Informatica World 2024 | Levent Ergin | Informatica, Meredith Kalman & Wout Vandeagar | Deloitte

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Levent Ergin

Global Chief ESG Sustainability Strategist & Global Head of ESG Strategic Alliance Partnerships

Informatica

Meredith Kalman

Global ESG Data Lead

Deloitte

Wout Vandegaer

Informatica Alliance lead

Deloitte

Deloitte and Informatica aim to drive ESG data management capabilities

During Informatica World, there’s already been some discussion around sustainability and environmental, social and governance concerns. But there’s much more to discuss, especially given how data centers aren’t necessarily prepared for the AI wave to come and its impact on ESG.That’s an area of interest for massive companies such as Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu Ltd., which has a huge number of customers and deals with lots of data. The company, which is partnered with Informatica Inc., views the chief data officer as being uniquely positioned to drive sustainability within an organization, according to Meredith Kalman (pictured, left), senior manager of strategy and analytics at Deloitte

play_circle_outline Exploring the Future of Sustainability and ESG: Highlights from Informatica World 2024 in Las Vegas

play_circle_outline Challenges of data management and integration for ESG reporting

play_circle_outline Need for a holistic approach and integration with corporate reporting

play_circle_outline Informatica's role in providing data management and AI capabilities for ESG data

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Levent Ergin | Informatica, Meredith Kalman & Wout Vandeagar | Deloitte

Levent Ergin

Global Chief ESG Sustainability Strategist & Global Head of ESG Strategic Alliance Partnerships Informatica

Meredith Kalman

Global ESG Data Lead Deloitte

Wout Vandegaer

Informatica Alliance lead Deloitte

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>> Hello and welcome back to Informatica World 2024 live from Las Vegas. We continue our wall-to-wall coverage here today. It's been just chock full of executives, partners and customers. We're going to keep diving in especially into a topic that's near and dear to my heart. We kind of had a little bit of this yesterday. We're going to dive even deeper today with another set of guests into sustainability and ESG and why it's I and who's really caring about it today. And for that, I definitely want to welcome in our guests. So I have Wout Vandegaer, who's the Informatica Alliance Lead for Deloitte. I have Meredith Kalman, who's the Global ESG Data Lead for Deloitte Consulting. And I'm not going to screw your name up this time, Levent Ergin, who's-

Levent Ergin

>> Thank you....

>> Who's the Global Chief ESG Sustainability Strategist and Global Head of ESG Strategic Alliance Partnerships at Informatica. You win on the longest title.

Levent Ergin

>> I have about that.

>> But I mean, I'm only half joking because I mean, we're here talking about getting your data, everything's prepared for AI except your data. I'd argue to say the data center isn't necessarily prepared for AI yet either as we talk about sustainability and where people are looking and how they really use the data to power their sustainability. And I think that's part of what we want to really jump into is kind of Deloitte, massive company. You have a lot of customers. You're collecting a lot of data. You're partnered with Informatica. How does this partnership work and who really cares about sustainability?

Meredith Kalman

>> So we actually think that the chief data officer in particular is really uniquely positioned to drive sustainability within their organization because at the end of the day, they're responsible for the quality of that sustainability data and making sure that the organization has trust in that data. So if you think about it from the top down, they have the responsibility to really partner with the CEO to set the sustainability strategy, figure out what the priorities are around sustainability for their organization, move on to the chief financial officer. They have to work with them to figure out what regulations are applicable in sustainability for their organization as well as figure out when they have to comply with those and map out a roadmap. And then you've got the supply chain and operations side where the chief data officer needs to figure out, okay, how do I partner with the suppliers to gather the data that's needed to do all of the sustainability reporting? And then at the end, you've got the chief information officer. How do I stand up this sustainability data and reporting platform? What's going to be the roadmap for that and how do I integrate it with the rest of the IT ecosystem?

>> Yeah. I mean to me that is the thing is there's so much data and you got into supply chain and you have your scope one and your scope two that are, I wouldn't say easy, but then you get into the scope three, which again is spread out, could be spread out all over the place, and especially depending on working with the people that you buy stuff from who buy stuff from somebody else in that entire chain. What are some of the ESG disclosures and things that you're seeing customers worry about today?

Levent Ergin

>> Yeah. Okay. Well, I'll pick that one up. So when we look at where this all started, just to set the context, I mean we have the Paris Agreement, which was signed in 2015 by 191 nations. It's a legally binding international treaty where the whole goal was to limit global warming to one and a half degrees. Now, unfortunately, we've already hit that point last year, but certainly since then we've had the G7 and G20 regulate and enact various different disclosures. And what's the biggest challenge for multinationals, which is really the clients that we typically work with Deloitte on and we solve big hairy problems for them, is they've got lots of different legal entities and different legal jurisdictions. And just to give some more context, at the time of the Paris Agreement, there was more than 400 different voluntary reporting frameworks and the International Sustainability Standards Board set up by IFRS, the International Financial Reporting Standard, was given a task to create a global baseline, which they did back in June of last year. But until countries and their regulators set a date as to when they're going to adopt companies, multinationals are still going to be in that state of limbo where they're going to have to report on the same data, but in different reporting formats, if you like. So just to bring it closer to home to let's say the US and North America, we have SEC's climate disclosures, obviously. Then we've had California, which is what spearheads most of the regulations with Senate Bill 253, and 261, which actually brings in another 17,000 companies into scope. So it's a huge challenge for companies, and I'm sure hopefully Deloitte will expand on this more. This is the first biggest hairiest problem for most of our clients today.

>> Yeah. And like you were all talking about, I think, and what we've been talking about this week, there's definitely data challenges. What are some of the data challenges that you're seeing in these organizations that they're trying to data wrangle and get their metadata all cleaned up? Because obviously if you're going to leverage AI to solve this problem, and we'll park the fact of how sustainable GPUs are and all that stuff, and data center power and cooling. But again, if it's going to be part of the solution, it's garbage in, garbage out. So you have these data challenges. What are you seeing from the customers about the data challenges?

Meredith Kalman

>> Yeah. So building off of what Levent was saying around the different regulations and regimes that companies need to comply with, I think the first biggest challenge with data is actually managing the different requirements for each of these regimes. They have different sets of data that are needed, different formats. Everything needs to be standardized, and it's really difficult to do that. And that also leads into there's just a large number of data sets and a lot of these data sets, like if you take supplier carbon emissions data and sustainability data, they're coming from a third party. You don't have direct control over that data and you need to catalog that data, make sure that you understand its lineage, that the quality is correct, and then weave it together with your own internal data in order to produce those reports. And then there's also an organizational and change perspective. How do you coordinate all of the people from the business, data governance, IT who need to put all this data together at the end of the day and curate it so that it can be landed and reported off of?

Wout Vandegaer

>> I mean, I would just like to add to that, Meredith, the business problem is exactly the same as any other strategic priority in an organization. If you do a digital transformation, an ERP transformation, a gen AI endeavor, or now ESG, they all have the same data foundation that no other company can provide in an accelerated manner like Informatica.

Levent Ergin

>> And how has that relationship grown, I guess, with Informatica? Because again, we look at it as data platforms are highly siloed, a lot of them. And so to your point about, hey, I'm getting data from all over the place, maybe from outside the company, inside the company, are you using Informatica and is that where the relationship really started was how to do this data wrangling aspect of it?

Wout Vandegaer

>> Yeah. I would not call it data wrangling, per se, but the main common foundational element that Informatica provides is the accelerator for our client's value journey. And there is no one company that can solve for this hairy problem by itself. So you need to bring together an ecosystem that brings the best in-breed capabilities for each of those components of a reference architecture. Informatica is front and center, but think about Workiva, Persephone, Snowflake or Databricks. You need to build that ecosystem to enable the value for our clients.

Meredith Kalman

>> Yeah. And I mean, the beauty of Informatica is that we will stitch it together with any of the hyperscalers, any of the carbon accounting tools and reporting tools. So at the end of the day, we're here to help our clients, even advise them on selecting those other tools as well that integrate into that holistic ESG ecosystem.

Wout Vandegaer

>> Yeah. I mean, it looks like, again, it's totally agree. There's no one magic wand that you can go and hey, the data's clean, the data's all there. But to your point, everybody's using, we see it in our data that we collect around what are people buying and how are they using cloud? How are they using on-prem? And with AI in particular, people are bringing the AI to the data a lot of times, which may be on-premise, it may be in a co-location facility. Do you see that when you're going in and engaging with customers from a Deloitte perspective, that you're coming in to your point, hey, they got a Snowflake over here in Amazon in Frankfurt, they have Databricks in Azure in France or in London, and they have something else in the US and you're trying to gather? Because some of the systems of record are in all of these different places, is that kind of one of the major challenges that you have?

Meredith Kalman

>> It's definitely a challenge, and I think one of the things that we always would work with any client and that perspective is to say, you don't want to build a separate data lake and separate reporting platform and system for your ESG. It needs to integrate with the rest of the corporate reporting.

Wout Vandegaer

>> So you're tying it back again to where you started with the CDO and saying, hey, you have to look at this more strategically about ... This kind of makes it sound easy, but it's just another set of reports, but it is. It's a set of data that you have to put a strategy around that should be treated like you're doing your 10 K's and 10 Q's, and if you're doing the SEC or what have you. Is that kind of the approach that you take as well?

Wout Vandegaer

>> Yes. I think you're spot on. We want to make sure that organizations understand that they can drive so much more value if they take a holistic approach. So if you treat your ESG as an extension of your ERP or digital transformation, you can get a lot more value out of this effort than if you would stand up an entire ecosystem just for ESG.

>> Yeah. I mean, I think that has to be part of where Informatica is coming from as well in this, because you're looking at it as another data set that you can help them build models around, help them build specific connectors in. Is that really where Informatica is coming in as well?

Levent Ergin

>> Yeah. Exactly. You're spot on. So from our perspective, it's another data domain that needs to have the same level of controls and rigor, and you've hit the nail on the head. You have this ESG sustainability data, which is non-financial data that is going to be part of the 10 K, which is financial data. And the expectation by the regulators at a minimum is for you to have the same level of controls that you have on your financial data on this non-financial data. And the regulations have made it a lot clearer now, whereas before it was more of a beauty pageant. Sustainability reporting was not subject to the same controls. But now you have limited and reasonable assurance requirements where you need to demonstrate all of those controls. And certainly what we are really excited about, which we've announced at Informatica World, is our generative AI capabilities for ESG data management. And now every executive wants to get their hands on this new shiny toy, which is generative AI. However, you cannot skip the foundational governance steps. And for gen AI to work, you need to have the metadata, which then has our ClearGPT large language model sitting over the top so that you can finally enable the business, the sustainability people, which are not technical data people, to be able to converse with the platform in simple English or using natural language processing to really unlock the power of gen AI for ESG sustainability data.

>> Yeah. I mean, with the last word here, because I think that to me makes total sense because this is something that Gen AI should be able to be good at doing. Where do you see companies getting started from? Just where should they get started?

Meredith Kalman

>> So typically what we would advise our clients to do is pick a specific use case. So maybe you want to do a supplier emission scorecard. So start with picking out, okay, what are our top 20 suppliers? We want to gather the data from them, build up the data ecosystem, then stand up a data science workbench and eventually be able to create those reports. And then from a feedback loop perspective, start measuring your customer's reaction to increase sustainability and products.

>> Yeah. No, I think that to me is a great piece of advice that I think we'll leave it right there. I really appreciate you all coming on. Thank you for coming on board.

Wout Vandegaer

>> Thank you for having us.

Meredith Kalman

>> Thanks so much.

Wout Vandegaer

>> Told you it'd be the fastest 15 minutes of your life today. And thank you.

Levent Ergin

>> Thank you, Rob.

>> And thank you all for watching this episode of theCUBE here live from Informatica World 2024 live in Las Vegas. We're back with you in a few minutes. Stay tuned to theCUBE, the leader in high-tech news and analysis.

Levent Ergin | Informatica, Meredith Kalman & Wout Vandeagar | Deloitte

search

>> Hello and welcome back to Informatica World 2024 live from Las Vegas. We continue our wall-to-wall coverage here today. It's been just chock full of executives, partners and customers. We're going to keep diving in especially into a topic that's near and dear to my heart. We kind of had a little bit of this yesterday. We're going to dive even deeper today with another set of guests into sustainability and ESG and why it's I and who's really caring about it today. And for that, I definitely want to welcome in our guests. So I have Wout Vandegaer, who's the Informatica Alliance Lead for Deloitte. I have Meredith Kalman, who's the Global ESG Data Lead for Deloitte Consulting. And I'm not going to screw your name up this time, Levent Ergin, who's-

Levent Ergin

>> Thank you....

>> Who's the Global Chief ESG Sustainability Strategist and Global Head of ESG Strategic Alliance Partnerships at Informatica. You win on the longest title.

Levent Ergin

>> I have about that.

>> But I mean, I'm only half joking because I mean, we're here talking about getting your data, everything's prepared for AI except your data. I'd argue to say the data center isn't necessarily prepared for AI yet either as we talk about sustainability and where people are looking and how they really use the data to power their sustainability. And I think that's part of what we want to really jump into is kind of Deloitte, massive company. You have a lot of customers. You're collecting a lot of data. You're partnered with Informatica. How does this partnership work and who really cares about sustainability?

Meredith Kalman

>> So we actually think that the chief data officer in particular is really uniquely positioned to drive sustainability within their organization because at the end of the day, they're responsible for the quality of that sustainability data and making sure that the organization has trust in that data. So if you think about it from the top down, they have the responsibility to really partner with the CEO to set the sustainability strategy, figure out what the priorities are around sustainability for their organization, move on to the chief financial officer. They have to work with them to figure out what regulations are applicable in sustainability for their organization as well as figure out when they have to comply with those and map out a roadmap. And then you've got the supply chain and operations side where the chief data officer needs to figure out, okay, how do I partner with the suppliers to gather the data that's needed to do all of the sustainability reporting? And then at the end, you've got the chief information officer. How do I stand up this sustainability data and reporting platform? What's going to be the roadmap for that and how do I integrate it with the rest of the IT ecosystem?

>> Yeah. I mean to me that is the thing is there's so much data and you got into supply chain and you have your scope one and your scope two that are, I wouldn't say easy, but then you get into the scope three, which again is spread out, could be spread out all over the place, and especially depending on working with the people that you buy stuff from who buy stuff from somebody else in that entire chain. What are some of the ESG disclosures and things that you're seeing customers worry about today?

Levent Ergin

>> Yeah. Okay. Well, I'll pick that one up. So when we look at where this all started, just to set the context, I mean we have the Paris Agreement, which was signed in 2015 by 191 nations. It's a legally binding international treaty where the whole goal was to limit global warming to one and a half degrees. Now, unfortunately, we've already hit that point last year, but certainly since then we've had the G7 and G20 regulate and enact various different disclosures. And what's the biggest challenge for multinationals, which is really the clients that we typically work with Deloitte on and we solve big hairy problems for them, is they've got lots of different legal entities and different legal jurisdictions. And just to give some more context, at the time of the Paris Agreement, there was more than 400 different voluntary reporting frameworks and the International Sustainability Standards Board set up by IFRS, the International Financial Reporting Standard, was given a task to create a global baseline, which they did back in June of last year. But until countries and their regulators set a date as to when they're going to adopt companies, multinationals are still going to be in that state of limbo where they're going to have to report on the same data, but in different reporting formats, if you like. So just to bring it closer to home to let's say the US and North America, we have SEC's climate disclosures, obviously. Then we've had California, which is what spearheads most of the regulations with Senate Bill 253, and 261, which actually brings in another 17,000 companies into scope. So it's a huge challenge for companies, and I'm sure hopefully Deloitte will expand on this more. This is the first biggest hairiest problem for most of our clients today.

>> Yeah. And like you were all talking about, I think, and what we've been talking about this week, there's definitely data challenges. What are some of the data challenges that you're seeing in these organizations that they're trying to data wrangle and get their metadata all cleaned up? Because obviously if you're going to leverage AI to solve this problem, and we'll park the fact of how sustainable GPUs are and all that stuff, and data center power and cooling. But again, if it's going to be part of the solution, it's garbage in, garbage out. So you have these data challenges. What are you seeing from the customers about the data challenges?

Meredith Kalman

>> Yeah. So building off of what Levent was saying around the different regulations and regimes that companies need to comply with, I think the first biggest challenge with data is actually managing the different requirements for each of these regimes. They have different sets of data that are needed, different formats. Everything needs to be standardized, and it's really difficult to do that. And that also leads into there's just a large number of data sets and a lot of these data sets, like if you take supplier carbon emissions data and sustainability data, they're coming from a third party. You don't have direct control over that data and you need to catalog that data, make sure that you understand its lineage, that the quality is correct, and then weave it together with your own internal data in order to produce those reports. And then there's also an organizational and change perspective. How do you coordinate all of the people from the business, data governance, IT who need to put all this data together at the end of the day and curate it so that it can be landed and reported off of?

Wout Vandegaer

>> I mean, I would just like to add to that, Meredith, the business problem is exactly the same as any other strategic priority in an organization. If you do a digital transformation, an ERP transformation, a gen AI endeavor, or now ESG, they all have the same data foundation that no other company can provide in an accelerated manner like Informatica.

Levent Ergin

>> And how has that relationship grown, I guess, with Informatica? Because again, we look at it as data platforms are highly siloed, a lot of them. And so to your point about, hey, I'm getting data from all over the place, maybe from outside the company, inside the company, are you using Informatica and is that where the relationship really started was how to do this data wrangling aspect of it?

Wout Vandegaer

>> Yeah. I would not call it data wrangling, per se, but the main common foundational element that Informatica provides is the accelerator for our client's value journey. And there is no one company that can solve for this hairy problem by itself. So you need to bring together an ecosystem that brings the best in-breed capabilities for each of those components of a reference architecture. Informatica is front and center, but think about Workiva, Persephone, Snowflake or Databricks. You need to build that ecosystem to enable the value for our clients.

Meredith Kalman

>> Yeah. And I mean, the beauty of Informatica is that we will stitch it together with any of the hyperscalers, any of the carbon accounting tools and reporting tools. So at the end of the day, we're here to help our clients, even advise them on selecting those other tools as well that integrate into that holistic ESG ecosystem.

Wout Vandegaer

>> Yeah. I mean, it looks like, again, it's totally agree. There's no one magic wand that you can go and hey, the data's clean, the data's all there. But to your point, everybody's using, we see it in our data that we collect around what are people buying and how are they using cloud? How are they using on-prem? And with AI in particular, people are bringing the AI to the data a lot of times, which may be on-premise, it may be in a co-location facility. Do you see that when you're going in and engaging with customers from a Deloitte perspective, that you're coming in to your point, hey, they got a Snowflake over here in Amazon in Frankfurt, they have Databricks in Azure in France or in London, and they have something else in the US and you're trying to gather? Because some of the systems of record are in all of these different places, is that kind of one of the major challenges that you have?

Meredith Kalman

>> It's definitely a challenge, and I think one of the things that we always would work with any client and that perspective is to say, you don't want to build a separate data lake and separate reporting platform and system for your ESG. It needs to integrate with the rest of the corporate reporting.

Wout Vandegaer

>> So you're tying it back again to where you started with the CDO and saying, hey, you have to look at this more strategically about ... This kind of makes it sound easy, but it's just another set of reports, but it is. It's a set of data that you have to put a strategy around that should be treated like you're doing your 10 K's and 10 Q's, and if you're doing the SEC or what have you. Is that kind of the approach that you take as well?

Wout Vandegaer

>> Yes. I think you're spot on. We want to make sure that organizations understand that they can drive so much more value if they take a holistic approach. So if you treat your ESG as an extension of your ERP or digital transformation, you can get a lot more value out of this effort than if you would stand up an entire ecosystem just for ESG.

>> Yeah. I mean, I think that has to be part of where Informatica is coming from as well in this, because you're looking at it as another data set that you can help them build models around, help them build specific connectors in. Is that really where Informatica is coming in as well?

Levent Ergin

>> Yeah. Exactly. You're spot on. So from our perspective, it's another data domain that needs to have the same level of controls and rigor, and you've hit the nail on the head. You have this ESG sustainability data, which is non-financial data that is going to be part of the 10 K, which is financial data. And the expectation by the regulators at a minimum is for you to have the same level of controls that you have on your financial data on this non-financial data. And the regulations have made it a lot clearer now, whereas before it was more of a beauty pageant. Sustainability reporting was not subject to the same controls. But now you have limited and reasonable assurance requirements where you need to demonstrate all of those controls. And certainly what we are really excited about, which we've announced at Informatica World, is our generative AI capabilities for ESG data management. And now every executive wants to get their hands on this new shiny toy, which is generative AI. However, you cannot skip the foundational governance steps. And for gen AI to work, you need to have the metadata, which then has our ClearGPT large language model sitting over the top so that you can finally enable the business, the sustainability people, which are not technical data people, to be able to converse with the platform in simple English or using natural language processing to really unlock the power of gen AI for ESG sustainability data.

>> Yeah. I mean, with the last word here, because I think that to me makes total sense because this is something that Gen AI should be able to be good at doing. Where do you see companies getting started from? Just where should they get started?

Meredith Kalman

>> So typically what we would advise our clients to do is pick a specific use case. So maybe you want to do a supplier emission scorecard. So start with picking out, okay, what are our top 20 suppliers? We want to gather the data from them, build up the data ecosystem, then stand up a data science workbench and eventually be able to create those reports. And then from a feedback loop perspective, start measuring your customer's reaction to increase sustainability and products.

>> Yeah. No, I think that to me is a great piece of advice that I think we'll leave it right there. I really appreciate you all coming on. Thank you for coming on board.

Wout Vandegaer

>> Thank you for having us.

Meredith Kalman

>> Thanks so much.

Wout Vandegaer

>> Told you it'd be the fastest 15 minutes of your life today. And thank you.

Levent Ergin

>> Thank you, Rob.

>> And thank you all for watching this episode of theCUBE here live from Informatica World 2024 live in Las Vegas. We're back with you in a few minutes. Stay tuned to theCUBE, the leader in high-tech news and analysis.