Informatica World 2024 | Don Tirsell | Google Cloud & Rik Tamm-Daniels | Informatica

Clips
News
More from Informatica World 2024

Don Tirsell

Global Head of Data and Analytics Partnerships

Google

Rik Tamm-Daniels

GVP, Technology Alliances

Informatica

Google Cloud and Informatica’s strategic collaboration to transform data management

Working in collaboration, tech giants Google Cloud and Informatica Inc. are seeking to transform the landscape of data management and artificial intelligence integration.By combining strengths, the two companies are simplifying the migration to cloud platforms, enhancing data governance and unlocking new opportunities for AI-driven innovation. The partnership is not just about technology; it’s about setting a new standard for how businesses can effectively leverage data to stay competitive in a rapidly evolving market.Don Tirsell, Google Cloud, and Rik Tamm-Daniels, Informatica, talk the collaboration between Google Cloud and Informatica

play_circle_outline Unlocking Data Potential: The Synergistic Google Cloud and Informatica Partnership Empowering Agile Data Management

play_circle_outline Customer stories of solving problems using Informatica and Google Cloud

play_circle_outline Simplifying the process of bringing together different components of AI architecture

play_circle_outline Benefits of a customer-driven partnership and cultural alignment between organizations

Info

Don Tirsell | Google Cloud & Rik Tamm-Daniels | Informatica

Don Tirsell

Global Head of Data and Analytics Partnerships Google

Rik Tamm-Daniels

GVP, Technology Alliances Informatica

search

>> Hello, everyone, and welcome back to theCUBE's live coverage of Informatica World here at the Mandalay Bay in Las Vegas, Nevada. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, sitting alongside my co-host and analyst, Rob . Rob, this is day three, we've been here the entire time. We've got some heavy hitters coming on today, we already had the CMO, we're having the CEO on, but we're also talking to Informatica's partners.

>> Yes. Yeah, I think, again, bringing it back to where you need Informatica, where you need data management, where you need to have that metadata, Informatica's there, and I think that's super important.

>> Exactly. Well, a great segue to introduce our next guest. We have Don Tirsell, the Global Head of Data and Analytics Partnerships at Google Cloud. Thanks so much for-

>> Thanks for having me....

>> coming back on theCUBE, Don. And Rik Tamm-Daniels, GVP of Technology Alliances at Informatica, thank you so much for returning to theCUBE.

>> Yeah, I'm happy to be here.

>> Long time, no see.

>> I'm basically a co-host at this point.

>> I know, exactly, exactly.

>> But thank you, yeah.

>> I want to start with you, Don, and give our viewers an overview of the partnership between Google Cloud and Informatica.

>> So I have a long history of Informatica. I actually left Informatica to go to Google Cloud about seven years ago, and as that partnership was forming, I was at Informatica building out the first touch points of Informatica in Google Cloud. So there's a good overlap for me to look back to Informatica and work with Rick and his team on both product integration, engaging with customers, getting things on the marketplace, making sure that Google Cloud's platforms for data and AI have a really strong integration and ease of use with Informatica, both moving legacy customers onto the cloud platform from Informatica, as well as new companies really just getting started that are cloud-native. We have a whole spectrum of joint customers, and it's a really mature and accelerating partnership to drive the value of data management for getting to the cloud. And it's always a pleasure working with Rik, he and I have known each other for a long time. When I was in Informatica, he was at another Informatica partner, so there's a lot of history there, too.

>> Yeah, no, I think to me, this is why it's been a lot of fun, is that you see how Informatica kind of brings a lot of these together. And in fact, all of us except for Rik was at NEXT, just back about a month ago, and when you start to look at it, you guys actually had some announcements Informatica did with Google at NEXT. Why don't we reiterate what those were?

>> Absolutely, and as Don mentioned, the partnership has been, I think about five years old now at this point, but a tremendous amount of acceleration, and really, a customer adoption. We've been doing a lot of global expansion, so we expanded into EMEA last year, we just announced that next expansion to Saudi Arabia, to putting a point of delivery there for IDMC. So that's been fantastic, right? And the product announcements, the innovation announcements, though, were focused around kind of two big use case areas. So one of the unique things about the Google partnership is, because of some of the properties they have in terms of Google Ads business and other business, they're uniquely positioned in some ways to be focused on customer data platform type use cases. And they have a solution they call the composable customer data platform, and we've been aligning around it for a while, but we actually launched what we call our extension for master data management for BigQuery. So it basically makes it really easy to just get your Customer 360 data into BigQuery to support those analytics use cases. But in the process, we also realized with gen-AI, Customer 360 data is really important for grounding a lot of gen-AI applications, as well. So that same solution became an accelerator for our blueprint for Google Cloud to deliver those gen-AI applications.

>> Don, I want to return to you, because the theme or the tagline of this conference is, everybody's ready for AI except your data. And that messaging really aligns nicely with Google's approach to The Data Foundation and making sure that data is trusted, secure, scalable, that you have the right foundation. Why don't you tell our viewers a little bit more about Google's approach to ...

>> Sure, so we have a set of services that are really helping organizations transform the way they bring data to the cloud, management as a common platform, no longer looking at it as silos, and putting the best practice across that much more easily and simply. And we view that as a foundation for our other set of services around AI from Vector and our generative AI models, and they're very tightly intertwined in the dependency for having that data foundation that Informatica is fuel for, is fueling, to develop new next-gen generative-AI applications. We had been working with Informatica on regular machine learning-based apps for a while, where you're ingesting a customer's data in a certain format to build a standalone model. But now, the trend is now to marry with these generative AI models, like Gemini and other open source brethren, with Informatica data sources like MDM, that may live in a Google Cloud database or storage, but you still have to have that trusted, reliable data to do a rag use case or tune a model for a particular outcome, driven by prompts that are developed by new types of developers. And so, there's a really good layering effect of platforms. And then, looking at the security and the performance and reliability of that is really enabling the rapid delivery of new types of solutions using generative-AI.

>> Yeah, and I think a lot of it is about the simplicity, and how, again, Informatica can help, to your point, break down some of the silos. Because you have Vertex, you have BigQuery, you have a number of different things that may be part of that AI architecture, including Gemini, and all the other kit that you have going on. But one of the things is looking at how you get started with it, and so, I have to imagine, Rick, from a perspective of getting started, one of the places that people are looking to is Google's marketplace.

>> Yeah, absolutely, the Google Marketplace, from a customer benefit perspective, it really allows them to think about their cloud strategy holistically. And it may come down to, it's about, how do they acquire technology, but when they look at what their strategy's going to be, being able to say, you know what? I'm going to invest in Google Cloud, and I'm going to get all the services I need, whether Google Services or their third-party service like Informatica, from one place, that one-stop shop, it's incredibly powerful for them. And we've seen a lot of really big customers who get IDMC through the marketplace, and it really does help them just kind of unify their strategy and use the best-of-breed tools as they need them.

>> Well, this show has done a great job of showcasing some customer stories. We had Takeda Pharmaceuticals on the main stage yesterday, Royal Caribbean Cruises. Do you have any customer use cases that you could share about how customers are really solving some of their problems?

>> Yeah, in fact, we have a whole section of the show over here that has round tables for customers wanting to know about particular topics. And I was just chatting with ... There's two pharmaceutical companies, two insurance companies, a very large auto manufacturer, that are using Google Cloud BigQuery or our platform for analytics, or one of them was actually using Spanner, our global relational database, for transactional workloads, and the integration with Informatica was helping them accelerate the delivery of their internal solutions to the business. And a couple of them had gone through that journey of moving from on-prem power center to an on-prem data warehouse, all the way to the full transformation of getting to IDMC, talking to BigQuery. And now, they're just starting to think about AI, so that's the next wave of introspection they're going to do. Each company was kind of on that same spot in the journey, but now they know that they have that data foundation in place, and they think it's going to be a lot easier to step into this new world and deliver more value to the business. So really rewarding just to meet logos that I knew from my early days in Informatica that have continued that journey, and now they're mutual customers that Rik and my teams will try to accelerate.

>> Yeah, I mean, I think, again, it's one of these things that ... The uniqueness of how the master data management and metadata, and how Informatica really brings it together. I mean, again, I go back over 10 years with Informatica, where I used to build cubes for doing analytics data and all of this stuff, so I mean, geek out later on about that. But when you start to look at how it has evolved in the cloud, and how bringing these pieces together, it has to be kind of a strategy when you're talking to customers and you're talking to customers. Because like you said, I happen to have been at an open source company, we plowed a lot of Customer 360 data into BigQuery. People then went and built their recommendations engines on top of that. But trying to get to that catalog and trying to understand how to bring it together and model the data was always one of the big challenges. Are you seeing, not just in retail, but across, that that's how people are looking to get to those, like you said, traditional AI, I guess we could say or call it?

>> Old-fashioned AI.

>> Old-fashioned AI was so last year, but beyond just the generative, which they want to, where they can actually interact with their data, it has to be a major component, like you were saying, with those other industries, like manufacturing insurance and so forth.

>> So if you think about where just the concept of machine learning has come, Informatica has machine learning as part of their platform, but early on, we recognized that if we could leverage an enterprise data to build a machine learning model, we could have a better call center experience. That's a big area that Google Cloud jumped into with machine learning, our CCAI platform. But it was using an enterprise's data to train, build, refresh those models, but the outcomes that we were driving to all was tied to the business, which is, how do I accelerate a next best offer, or how do I address a possible churn customer? So that whole machine learning journey now, I think we're at that other new inflection point of, it was hard in those days, because the experts were few, the data science organization could only handle so much projects. And I think with generative AI and having a data foundation, the concepts of AI can be adopted more rapidly. Prototyped and choosing the type of use cases to roll out will be a lot easier. And so, this whole adoption of AI has gone like this, I think we're going to see a new hockey stick, and it's all because of the foundations put in place. And then, I can't emphasize enough, the get your data to the cloud thing, because it has been a journey for a lot of industries. From a trust, reliability, sovereignty perspective, we've innovated a lot on delivering those to different geographies around the world, or different industry regulation, and I think we're at that tipping point where using the cloud for your data platform is no longer a question about, no, I don't trust it, it's when. And so, even the laggard industries are moving, and so, that foundation will just further accelerate AIs that's all brought together.

>> Yeah, and I would add to that, too, I think the nice thing about the Informatica journey over the last five or six years in particular is that we actually, because of the vision that had and leadership had to really aggressively move all of our capabilities to cloud-native versions, and we didn't just lift everything up, we actually reinvented things for the cloud, actually positioned us extremely well when gen-AI kind of exploded onto the scene. Because all the same challenges we deal with gen-AI existed for analytics, they existed for traditional AI, I guess, or legacy AI, maybe, at this point. But those same problem statements , data quality, data governance, data integration, all need to be there. The only big difference is, there are now new endpoints, there's new connections, new integrations that we have to build with Vertex AI and some of these other key services, and new opportunities to accelerate integration. So it does all come back to that foundation, and fortunately, a lot of customers here had that foundation, they're acquiring the foundation, and now they're ready for AI.

>> So we are at an inflection point when it comes to the technology, but we're also at a real inflection point when it comes to the future of work in general. And Don and Rik, you have a long history together. You were once an employee at Informatica. Can you just talk a little bit about how understanding the culture of Informatica helps you be a better partner to them, which in turn, then helps you to help customers solve the problems that they're facing?

>> Well, I think we have two very technology engineering-driven organizations. That's a very good match. But even on top of that is, we're so customer-driven on both sides. Part of Google's mantra is putting the customer first, has been Informatica's mantra. We take requirements, we look at what their journey is, we absolutely invite them in from a holistic approach into how we evolve our offerings. And we go together, that's the biggest part of the partnership. It's not only at the back where we're developing solutions together, but it's all the way out to how we're entering customers together, and making sure that running Informatica on and with Google Cloud, no matter the use case, is a good experience for them. And so, putting that customer first is a collective cultural bridge, and that's really a big part of our partnership.

>> Well, that's a great note to end on. Rik and Don, thank you both so much for returning to theCUBE and sharing your insights.

>> Thank you very much.

>> .

>> Thanks, Rik.

>> I'm Rebecca Knight for Rob , stay tuned for more of theCUBE's live coverage of Informatica world. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in enterprise tech news and analysis.

Don Tirsell | Google Cloud & Rik Tamm-Daniels | Informatica

search

>> Hello, everyone, and welcome back to theCUBE's live coverage of Informatica World here at the Mandalay Bay in Las Vegas, Nevada. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, sitting alongside my co-host and analyst, Rob . Rob, this is day three, we've been here the entire time. We've got some heavy hitters coming on today, we already had the CMO, we're having the CEO on, but we're also talking to Informatica's partners.

>> Yes. Yeah, I think, again, bringing it back to where you need Informatica, where you need data management, where you need to have that metadata, Informatica's there, and I think that's super important.

>> Exactly. Well, a great segue to introduce our next guest. We have Don Tirsell, the Global Head of Data and Analytics Partnerships at Google Cloud. Thanks so much for-

>> Thanks for having me....

>> coming back on theCUBE, Don. And Rik Tamm-Daniels, GVP of Technology Alliances at Informatica, thank you so much for returning to theCUBE.

>> Yeah, I'm happy to be here.

>> Long time, no see.

>> I'm basically a co-host at this point.

>> I know, exactly, exactly.

>> But thank you, yeah.

>> I want to start with you, Don, and give our viewers an overview of the partnership between Google Cloud and Informatica.

>> So I have a long history of Informatica. I actually left Informatica to go to Google Cloud about seven years ago, and as that partnership was forming, I was at Informatica building out the first touch points of Informatica in Google Cloud. So there's a good overlap for me to look back to Informatica and work with Rick and his team on both product integration, engaging with customers, getting things on the marketplace, making sure that Google Cloud's platforms for data and AI have a really strong integration and ease of use with Informatica, both moving legacy customers onto the cloud platform from Informatica, as well as new companies really just getting started that are cloud-native. We have a whole spectrum of joint customers, and it's a really mature and accelerating partnership to drive the value of data management for getting to the cloud. And it's always a pleasure working with Rik, he and I have known each other for a long time. When I was in Informatica, he was at another Informatica partner, so there's a lot of history there, too.

>> Yeah, no, I think to me, this is why it's been a lot of fun, is that you see how Informatica kind of brings a lot of these together. And in fact, all of us except for Rik was at NEXT, just back about a month ago, and when you start to look at it, you guys actually had some announcements Informatica did with Google at NEXT. Why don't we reiterate what those were?

>> Absolutely, and as Don mentioned, the partnership has been, I think about five years old now at this point, but a tremendous amount of acceleration, and really, a customer adoption. We've been doing a lot of global expansion, so we expanded into EMEA last year, we just announced that next expansion to Saudi Arabia, to putting a point of delivery there for IDMC. So that's been fantastic, right? And the product announcements, the innovation announcements, though, were focused around kind of two big use case areas. So one of the unique things about the Google partnership is, because of some of the properties they have in terms of Google Ads business and other business, they're uniquely positioned in some ways to be focused on customer data platform type use cases. And they have a solution they call the composable customer data platform, and we've been aligning around it for a while, but we actually launched what we call our extension for master data management for BigQuery. So it basically makes it really easy to just get your Customer 360 data into BigQuery to support those analytics use cases. But in the process, we also realized with gen-AI, Customer 360 data is really important for grounding a lot of gen-AI applications, as well. So that same solution became an accelerator for our blueprint for Google Cloud to deliver those gen-AI applications.

>> Don, I want to return to you, because the theme or the tagline of this conference is, everybody's ready for AI except your data. And that messaging really aligns nicely with Google's approach to The Data Foundation and making sure that data is trusted, secure, scalable, that you have the right foundation. Why don't you tell our viewers a little bit more about Google's approach to ...

>> Sure, so we have a set of services that are really helping organizations transform the way they bring data to the cloud, management as a common platform, no longer looking at it as silos, and putting the best practice across that much more easily and simply. And we view that as a foundation for our other set of services around AI from Vector and our generative AI models, and they're very tightly intertwined in the dependency for having that data foundation that Informatica is fuel for, is fueling, to develop new next-gen generative-AI applications. We had been working with Informatica on regular machine learning-based apps for a while, where you're ingesting a customer's data in a certain format to build a standalone model. But now, the trend is now to marry with these generative AI models, like Gemini and other open source brethren, with Informatica data sources like MDM, that may live in a Google Cloud database or storage, but you still have to have that trusted, reliable data to do a rag use case or tune a model for a particular outcome, driven by prompts that are developed by new types of developers. And so, there's a really good layering effect of platforms. And then, looking at the security and the performance and reliability of that is really enabling the rapid delivery of new types of solutions using generative-AI.

>> Yeah, and I think a lot of it is about the simplicity, and how, again, Informatica can help, to your point, break down some of the silos. Because you have Vertex, you have BigQuery, you have a number of different things that may be part of that AI architecture, including Gemini, and all the other kit that you have going on. But one of the things is looking at how you get started with it, and so, I have to imagine, Rick, from a perspective of getting started, one of the places that people are looking to is Google's marketplace.

>> Yeah, absolutely, the Google Marketplace, from a customer benefit perspective, it really allows them to think about their cloud strategy holistically. And it may come down to, it's about, how do they acquire technology, but when they look at what their strategy's going to be, being able to say, you know what? I'm going to invest in Google Cloud, and I'm going to get all the services I need, whether Google Services or their third-party service like Informatica, from one place, that one-stop shop, it's incredibly powerful for them. And we've seen a lot of really big customers who get IDMC through the marketplace, and it really does help them just kind of unify their strategy and use the best-of-breed tools as they need them.

>> Well, this show has done a great job of showcasing some customer stories. We had Takeda Pharmaceuticals on the main stage yesterday, Royal Caribbean Cruises. Do you have any customer use cases that you could share about how customers are really solving some of their problems?

>> Yeah, in fact, we have a whole section of the show over here that has round tables for customers wanting to know about particular topics. And I was just chatting with ... There's two pharmaceutical companies, two insurance companies, a very large auto manufacturer, that are using Google Cloud BigQuery or our platform for analytics, or one of them was actually using Spanner, our global relational database, for transactional workloads, and the integration with Informatica was helping them accelerate the delivery of their internal solutions to the business. And a couple of them had gone through that journey of moving from on-prem power center to an on-prem data warehouse, all the way to the full transformation of getting to IDMC, talking to BigQuery. And now, they're just starting to think about AI, so that's the next wave of introspection they're going to do. Each company was kind of on that same spot in the journey, but now they know that they have that data foundation in place, and they think it's going to be a lot easier to step into this new world and deliver more value to the business. So really rewarding just to meet logos that I knew from my early days in Informatica that have continued that journey, and now they're mutual customers that Rik and my teams will try to accelerate.

>> Yeah, I mean, I think, again, it's one of these things that ... The uniqueness of how the master data management and metadata, and how Informatica really brings it together. I mean, again, I go back over 10 years with Informatica, where I used to build cubes for doing analytics data and all of this stuff, so I mean, geek out later on about that. But when you start to look at how it has evolved in the cloud, and how bringing these pieces together, it has to be kind of a strategy when you're talking to customers and you're talking to customers. Because like you said, I happen to have been at an open source company, we plowed a lot of Customer 360 data into BigQuery. People then went and built their recommendations engines on top of that. But trying to get to that catalog and trying to understand how to bring it together and model the data was always one of the big challenges. Are you seeing, not just in retail, but across, that that's how people are looking to get to those, like you said, traditional AI, I guess we could say or call it?

>> Old-fashioned AI.

>> Old-fashioned AI was so last year, but beyond just the generative, which they want to, where they can actually interact with their data, it has to be a major component, like you were saying, with those other industries, like manufacturing insurance and so forth.

>> So if you think about where just the concept of machine learning has come, Informatica has machine learning as part of their platform, but early on, we recognized that if we could leverage an enterprise data to build a machine learning model, we could have a better call center experience. That's a big area that Google Cloud jumped into with machine learning, our CCAI platform. But it was using an enterprise's data to train, build, refresh those models, but the outcomes that we were driving to all was tied to the business, which is, how do I accelerate a next best offer, or how do I address a possible churn customer? So that whole machine learning journey now, I think we're at that other new inflection point of, it was hard in those days, because the experts were few, the data science organization could only handle so much projects. And I think with generative AI and having a data foundation, the concepts of AI can be adopted more rapidly. Prototyped and choosing the type of use cases to roll out will be a lot easier. And so, this whole adoption of AI has gone like this, I think we're going to see a new hockey stick, and it's all because of the foundations put in place. And then, I can't emphasize enough, the get your data to the cloud thing, because it has been a journey for a lot of industries. From a trust, reliability, sovereignty perspective, we've innovated a lot on delivering those to different geographies around the world, or different industry regulation, and I think we're at that tipping point where using the cloud for your data platform is no longer a question about, no, I don't trust it, it's when. And so, even the laggard industries are moving, and so, that foundation will just further accelerate AIs that's all brought together.

>> Yeah, and I would add to that, too, I think the nice thing about the Informatica journey over the last five or six years in particular is that we actually, because of the vision that had and leadership had to really aggressively move all of our capabilities to cloud-native versions, and we didn't just lift everything up, we actually reinvented things for the cloud, actually positioned us extremely well when gen-AI kind of exploded onto the scene. Because all the same challenges we deal with gen-AI existed for analytics, they existed for traditional AI, I guess, or legacy AI, maybe, at this point. But those same problem statements , data quality, data governance, data integration, all need to be there. The only big difference is, there are now new endpoints, there's new connections, new integrations that we have to build with Vertex AI and some of these other key services, and new opportunities to accelerate integration. So it does all come back to that foundation, and fortunately, a lot of customers here had that foundation, they're acquiring the foundation, and now they're ready for AI.

>> So we are at an inflection point when it comes to the technology, but we're also at a real inflection point when it comes to the future of work in general. And Don and Rik, you have a long history together. You were once an employee at Informatica. Can you just talk a little bit about how understanding the culture of Informatica helps you be a better partner to them, which in turn, then helps you to help customers solve the problems that they're facing?

>> Well, I think we have two very technology engineering-driven organizations. That's a very good match. But even on top of that is, we're so customer-driven on both sides. Part of Google's mantra is putting the customer first, has been Informatica's mantra. We take requirements, we look at what their journey is, we absolutely invite them in from a holistic approach into how we evolve our offerings. And we go together, that's the biggest part of the partnership. It's not only at the back where we're developing solutions together, but it's all the way out to how we're entering customers together, and making sure that running Informatica on and with Google Cloud, no matter the use case, is a good experience for them. And so, putting that customer first is a collective cultural bridge, and that's really a big part of our partnership.

>> Well, that's a great note to end on. Rik and Don, thank you both so much for returning to theCUBE and sharing your insights.

>> Thank you very much.

>> .

>> Thanks, Rik.

>> I'm Rebecca Knight for Rob , stay tuned for more of theCUBE's live coverage of Informatica world. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in enterprise tech news and analysis.