Informatica World 2024 | Amit Walia | Informatica

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Amit Walia

Chief Executive Officer

Informatica

Three insights you might have missed from theCUBE’s coverage of Informatica World

The battle for enterprise AI dominance is heating up, and companies such as Informatica Inc. have been seeking to capitalize. At this year’s Informatica World, executives, companies and partners weighed in on how best to stand out with data platform services.Planned announcements from Informatica were a key area of interest. The event was a chance to hear more from executives about the company’s vision, how important partners are and how customers are leveraging technology to move AI strategies forward, according to theCUBE Research principal analyst Rob Strechay.Rob Strechay and Rebecca Knight of theCUBE announced the latest announcements coming out of Informatica World 2024

CEO Amit Walia positions Informatica to get customer data ready for generative AI

The creation of a tagline for a major conference or branding campaign can take weeks of research and discussion, yet the organizers of Informatica World 2024 didn’t have to do much for this year’s slogan, “Everyone’s ready for AI except your data.”Customers delivered it for them, according to Amit Walia (pictured), chief executive officer of Informatica Inc.Amit Walia, CEO of Informatica, talks with theCUBE at Informatica World 2024.“The funny thing about this tagline is we didn’t come up with it,” he said. “I’ve been talking with hundreds of customers, and that’s exactly what they’ve been saying. That’s what our customers have been telling us, so let’s just tell it back to them

play_circle_outline Unlocking the Potential: Navigating the Fragmented Enterprise Data Environment and its Impact on AI

play_circle_outline Accelerating pace of AI: Informatica's pivot to all cloud, building new products and AI capabilities

play_circle_outline The All-Inclusive Data Solution: Informatica's Platform Empowers with Unrivaled Format Support and Flexible Pricing

play_circle_outline Excitement about future and Gen AI use cases

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Amit Walia | Informatica

Amit Walia

Chief Executive Officer Informatica

search

Rebecca Knight

>> Good afternoon everyone, and welcome back to theCUBE's live coverage of Informatica World here at the Mandalay Bay Convention Center. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, sitting alongside my co-host and analyst, Rob Strache. Rob, we've been waiting for this one.

>> Yeah, absolutely. This is right from the top. I mean, it doesn't get any better in looking at the direction that Informatica is going in for the next year, and I think again, was set really well with the keynotes, but I'm really excited about this.

Rebecca Knight

>> Indeed. So let's welcome to theCUBE, Amit Walia. He is the CEO of Informatica. Thank you so much for coming on.

Amit Walia

>> Rebecca, great to be here. Hello, Rob.

Rebecca Knight

>> Hello. So Amit, the tagline for this conference is everyone's ready for AI except your data and that is the message that is really coming across, but we'd like to hear it from the horse's mouth. How do you describe that as what you see as sort of the overarching issue right now that organizations across the board are grappling with?

Amit Walia

>> Well, the funny thing about this tagline is that we didn't come up with it. As I've been talking to hundreds of customers, exactly what they've been saying that to me. For the last 12 months, I've been hearing them say, you know what? We all want to get ready for AI, but my data's not ready. I'm like, that's such an obvious thing to say. That's what our customers are telling us, so let's just tell it back to them. So it's pretty verbatim from our customers. Look, if you get step back, here is the reality of an enterprise. It's a very complex, fragmented environment. There's hundreds of apps running around, hundreds of data silos running around hundreds of many cloud platforms. People are building their own apps. And let's not forget, as much as we think the world is 100% cloud, there's a lot of stuff running from the old legacy stuff running around as well. And when you think about AI in particular, the biggest thing is that you want to give your AI model. An AI model by itself is not intelligent, but you got to give it, first of all, complete holistic data. So you want to bring data from all over those places. You want to give it good quality data. You want to have governance on top of that data, so as a model can do something and you operationalize that. All of that stuff is data management. And at the end of the day, that's what we do for a living. And the other thing is fundamentally is that searching for all this data is a complex thing. And what we've done very uniquely is build this metadata system of record, which is what Google did to the World Wide Web we did to the enterprise data, and that's powering this IDMC platform we have, helping enterprises in this Gen AI world to get stuff done.

Amit Walia

>> And I think what it also has done is accelerated the pace at which yourself and your customers, but in particular yourself. I mean, again, like you said, you're probably in the vortex of the storm right in the eye there. Why data management is important, like you said, garbage in, garbage out, especially with AI. How has that changed Informatica, just the AI in accelerating the pace of everything?

Amit Walia

>> Look, fundamentally the first pivot the company did a couple of years ago was pivoting to all cloud, everything... What we did was we built a whole new Informatica under the covers, brand new products. Even if there was an old legacy product, we left it behind all on one platform IDMC. And to give you a sense of scale, that platform is running at 92 trillion transactions a month. That's a usage of the platform by our customers. And each time the scale doubles growth rate has continued like that. So it's at that scale we are operating. So that has already happened. And now what that has allowed us to do is in the world of Gen AI, actually provide those capabilities for customers to use that platform to run their Gen AI workloads, but also provide our Gen AI in the context of a Clare Copilot. Clare is our AI engine and Clare GPT, which went live a couple of weeks ago. So our goal is to give our customers a holistic platform to do any kind of digital transformation, including Gen AI driven digital transformation. And the one other thing is that very unique for us is that we've always been the Switzerland of data. We support any data format, support any cloud, any database, any application. And in the world of Gen AI, we are going to be the Switzerland of Gen AI, any LLM, any vector database, any of that stuff. That's very important for our customers to have that choice.

Amit Walia

>> Yeah, I mean, we were even talking with Garav about how you're using different models for different pieces underneath Clare GPT and how it actually, again, to give not only the right answer, but how to say no when it doesn't know, which I loved. I mean, that answer was probably the best AI answer because having used other AI things and it gives me an answer and I'm like, yeah, that's completely wrong. And then you lose faith in it. So from an Informatica perspective, the thread we've been seeing throughout this week has been data quality, give the right answers, get the best data in, govern it really well, make sure that you're bringing it all together. And I think the special sauce that I've seen in the 13 years or so that I've known Informatica is that really it's about the metadata and how that all gets across, like you were saying, all of those silos, no matter if it's on-prem or in the cloud. Are you seeing the customers when you're... I mean, you have to be inundated with customer meetings this week to put it mildly. They're saying here's... I mean, like Takeda who was on stage and went from eight to two, different data management systems. That has to be one of the major goals because again, Gen AI tends to steal from other places from a budgetary perspective, it's not like there's infinite money everywhere within IT. Are you seeing that at your customers where they're looking to Informatica to actually help you get a higher ROI on their data?

Amit Walia

>> So that's a great set of questions. I think what we are seeing is three things. One is absolutely, you're right, IT budgets are not increasing exponentially, but what customers are doing is that routing budgets towards critical strategic initiatives and data-driven Gen AI initiatives are definitely getting the budget allocation. So that's a good thing for us because that's a tailwind. Then comes a second thing. Customers have come to this realization that good Lord. Am I in the business of stitching hundreds of data management tools? And by the way, some of them are so small that they cannot even scale to enterprises' operational scale. And then if one thing fails, my whole flow changes or I get to a consolidated best-of-breed player like Informatica and have them do that for me. And with us, they get two things. See we talk about a platform, intelligent data management cloud, but what people forget is that we are also have the best-of-breed products of that platform. All products from us are number one in our category, whether you look at the magic quadrants, whether you look at the Forrester Waves, so they're getting a two for. They're getting the best products, one platform, AI engine, and lastly one single consumption-based pricing for the entire platform. So you can use any product when you buy even one IPU. And lastly, all of those products and all of that platform, if they've already started using it currently for their data-driven digital transformation as we shared on stage, fully seamlessly support all Gen AI workloads. So they don't have to re-engineer anything. If they were doing a current workload on some data platform, they can now do LLMs and vector databases. So they are future-proof, don't have to spend a lot more money to do Gen AI initiatives. That's the three things that I'm seeing that's consolidating a lot of this fragmentation to IDMC.

Rebecca Knight

>> When you had the CDO of Takeda on yesterday, you asked her about how the role of the CDO has changed over the years, and I thought it was a really insightful question. I'm a journalist, and so good question. And it occurred to me that the C-suite is really undergoing such a transformation in this new era of Gen AI. You're a tech veteran, you've been at Informatica for a long time too. How would you say your job as a leader has changed in this new era?

Amit Walia

>> I think the one thing that has changed a lot, especially for what customers are asking us, and I see that when I get talked to customers, by the way, both Barb and Rafi was on stage. They are looking to players like us who are leaders in our space at scale for thought leadership and advice. So my first conversation with both of them were, look, I'm undergoing this kind of a transformation. Can I just talk to you as to how to even think about it? Am I making a mistake over there? Should I do this? It's not about the technology first. The conversation is a lot more strategic and the scale and the breadth and the depth and the place we have in the industry because we've seen so much, they're looking to us for advice, guidance, thought leadership, which I think is a great thing because it elevates the conversation about having one product for one use case to a platform and a holistic conversation. That's a big change that's happening. All conversations for me begin with, can you tell me how am I thinking about it the right way? And by the way, the CDOs coming to them, look, they are a very big persona for us. We have thousands of CDOs in our network. In fact, we run a CDO council every month we meet, we only have a chat about what's happening in that world and their role has changed and they're becoming very strategic and I really see their role growing very significantly.

Amit Walia

>> It seems to be one of those roles that seems to get other letters like CADO and things like this. It's crazy to see that. And I mean, again, having been in that world with people that are looking out and saying, as a CDO, do I own AI? Does the CIO own AI? Where does this all... And oh, by the way, then we got to partner up with the legal counsel and governance. And how do you see from your level in those strategic conversations that are happening about here's how we're building our center of excellence? How are customers really looking to build a center of excellence that's centralizing kind of governance and privacy and all that because there's other regulations coming down. The AI Act was the first kind of volley in Europe, there's going to be stuff coming to a state near you or a country near you. How do you see that evolving, that kind of center of excellence at your customers?

Amit Walia

>> Yeah, and it is evolving. That's the right word to put it. I think what I'm seeing is a couple of things. Of course legal is involved because there is regulatory compliance. There's always the nervousness about if we do something silly. So legal is always involved in terms of looking at are we doing the right things? Same in our company. Are legal counsel looking at are we approaching it the right way? Are using customer's data the right way? Are we using our own employee's data the right way, which is the right thing to do? I think what is happening is that clearly... One interesting thing has happened. At the boardroom level, topics like governance quality have become very... Because people realize, oh, without good quality stuff, nothing will come out of value. So the CDOs are becoming more and more important that, hey, we need to get the data state in order. And you cannot look at the data state in a silo, that function and that business over there. So the CDOs are becoming that clue to say, "Hey, if I have to put my data state in order, I got to do it holistically." So they're definitely becoming the owners or the drivers and the champions of that. Now clearly the users of AI will be functional. I'm in sales, I can use Salesforce's AI. I'm in marketing, I can use Adobe's AI. I'm in CM, I can use Workday's AI. That will be there, but the data state has to be only managed in one place. I think I'm seeing a lot of that happen now. In large companies, there can be multiple CDOs, there can be a global CDO, but the CDOs are becoming critically important.

Rebecca Knight

>> So this has really been a terrific show and it's showcased not only a lot of innovations and refinements that Informatica is putting out, but also the thought leadership as you were saying, and just how you approach Informatica's evolution as a company and as a brand. What are some of the things that are most exciting to you going back thinking about the future and about next year's Informatica World?

Amit Walia

>> Boy, I think, look, I am definitely excited. Look, while Gen AI is one of those things, it is going to be a cliche, but I'm super excited about that. And the reason for that is that look, let's not forget non-Gen AI transformation, digital transformation is still very much underway and has to be underway. It won't go away. I give the example that I think will continue for the next five years too. But the reality is that Gen AI is an exponential driver and customers have to start somewhere. Enterprises are not necessarily in operational mode yet, let's be very honest. But they're all building a roadmap. Okay? This is the first use case. What I'm excited about is that our customers with currently deployed IDMC can actually start experimenting the Gen AI workloads, can start to operationalize that. And what I really... I fully expect that when we come to next year on stage, there'll be two customers who will be talking about their operational Gen AI benefits and what they did. Just like you had Barb and Rafi on stage talking about digital trials. That's what I think will happen next year.

Rebecca Knight

>> And how it's really impacted the bottom line.

Amit Walia

>> And by the way, we are seeing it today, I think you had SSM Health, but they're using Clare GPT and they were able to discover very quickly where the different critical resources were, where critical equipment were, and they can route it within their hospital network. Imagine that. Imagine how much patient care gets elevated if you can get the right resource and the right equipment quickly from point A to point B, if one thing is understaffed and the other one is overstaffed. So we are seeing that already, and I fully expect next year we will be seeing actual demonstrated use cases where people will be talking about.

Amit Walia

>> Yeah, I think to me that's the most exciting thing is because we even are partnered up with a company ETR, and in that data, 80% of companies are still in the evaluation phase around what is the use case that they're going to do in production. And we agree, and I think there's a lot of talk about silicon and all of this other stuff that's way underneath where the actual apps are. And I know Informatica's been in what I'll call traditional AI or ML for a long time and building models and being able to, hey, recommendations engines for customer 360 and things of that nature. Where do you see the customers initially jumping in and is it customer service? Is it generation of content? Is it code generation? Where do you see them coming to you and saying, "Hey, we want to use our data in this way, in this use case," as we start to evaluate those use cases.

Amit Walia

>> Interestingly, what we saw is many use cases, not just one, because I gave you this example of SSM Health, it is customer service, but think about this way, it's also a little bit of a supply chain thing. How do I get the right people and the right medical care equipment at the right place? So it's a bit of a supply chain conversation which results in higher patient care and customer service. So now it depends upon how you want to categorize that. We saw another customer think of it in the context of a great campaign effectiveness, which results in higher revenue generation, which is in context of serving the customers. So we are seeing very different use cases emerge. The beauty is, here's what I tell everyone. Data impacts your entire value chain of an enterprise from front end to back end, whether it's increasing revenue, reducing cost, increasing productivity, and we've seen customers attempt all of those things. But you're right, I see customer service, I see supply chain, I see discovery of data to make real-time decisions help reduce customers churn, better understand your customer sentiment analysis. Those are the kind of places I'm seeing a lot of use cases emerge. Another thing I think I want to emphasize is that one of the unique things hopefully you are getting to see here is that we have this unique place in this ecosystem where we are the Switzerland working with everybody. I mean, you heard Scott on stage, Sridhar on stage from Snowflake, and our partnerships are deep with all the cloud hyperscalers or data clouds and all the system integrators who have Informatica practices. It's very important for our customers because our customers have a very fragmented, diverse set of landscape. We have a very high bar working with all of them. So our customers can benefit by having that choice. And that's another thing that as customers walk around, as you guys walk around, you'll see everybody present here signifying our strong partnership ethos.

Amit Walia

>> Yeah, no, that's definitely come through. To put it mildly, we've had the vast majority of ecosystem on... In fact, we have more to come this afternoon as well. But it's been fantastic seeing that because like you said, they are so fragmented and it is that layer up above where you're building your data products that has data from all over the place.

Amit Walia

>> Yes.

Rebecca Knight

>> Well, Amit, thank you so much for coming on theCUBE, a really great conversation.

Amit Walia

>> Always a pleasure. Thank you, Rebecca. Thanks, Rob.

Rebecca Knight

>> I'm Rebecca Knight for Rob Strache. Stay tuned for more of theCUBE's live coverage of Informatica World. You are watching theCUBE, the leader in enterprise news and analysis.

Amit Walia | Informatica

search

Rebecca Knight

>> Good afternoon everyone, and welcome back to theCUBE's live coverage of Informatica World here at the Mandalay Bay Convention Center. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, sitting alongside my co-host and analyst, Rob Strache. Rob, we've been waiting for this one.

>> Yeah, absolutely. This is right from the top. I mean, it doesn't get any better in looking at the direction that Informatica is going in for the next year, and I think again, was set really well with the keynotes, but I'm really excited about this.

Rebecca Knight

>> Indeed. So let's welcome to theCUBE, Amit Walia. He is the CEO of Informatica. Thank you so much for coming on.

Amit Walia

>> Rebecca, great to be here. Hello, Rob.

Rebecca Knight

>> Hello. So Amit, the tagline for this conference is everyone's ready for AI except your data and that is the message that is really coming across, but we'd like to hear it from the horse's mouth. How do you describe that as what you see as sort of the overarching issue right now that organizations across the board are grappling with?

Amit Walia

>> Well, the funny thing about this tagline is that we didn't come up with it. As I've been talking to hundreds of customers, exactly what they've been saying that to me. For the last 12 months, I've been hearing them say, you know what? We all want to get ready for AI, but my data's not ready. I'm like, that's such an obvious thing to say. That's what our customers are telling us, so let's just tell it back to them. So it's pretty verbatim from our customers. Look, if you get step back, here is the reality of an enterprise. It's a very complex, fragmented environment. There's hundreds of apps running around, hundreds of data silos running around hundreds of many cloud platforms. People are building their own apps. And let's not forget, as much as we think the world is 100% cloud, there's a lot of stuff running from the old legacy stuff running around as well. And when you think about AI in particular, the biggest thing is that you want to give your AI model. An AI model by itself is not intelligent, but you got to give it, first of all, complete holistic data. So you want to bring data from all over those places. You want to give it good quality data. You want to have governance on top of that data, so as a model can do something and you operationalize that. All of that stuff is data management. And at the end of the day, that's what we do for a living. And the other thing is fundamentally is that searching for all this data is a complex thing. And what we've done very uniquely is build this metadata system of record, which is what Google did to the World Wide Web we did to the enterprise data, and that's powering this IDMC platform we have, helping enterprises in this Gen AI world to get stuff done.

Amit Walia

>> And I think what it also has done is accelerated the pace at which yourself and your customers, but in particular yourself. I mean, again, like you said, you're probably in the vortex of the storm right in the eye there. Why data management is important, like you said, garbage in, garbage out, especially with AI. How has that changed Informatica, just the AI in accelerating the pace of everything?

Amit Walia

>> Look, fundamentally the first pivot the company did a couple of years ago was pivoting to all cloud, everything... What we did was we built a whole new Informatica under the covers, brand new products. Even if there was an old legacy product, we left it behind all on one platform IDMC. And to give you a sense of scale, that platform is running at 92 trillion transactions a month. That's a usage of the platform by our customers. And each time the scale doubles growth rate has continued like that. So it's at that scale we are operating. So that has already happened. And now what that has allowed us to do is in the world of Gen AI, actually provide those capabilities for customers to use that platform to run their Gen AI workloads, but also provide our Gen AI in the context of a Clare Copilot. Clare is our AI engine and Clare GPT, which went live a couple of weeks ago. So our goal is to give our customers a holistic platform to do any kind of digital transformation, including Gen AI driven digital transformation. And the one other thing is that very unique for us is that we've always been the Switzerland of data. We support any data format, support any cloud, any database, any application. And in the world of Gen AI, we are going to be the Switzerland of Gen AI, any LLM, any vector database, any of that stuff. That's very important for our customers to have that choice.

Amit Walia

>> Yeah, I mean, we were even talking with Garav about how you're using different models for different pieces underneath Clare GPT and how it actually, again, to give not only the right answer, but how to say no when it doesn't know, which I loved. I mean, that answer was probably the best AI answer because having used other AI things and it gives me an answer and I'm like, yeah, that's completely wrong. And then you lose faith in it. So from an Informatica perspective, the thread we've been seeing throughout this week has been data quality, give the right answers, get the best data in, govern it really well, make sure that you're bringing it all together. And I think the special sauce that I've seen in the 13 years or so that I've known Informatica is that really it's about the metadata and how that all gets across, like you were saying, all of those silos, no matter if it's on-prem or in the cloud. Are you seeing the customers when you're... I mean, you have to be inundated with customer meetings this week to put it mildly. They're saying here's... I mean, like Takeda who was on stage and went from eight to two, different data management systems. That has to be one of the major goals because again, Gen AI tends to steal from other places from a budgetary perspective, it's not like there's infinite money everywhere within IT. Are you seeing that at your customers where they're looking to Informatica to actually help you get a higher ROI on their data?

Amit Walia

>> So that's a great set of questions. I think what we are seeing is three things. One is absolutely, you're right, IT budgets are not increasing exponentially, but what customers are doing is that routing budgets towards critical strategic initiatives and data-driven Gen AI initiatives are definitely getting the budget allocation. So that's a good thing for us because that's a tailwind. Then comes a second thing. Customers have come to this realization that good Lord. Am I in the business of stitching hundreds of data management tools? And by the way, some of them are so small that they cannot even scale to enterprises' operational scale. And then if one thing fails, my whole flow changes or I get to a consolidated best-of-breed player like Informatica and have them do that for me. And with us, they get two things. See we talk about a platform, intelligent data management cloud, but what people forget is that we are also have the best-of-breed products of that platform. All products from us are number one in our category, whether you look at the magic quadrants, whether you look at the Forrester Waves, so they're getting a two for. They're getting the best products, one platform, AI engine, and lastly one single consumption-based pricing for the entire platform. So you can use any product when you buy even one IPU. And lastly, all of those products and all of that platform, if they've already started using it currently for their data-driven digital transformation as we shared on stage, fully seamlessly support all Gen AI workloads. So they don't have to re-engineer anything. If they were doing a current workload on some data platform, they can now do LLMs and vector databases. So they are future-proof, don't have to spend a lot more money to do Gen AI initiatives. That's the three things that I'm seeing that's consolidating a lot of this fragmentation to IDMC.

Rebecca Knight

>> When you had the CDO of Takeda on yesterday, you asked her about how the role of the CDO has changed over the years, and I thought it was a really insightful question. I'm a journalist, and so good question. And it occurred to me that the C-suite is really undergoing such a transformation in this new era of Gen AI. You're a tech veteran, you've been at Informatica for a long time too. How would you say your job as a leader has changed in this new era?

Amit Walia

>> I think the one thing that has changed a lot, especially for what customers are asking us, and I see that when I get talked to customers, by the way, both Barb and Rafi was on stage. They are looking to players like us who are leaders in our space at scale for thought leadership and advice. So my first conversation with both of them were, look, I'm undergoing this kind of a transformation. Can I just talk to you as to how to even think about it? Am I making a mistake over there? Should I do this? It's not about the technology first. The conversation is a lot more strategic and the scale and the breadth and the depth and the place we have in the industry because we've seen so much, they're looking to us for advice, guidance, thought leadership, which I think is a great thing because it elevates the conversation about having one product for one use case to a platform and a holistic conversation. That's a big change that's happening. All conversations for me begin with, can you tell me how am I thinking about it the right way? And by the way, the CDOs coming to them, look, they are a very big persona for us. We have thousands of CDOs in our network. In fact, we run a CDO council every month we meet, we only have a chat about what's happening in that world and their role has changed and they're becoming very strategic and I really see their role growing very significantly.

Amit Walia

>> It seems to be one of those roles that seems to get other letters like CADO and things like this. It's crazy to see that. And I mean, again, having been in that world with people that are looking out and saying, as a CDO, do I own AI? Does the CIO own AI? Where does this all... And oh, by the way, then we got to partner up with the legal counsel and governance. And how do you see from your level in those strategic conversations that are happening about here's how we're building our center of excellence? How are customers really looking to build a center of excellence that's centralizing kind of governance and privacy and all that because there's other regulations coming down. The AI Act was the first kind of volley in Europe, there's going to be stuff coming to a state near you or a country near you. How do you see that evolving, that kind of center of excellence at your customers?

Amit Walia

>> Yeah, and it is evolving. That's the right word to put it. I think what I'm seeing is a couple of things. Of course legal is involved because there is regulatory compliance. There's always the nervousness about if we do something silly. So legal is always involved in terms of looking at are we doing the right things? Same in our company. Are legal counsel looking at are we approaching it the right way? Are using customer's data the right way? Are we using our own employee's data the right way, which is the right thing to do? I think what is happening is that clearly... One interesting thing has happened. At the boardroom level, topics like governance quality have become very... Because people realize, oh, without good quality stuff, nothing will come out of value. So the CDOs are becoming more and more important that, hey, we need to get the data state in order. And you cannot look at the data state in a silo, that function and that business over there. So the CDOs are becoming that clue to say, "Hey, if I have to put my data state in order, I got to do it holistically." So they're definitely becoming the owners or the drivers and the champions of that. Now clearly the users of AI will be functional. I'm in sales, I can use Salesforce's AI. I'm in marketing, I can use Adobe's AI. I'm in CM, I can use Workday's AI. That will be there, but the data state has to be only managed in one place. I think I'm seeing a lot of that happen now. In large companies, there can be multiple CDOs, there can be a global CDO, but the CDOs are becoming critically important.

Rebecca Knight

>> So this has really been a terrific show and it's showcased not only a lot of innovations and refinements that Informatica is putting out, but also the thought leadership as you were saying, and just how you approach Informatica's evolution as a company and as a brand. What are some of the things that are most exciting to you going back thinking about the future and about next year's Informatica World?

Amit Walia

>> Boy, I think, look, I am definitely excited. Look, while Gen AI is one of those things, it is going to be a cliche, but I'm super excited about that. And the reason for that is that look, let's not forget non-Gen AI transformation, digital transformation is still very much underway and has to be underway. It won't go away. I give the example that I think will continue for the next five years too. But the reality is that Gen AI is an exponential driver and customers have to start somewhere. Enterprises are not necessarily in operational mode yet, let's be very honest. But they're all building a roadmap. Okay? This is the first use case. What I'm excited about is that our customers with currently deployed IDMC can actually start experimenting the Gen AI workloads, can start to operationalize that. And what I really... I fully expect that when we come to next year on stage, there'll be two customers who will be talking about their operational Gen AI benefits and what they did. Just like you had Barb and Rafi on stage talking about digital trials. That's what I think will happen next year.

Rebecca Knight

>> And how it's really impacted the bottom line.

Amit Walia

>> And by the way, we are seeing it today, I think you had SSM Health, but they're using Clare GPT and they were able to discover very quickly where the different critical resources were, where critical equipment were, and they can route it within their hospital network. Imagine that. Imagine how much patient care gets elevated if you can get the right resource and the right equipment quickly from point A to point B, if one thing is understaffed and the other one is overstaffed. So we are seeing that already, and I fully expect next year we will be seeing actual demonstrated use cases where people will be talking about.

Amit Walia

>> Yeah, I think to me that's the most exciting thing is because we even are partnered up with a company ETR, and in that data, 80% of companies are still in the evaluation phase around what is the use case that they're going to do in production. And we agree, and I think there's a lot of talk about silicon and all of this other stuff that's way underneath where the actual apps are. And I know Informatica's been in what I'll call traditional AI or ML for a long time and building models and being able to, hey, recommendations engines for customer 360 and things of that nature. Where do you see the customers initially jumping in and is it customer service? Is it generation of content? Is it code generation? Where do you see them coming to you and saying, "Hey, we want to use our data in this way, in this use case," as we start to evaluate those use cases.

Amit Walia

>> Interestingly, what we saw is many use cases, not just one, because I gave you this example of SSM Health, it is customer service, but think about this way, it's also a little bit of a supply chain thing. How do I get the right people and the right medical care equipment at the right place? So it's a bit of a supply chain conversation which results in higher patient care and customer service. So now it depends upon how you want to categorize that. We saw another customer think of it in the context of a great campaign effectiveness, which results in higher revenue generation, which is in context of serving the customers. So we are seeing very different use cases emerge. The beauty is, here's what I tell everyone. Data impacts your entire value chain of an enterprise from front end to back end, whether it's increasing revenue, reducing cost, increasing productivity, and we've seen customers attempt all of those things. But you're right, I see customer service, I see supply chain, I see discovery of data to make real-time decisions help reduce customers churn, better understand your customer sentiment analysis. Those are the kind of places I'm seeing a lot of use cases emerge. Another thing I think I want to emphasize is that one of the unique things hopefully you are getting to see here is that we have this unique place in this ecosystem where we are the Switzerland working with everybody. I mean, you heard Scott on stage, Sridhar on stage from Snowflake, and our partnerships are deep with all the cloud hyperscalers or data clouds and all the system integrators who have Informatica practices. It's very important for our customers because our customers have a very fragmented, diverse set of landscape. We have a very high bar working with all of them. So our customers can benefit by having that choice. And that's another thing that as customers walk around, as you guys walk around, you'll see everybody present here signifying our strong partnership ethos.

Amit Walia

>> Yeah, no, that's definitely come through. To put it mildly, we've had the vast majority of ecosystem on... In fact, we have more to come this afternoon as well. But it's been fantastic seeing that because like you said, they are so fragmented and it is that layer up above where you're building your data products that has data from all over the place.

Amit Walia

>> Yes.

Rebecca Knight

>> Well, Amit, thank you so much for coming on theCUBE, a really great conversation.

Amit Walia

>> Always a pleasure. Thank you, Rebecca. Thanks, Rob.

Rebecca Knight

>> I'm Rebecca Knight for Rob Strache. Stay tuned for more of theCUBE's live coverage of Informatica World. You are watching theCUBE, the leader in enterprise news and analysis.