Informatica World 2024 | Jim Kruger | Informatica

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Jim Kruger

CMO

Informatica

Data management for AI readiness amid Informatica’s differentiation strategy

Data management is hot again. Propelled by the artificial intelligence infusion, the new era promises productivity gains and enhanced organizational decision-making. But there’ll be growing pains, one of which is data readiness.Discussing AI-infused data management with Informatica’s Jim Kruger.“Within Informatica, we’re using AI across all of our different functions, and we are starting to get our feet planted and understand how to make it work,” said Jim Kruger (pictured), chief marketing officer of Informatica Inc. “But it’s early days and again, people are still learning. One of the things that Informatica does is help companies to get ready for AI

play_circle_outline The Transformation of Informatica: AI's Role in Improving Data Management, Decision-Making, and Company Performance

play_circle_outline Unlocking the Power of Data Management: Informatica’s Holistic Approach and Impact on Shifting CDO Mindsets

play_circle_outline Informatica's collaboration with various companies and its role as the "Switzerland of data"

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Jim Kruger | Informatica

Jim Kruger

CMO Informatica

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Rebecca Knight

>> Hello 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, alongside my co-host and analyst, Rob Strache. Rob, we're just starting off day three, three days wall-to-wall coverage. What's really clear at this show is how GenAI is really taking Informatica as a company and as a brand to new places.

>> Yeah. And I think, again, it's one of these things that all of a sudden data management has become hot again and it's gone through these cycles. And I guess no better person to actually dig into than who we have as our next guest.

Rebecca Knight

>> Than our next guest. Exactly. Well, a great segue to introduce Jim Krueger. He is the Chief Marketing Officer at Informatica. Welcome back to theCube, Jim, because I know you've been on before.

>> Thank you. Great to be on. Yeah, appreciate it.

Rebecca Knight

>> Excellent. Well, I mean, really the theme of this conference is everybody's excited or everybody's ready for AI, except your data. And I'd love you to start from really the market perspective, because I think companies are pretty confused about this. There's so many vendors and companies don't quite know where to go and what to do. Can you talk a little bit about what you're seeing out there?

>> Yeah, yeah. The data management space is definitely complex from that perspective. I think there's over 800 vendors in the space, and vendors are making all different types of claims in terms of what they can and can't do. And of course, when AI became popular, everybody jumped on that bandwagon. The unique thing about Informatica, I think, is that we started working on AI in our platform back in 2017. In fact, last year, Amit showed a clip of himself. He looked a little bit different, but back in 2017, but a clip of himself announcing Clare, which is the engine within our platform around AI. So yeah, every CEO, every board is very interested because there is tremendous opportunity relative to productivity gains, making teams smarter, leveraging AI to do a lot of the grunt work. And even within Informatica, we're using AI across all of our different functions, and we are starting to get our feet planted and understand how to make it work. But it's early days. And again, people are still learning. But one of the things that Informatica does is we help companies to get ready for AI. Research shows that a lot of companies that go down the path of starting with AI, they run into some roadblocks. And those roadblocks are they're missing the data quality, the governance, the privacy, all of those things. I think they might think they have it in place, but when they embark upon it, we did some research with 600 CDOs and 93% of the CDOs indicated that they understand that data is really important, but only 57% of them had made any changes to their data. And so when they run into roadblocks, it's kind of a start-stop. So we highly encourage our customers to make sure your data's ready, it's high quality, and then your AI implementation is going to be much smoother. For sure.

>> Yeah. I mean, we're even seeing that in the data that we have. It shows that out of the Fortune-100, that we had a survey and 41 of them, the organizations responded. And when you looked at it, half of those organizations were still trying to figure out what use case they were going to take to production. And I think it becomes one of those things that you don't know what you don't know until you start to get in and start to prototype it. I think one of the key themes that I've been seeing throughout this week has really been to what you were just talking about, data management and data preparation, how you get that and then govern that so that the right data gets to the right place at the right time. Are you seeing that as I mean... Informatica, I mean, I go back where I was a geek and using Informatica to build cubes and stuff like that some 10 years ago, actually over 10 years ago now. And when you start to look at where Informatica has come from to where it's going, kind of help us understand the brand of evolution of Informatica.

>> Yeah, the company has gone through a tremendous transformation, a transformation that many companies don't make their way through. So it's been exciting to be a part of that over the past couple of years and just see the changes that have happened and shifting our focus from being on-prem to moving into a subscription model and now moving into a pure cloud and consumption model. And just a tremendous opportunity because I think most of the players within the data management field are really focused on one specific category or specific use case. And Informatica is unique from that perspective because we take a holistic view of data management and all the key capabilities. And there's some key advantages to that, because again, our research shows that I think 58% of the CDOs felt that they needed five or more vendors in order to execute on their data management strategy. But once you go down that path, it becomes a slippery slope because then you have to do vendor assessments, you have different pricing models, the integration isn't there. And so if you want to be in the business of integration, which most companies don't, the more vendors you add, the more complexity it's going to add. And in fact, one of our customers, Takeda, who won the Innovator of the Year awards this year at Informatica World, a big congratulations to that team, amazing story because they were using eight vendors, and they embarked upon our journey with Informatica and went from eight down to two. And the amount of ROI and savings that they're seeing is incredible, and that's one of the reasons why they won the award. So most companies are thinking about the use case of today and how do I solve that today? And so we're trying to work closely with the CDOs and help them to see the future and look out 2, 3, 4 years down the line in terms of, okay, what is your data management practice going to look like? And we have best of breed products across every category and all the integration work is done. We have integration work into 50,000 plus connectors with all the hyperscalers and are investing in a tremendous amount of R&D to make sure that we're anticipating customer's needs as we go forward.

Rebecca Knight

>> Well, it does sound as though that's what's really required is working so closely with these CDOs to make them shift their mindset from using this, oh, here's one use case that I can consider focusing from just not the here and now, but for the future in such a crowded space. As you said, there are 800 vendors, it's crowded, it's competitive. How do you approach differentiating yourself in your go-to-market strategy? What's your approach there?

>> Yeah, yeah. So go to go-to-market strategy is we have set up sort of a specific vertical group. So we go to market specific to verticals, but really hone in on the key personas. And we try to hit organizations at different levels. So the CDO, CIO level is critically important for the more strategic view. But then we also have to build community and work closely with the data engineers and the practitioners who have to use the technology on a daily basis and make sure that it's going to fulfill their needs. And so having that sort of two-pronged approach at the high level and at the lower level and make sure that we're satisfying the needs of both of them. And I think one of the things that Informatica does extremely well is we get a lot of input from our customers and we cycle that back in. So one of our core values is customer centricity. And I think it shows because when you look at all of the Gardner Magic Quadrants, Forrester Waves, and every category that we compete in, we are in the top echelon number one in each of those categories. And so when you go with our platform and all the integration work that we do and the AI that we have embedded in that platform that's been there for seven years, it helps companies do their classification of data in 50% less time. And we hear stories from our customers that with the automation of our AI, they're able to do things that would've taken a couple of months and a team of people. Now with AI, they can do it in a matter of minutes or hours with one person, and then they free up their team to be more strategic and focus on how do we move the business forward versus the mundane tasks of some of the things that they had to do previously. So it's really I think helping them to free up the time, and like I said, move their data practice forward.

>> Yeah, I think that to me, and the Takeda example was great yesterday when they were on the main stage as well, talking through that. I think what we see in the organizations, we've kind of been doing research in what we call the six data platform or Next Intelligent Data platform. What we found is very similar to what you're talking about is there's 800 plus companies that say they do data management, but if you look at maybe they do it in the backup and recovery space, maybe they do it in just inside the storage itself for ransomware detection at disk level, everybody's a data platform now and everybody is doing data management. I think what we found was that it's bringing different pieces together and getting rid of silos. Because there's far too many silos. And we've had some of your great partners on from AWS, Microsoft with Snowflake, we have Google on today. All of these people who have solutions that are co-op petition to this. And I think what we found is really interesting is that to your point, Informatica goes across those silos because the cognitive load of data engineers to try to... I'm going to use the Google solution and Google with BigQuery, and I'm going to go over here and use this with Redshift in AWS, and you know I'm going to use this with Fabric and Microsoft. That has to be one of the things that people like Takeda and others are realizing. It's great that... I mean, trust me, I know how much hard work from an engineering perspective goes into getting in those magic quadrants in the top right corner and stuff like that. But it also has to be satisfying that the customers are coming back to you and saying, "Hey, here's the results that we're getting."

>> Yeah, absolutely. I think that's one of our key advantages and one of our key differentiators is that we are the Switzerland of data and data management. And so we work with everybody. And so customers that have whatever type of environment they have, we basically just snap in into that. And it interoperates across all of the key elements. And like I said, all the different data connectors. And then with our new announcement and general availability of ChatGPT, that's going to really turn I think the way you access data and interact with data on its head. Because typically the scenario is somebody wants to answer a question, they need data to do it, they go to IT, they ask for a report. It takes two to three weeks to get that report back and time goes by. And so with Clare GPT, having that on top of your high quality, governed, holistic data, you're able to get instantaneous answers to the majority of the questions that you're going to want to ask and to move your business forward. So how many are we selling in this geo to this class of customer, this segment, and questions like that, that you just don't have at your fingertips? You will going forward with that. And then the other key differentiator from that perspective is, again, unique to Informatica, is that we have a single metadata system of record. And so you have all these different sources of data, and if you go down the path of these siloed approaches with different vendors, you're not going to have this one metadata system of record. With Informatica, we pull all of that together and make the whole engine more intelligent so that the automation that you do and the decisions that you make are holistic across your entire enterprise versus this fragmented approach. So that's huge.

Rebecca Knight

>> Finally, I'd love to have you reflect a little bit on your career. You've been in this industry a long time, and now we're at this real cliff where generative AI could really be this enormous transformation in our lives and how we work. On the one hand we have people like Warren Buffett saying it scares the hell out of them. And then on the other hand, we come to conferences like these where there's so much excitement. Your mandate as the CMO of Informatica is to make sure that the data is sound and reliable and trustworthy. That's a big deal.

>> It is. It is.

Rebecca Knight

>> That's an important part of making AI real.

>> Yeah.

Rebecca Knight

>> Can you just reflect a little bit on that and what it means to you in your career to make sure that this happens?

>> Yeah. It is definitely a interesting time, a key inflection point, an exciting time. I think there's some people that get a little scared by it, but in fact, we had Levar Burton as one of our keynote speakers here this morning, and he talked about how excited he is relative to AI and education as just one use case and application. But his point was that he has trust in human beings and AI is going to be the servant to human beings, not the other way around. And so he's very optimistic and believes that it's going to do a tremendous amount of good, and that humans are going to point it in the right direction. So I think it is going to transform the way we work. I believe it's going to make all of us better in terms of how we approach things. I think there's going to be some level of, I would say, sort of copycat or generic following of AI because if you ask certain questions, you're going to get similar things that come back, and some companies are going to use that verbatim, but you need the human elements. No question about it. And I'm super excited. We did demos on stage yesterday with our own technology, and we're going to be putting that into production shortly for our own teams. And I know my marketing team is really excited to start using some of that because it's going to make us smarter, it's going to make us better, it's going to help us to target better and message better and all of those things. So I think it's just a really exciting time, but you have to roll with the change. You have to be willing to experiment. You have to be willing to fail because it's not always going to be perfect, but I think it's going to be truly amazing.

Rebecca Knight

>> Great insights, great advice. Jim Krueger, thank you so much for joining us on theCube.

>> You're welcome. Thank you for having me.

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 tech news and analysis.

Jim Kruger | Informatica

search

Rebecca Knight

>> Hello 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, alongside my co-host and analyst, Rob Strache. Rob, we're just starting off day three, three days wall-to-wall coverage. What's really clear at this show is how GenAI is really taking Informatica as a company and as a brand to new places.

>> Yeah. And I think, again, it's one of these things that all of a sudden data management has become hot again and it's gone through these cycles. And I guess no better person to actually dig into than who we have as our next guest.

Rebecca Knight

>> Than our next guest. Exactly. Well, a great segue to introduce Jim Krueger. He is the Chief Marketing Officer at Informatica. Welcome back to theCube, Jim, because I know you've been on before.

>> Thank you. Great to be on. Yeah, appreciate it.

Rebecca Knight

>> Excellent. Well, I mean, really the theme of this conference is everybody's excited or everybody's ready for AI, except your data. And I'd love you to start from really the market perspective, because I think companies are pretty confused about this. There's so many vendors and companies don't quite know where to go and what to do. Can you talk a little bit about what you're seeing out there?

>> Yeah, yeah. The data management space is definitely complex from that perspective. I think there's over 800 vendors in the space, and vendors are making all different types of claims in terms of what they can and can't do. And of course, when AI became popular, everybody jumped on that bandwagon. The unique thing about Informatica, I think, is that we started working on AI in our platform back in 2017. In fact, last year, Amit showed a clip of himself. He looked a little bit different, but back in 2017, but a clip of himself announcing Clare, which is the engine within our platform around AI. So yeah, every CEO, every board is very interested because there is tremendous opportunity relative to productivity gains, making teams smarter, leveraging AI to do a lot of the grunt work. And even within Informatica, we're using AI across all of our different functions, and we are starting to get our feet planted and understand how to make it work. But it's early days. And again, people are still learning. But one of the things that Informatica does is we help companies to get ready for AI. Research shows that a lot of companies that go down the path of starting with AI, they run into some roadblocks. And those roadblocks are they're missing the data quality, the governance, the privacy, all of those things. I think they might think they have it in place, but when they embark upon it, we did some research with 600 CDOs and 93% of the CDOs indicated that they understand that data is really important, but only 57% of them had made any changes to their data. And so when they run into roadblocks, it's kind of a start-stop. So we highly encourage our customers to make sure your data's ready, it's high quality, and then your AI implementation is going to be much smoother. For sure.

>> Yeah. I mean, we're even seeing that in the data that we have. It shows that out of the Fortune-100, that we had a survey and 41 of them, the organizations responded. And when you looked at it, half of those organizations were still trying to figure out what use case they were going to take to production. And I think it becomes one of those things that you don't know what you don't know until you start to get in and start to prototype it. I think one of the key themes that I've been seeing throughout this week has really been to what you were just talking about, data management and data preparation, how you get that and then govern that so that the right data gets to the right place at the right time. Are you seeing that as I mean... Informatica, I mean, I go back where I was a geek and using Informatica to build cubes and stuff like that some 10 years ago, actually over 10 years ago now. And when you start to look at where Informatica has come from to where it's going, kind of help us understand the brand of evolution of Informatica.

>> Yeah, the company has gone through a tremendous transformation, a transformation that many companies don't make their way through. So it's been exciting to be a part of that over the past couple of years and just see the changes that have happened and shifting our focus from being on-prem to moving into a subscription model and now moving into a pure cloud and consumption model. And just a tremendous opportunity because I think most of the players within the data management field are really focused on one specific category or specific use case. And Informatica is unique from that perspective because we take a holistic view of data management and all the key capabilities. And there's some key advantages to that, because again, our research shows that I think 58% of the CDOs felt that they needed five or more vendors in order to execute on their data management strategy. But once you go down that path, it becomes a slippery slope because then you have to do vendor assessments, you have different pricing models, the integration isn't there. And so if you want to be in the business of integration, which most companies don't, the more vendors you add, the more complexity it's going to add. And in fact, one of our customers, Takeda, who won the Innovator of the Year awards this year at Informatica World, a big congratulations to that team, amazing story because they were using eight vendors, and they embarked upon our journey with Informatica and went from eight down to two. And the amount of ROI and savings that they're seeing is incredible, and that's one of the reasons why they won the award. So most companies are thinking about the use case of today and how do I solve that today? And so we're trying to work closely with the CDOs and help them to see the future and look out 2, 3, 4 years down the line in terms of, okay, what is your data management practice going to look like? And we have best of breed products across every category and all the integration work is done. We have integration work into 50,000 plus connectors with all the hyperscalers and are investing in a tremendous amount of R&D to make sure that we're anticipating customer's needs as we go forward.

Rebecca Knight

>> Well, it does sound as though that's what's really required is working so closely with these CDOs to make them shift their mindset from using this, oh, here's one use case that I can consider focusing from just not the here and now, but for the future in such a crowded space. As you said, there are 800 vendors, it's crowded, it's competitive. How do you approach differentiating yourself in your go-to-market strategy? What's your approach there?

>> Yeah, yeah. So go to go-to-market strategy is we have set up sort of a specific vertical group. So we go to market specific to verticals, but really hone in on the key personas. And we try to hit organizations at different levels. So the CDO, CIO level is critically important for the more strategic view. But then we also have to build community and work closely with the data engineers and the practitioners who have to use the technology on a daily basis and make sure that it's going to fulfill their needs. And so having that sort of two-pronged approach at the high level and at the lower level and make sure that we're satisfying the needs of both of them. And I think one of the things that Informatica does extremely well is we get a lot of input from our customers and we cycle that back in. So one of our core values is customer centricity. And I think it shows because when you look at all of the Gardner Magic Quadrants, Forrester Waves, and every category that we compete in, we are in the top echelon number one in each of those categories. And so when you go with our platform and all the integration work that we do and the AI that we have embedded in that platform that's been there for seven years, it helps companies do their classification of data in 50% less time. And we hear stories from our customers that with the automation of our AI, they're able to do things that would've taken a couple of months and a team of people. Now with AI, they can do it in a matter of minutes or hours with one person, and then they free up their team to be more strategic and focus on how do we move the business forward versus the mundane tasks of some of the things that they had to do previously. So it's really I think helping them to free up the time, and like I said, move their data practice forward.

>> Yeah, I think that to me, and the Takeda example was great yesterday when they were on the main stage as well, talking through that. I think what we see in the organizations, we've kind of been doing research in what we call the six data platform or Next Intelligent Data platform. What we found is very similar to what you're talking about is there's 800 plus companies that say they do data management, but if you look at maybe they do it in the backup and recovery space, maybe they do it in just inside the storage itself for ransomware detection at disk level, everybody's a data platform now and everybody is doing data management. I think what we found was that it's bringing different pieces together and getting rid of silos. Because there's far too many silos. And we've had some of your great partners on from AWS, Microsoft with Snowflake, we have Google on today. All of these people who have solutions that are co-op petition to this. And I think what we found is really interesting is that to your point, Informatica goes across those silos because the cognitive load of data engineers to try to... I'm going to use the Google solution and Google with BigQuery, and I'm going to go over here and use this with Redshift in AWS, and you know I'm going to use this with Fabric and Microsoft. That has to be one of the things that people like Takeda and others are realizing. It's great that... I mean, trust me, I know how much hard work from an engineering perspective goes into getting in those magic quadrants in the top right corner and stuff like that. But it also has to be satisfying that the customers are coming back to you and saying, "Hey, here's the results that we're getting."

>> Yeah, absolutely. I think that's one of our key advantages and one of our key differentiators is that we are the Switzerland of data and data management. And so we work with everybody. And so customers that have whatever type of environment they have, we basically just snap in into that. And it interoperates across all of the key elements. And like I said, all the different data connectors. And then with our new announcement and general availability of ChatGPT, that's going to really turn I think the way you access data and interact with data on its head. Because typically the scenario is somebody wants to answer a question, they need data to do it, they go to IT, they ask for a report. It takes two to three weeks to get that report back and time goes by. And so with Clare GPT, having that on top of your high quality, governed, holistic data, you're able to get instantaneous answers to the majority of the questions that you're going to want to ask and to move your business forward. So how many are we selling in this geo to this class of customer, this segment, and questions like that, that you just don't have at your fingertips? You will going forward with that. And then the other key differentiator from that perspective is, again, unique to Informatica, is that we have a single metadata system of record. And so you have all these different sources of data, and if you go down the path of these siloed approaches with different vendors, you're not going to have this one metadata system of record. With Informatica, we pull all of that together and make the whole engine more intelligent so that the automation that you do and the decisions that you make are holistic across your entire enterprise versus this fragmented approach. So that's huge.

Rebecca Knight

>> Finally, I'd love to have you reflect a little bit on your career. You've been in this industry a long time, and now we're at this real cliff where generative AI could really be this enormous transformation in our lives and how we work. On the one hand we have people like Warren Buffett saying it scares the hell out of them. And then on the other hand, we come to conferences like these where there's so much excitement. Your mandate as the CMO of Informatica is to make sure that the data is sound and reliable and trustworthy. That's a big deal.

>> It is. It is.

Rebecca Knight

>> That's an important part of making AI real.

>> Yeah.

Rebecca Knight

>> Can you just reflect a little bit on that and what it means to you in your career to make sure that this happens?

>> Yeah. It is definitely a interesting time, a key inflection point, an exciting time. I think there's some people that get a little scared by it, but in fact, we had Levar Burton as one of our keynote speakers here this morning, and he talked about how excited he is relative to AI and education as just one use case and application. But his point was that he has trust in human beings and AI is going to be the servant to human beings, not the other way around. And so he's very optimistic and believes that it's going to do a tremendous amount of good, and that humans are going to point it in the right direction. So I think it is going to transform the way we work. I believe it's going to make all of us better in terms of how we approach things. I think there's going to be some level of, I would say, sort of copycat or generic following of AI because if you ask certain questions, you're going to get similar things that come back, and some companies are going to use that verbatim, but you need the human elements. No question about it. And I'm super excited. We did demos on stage yesterday with our own technology, and we're going to be putting that into production shortly for our own teams. And I know my marketing team is really excited to start using some of that because it's going to make us smarter, it's going to make us better, it's going to help us to target better and message better and all of those things. So I think it's just a really exciting time, but you have to roll with the change. You have to be willing to experiment. You have to be willing to fail because it's not always going to be perfect, but I think it's going to be truly amazing.

Rebecca Knight

>> Great insights, great advice. Jim Krueger, thank you so much for joining us on theCube.

>> You're welcome. Thank you for having me.

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 tech news and analysis.