'm not interested.
>> You're cloud-native? >> Cloud, cloud first.
That's right.
>> How 'about you guys, multiple clouds?
What kind of clouds (mumbles) do you guys have?
>> With Informatica?
>> No, for you guys.
>> For us-- >> Salesforce, Markelo.
>> Those are the things, all those business applications.
Salesforce, Markelo, a little bit of hybrid stuff.
We've got our own on-premz--
Do you have your own data center?
>> We do have, as Carbonite?
>> Yeah. >> Absolutely
(talking over each other)
Our customers data.
>> Would you put that in the cloud, customer data?
>> Yeah, that is, in fact, moving to the cloud.
>> John: Alright, you are.
>> Yeah. >> But under your control.
It's your, effectively it's your cloud.
So as you think about
working with Markelo, Salesforce,
Zoira, remmember the last one you mentioned,
Oh, NetSuite >> Netsuite.
>> As you look at those four, everybody, everybody
is, all these SaaS companies are making,
have a realization that if I can get the data,
then I get the customer.
Are they starting to make it more or less easy
for you to perform these integrations
across how they handle things?
Where do you think their willingness to expose their APIs,
get more information about the metadat, et cetera,
is going so you can do a more effective job
of bringing it together and creating derivative value
out of these very rich, cloud-based applications?
>> I think that's an excellent question.
And for me as somebody who is not a developer,
but as for me as somebody who's very very interested
in moving and lending and transferring
and transforming data, I have to rely on a tool
like in Informatica because I don't want to go
digging in the bowels of NetSuite
to try and pull data out.
I don't even want to have to write an API core.
I honestly don't want to do that
and I don't really want my team to be doing that.
I want to be able to point Informatica at a system
and say what have we got, so for me that's crucial.
So I think that's where the partnership between
a Salesforce and Informatica, I'm relying on that
and I think that those sources, like the NetSuite
and the Salesforce, I think they're going to continue to
hopefully have this really good open partnership
with these middleware or these integration tools.
We have to have that.
If we don't have that, we're stuck.
The same people are going to start breaking into Salesforce
and breaking into NetSuite to get the data
'cause we're going to get it one way or the other.
>> Justin, great success story.
I'd love to hear the cloud, need it being,
you know, taking advantage of Informatica,
really highlights that they've got the modern approach.
Appreciate you coming out.
Justin Donlon, Carbonite Applications Manager.
This is The Cube with coverage of Informatica World 2017.
More live coverage here after the short break.
Stay with us.
(innovative tones)