Informatica World 2024 | Sri Raghavan | AWS & Gopi Sankaran | Informatica

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Sri Raghavan

AI, Data & Analytics Partners in AWS Center of Excellence

AWS

Gopinath Sankaran

Vice President, Strategic Cloud Ecosystems

Informatica

Data management and AI integration: The new era of strategic tech partnerships

The integration of data management and artificial intelligence is critical for driving innovations and efficiency across industries.Companies are increasingly focusing on how to effectively manage and utilize data, both on-premise and in the cloud, to enhance AI capabilities. Strategic partnerships between tech giants, such as Informatica Inc. and Amazon Web Services Inc., are central to achieving these goals, as companies bring together complementary strengths and foster collaborative innovation. This synergy is essential for developing durable data frameworks and advancing AI-driven solutions that meet the complex needs of modern enterprises

play_circle_outline The Power of Partnership: Informatica and AWS Driving Innovation through Collaborative Synergy

play_circle_outline Unlocking the Power of Generative AI: Ensuring Trusted Data Governance for Optimal Results

play_circle_outline Customer feedback and driving product improvements

play_circle_outline Use cases with joint customers such as Gilead in pharmaceutical industry

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Sri Raghavan | AWS & Gopi Sankaran | Informatica

Sri Raghavan

AI, Data & Analytics Partners in AWS Center of Excellence AWS

Gopinath Sankaran

Vice President, Strategic Cloud Ecosystems Informatica

search

Rebecca Knight

>> Hello everyone, and welcome back to theCube's live coverage of Informatica World here in Las Vegas. We have three days of wall-to-wall coverage. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, sitting alongside my co-host and analyst, Rob Strachay. Rob, we're having a lot of great conversations here on theCube, per usual, but really talking today about partnerships.

>> Yeah. I think, again, it's a lot about how you really bring up all this data and the management of it and how you go and you're going to bring data to AI and AI to the data and how that happens, not only on-premise but in the cloud in particular, and again, how Informatica is really bringing a layer above that and partnering for the pieces underneath.

Rebecca Knight

>> Well, with that, I would like to introduce our next guest. They're both CUBE alum. We have Sri Raghavan, manager of AI data and analytics partners in AWS Center of Excellence. Welcome back, Sri.

Sri Raghavan

>> Thank you.

Rebecca Knight

>> And Gopi Sankaran, he's the Vice President, Strategic Cloud Ecosystems at Informatica. Thank you both so much for coming on.

Sri Raghavan

>> Hey, thank you. Appreciate it.

Rebecca Knight

>> So I'll start with you, Sri. Why don't you tell our viewers a little bit about this partnership and then the joint innovation that's going on?

Sri Raghavan

>> Yeah, this is one of the longest relationships that we've had between the two companies. In fact, I think Informatica has been a partner of AWS for the past 13 years. And if you looked at the trajectory, it's been fantastic. I take it as a personal point of pride for two reasons. Number one is Informatica has, with AWS, a strong trajectory of innovation with different kinds of products. In fact, you folks were-

>> The launch partner of Redshift....

Sri Raghavan

>> the launch partner for S3, for Redshift, for Lake Formation, if I remember right.

>> Yeah.

Sri Raghavan

>> I take it personally for Redshift because I was involved in many of the integration discussions. So it's fantastic. The other thing I want to make sure I point out is these folks were some of the first to be leaned in heavily into the AWS Marketplace. Now, as you know with the AWS Marketplace, it is a platform which makes it very easy for our customers to easily procure solutions. So you don't have to worry about looking at your consumption, because all the reports and the consumption are provided to you. You pay only for what you use. It's very intuitive for you to be able to use the different kinds of products, and as you know, Informatica has got a number of products. The IDMC is a central part of the marketplace. So our joint customers are thrilled that they're able to adopt and adapt to Informatica on the cloud Marketplace with AWS. It's a fantastic partnership, years in the making. The momentum has increased significantly and we're thrilled with this relationship.

Rebecca Knight

>> Yeah, absolutely. To add to it, you have heard many people talk about, "Hey, this is a strategic partnership, it's a strategic relationship." This partnership is a definition of what that word strategic means. Because when you think about when you're a launch partner of Amazon Redshift, Amazon Redshift was launched, what, 2011, 2012 timeframe. From that timeframe, we have been working all across from deep integration with the engineering team, go-to-market efforts. With respect to the marketplaces, how do we actually go talk to our joint customers so that we have the customer-focused innovation, customer-centricity as Amit was saying this morning. And that is actually the foundation also for this partnership. And it has been going great. I'm glad to also be in the position to manage the partnership also, and there is lots more to do in this and we are thrilled for that.

Sri Raghavan

>> And the advantage to this thing is we've just begun. Hard as it seems to believe that we've been in this 13 years, but there's a lot more that we're going to be able to do with this relationship. It's great.

>> Yeah, no, I think what's been really interesting is that, like you were talking about with Marketplace and being able to use customer's EDPs so that they can actually burn down credits within their agreements with AWS utilizing the Informatica product set. I think one of the things has always been ... okay, there are not just Redshift, there's a number of other places that integration can happen in product, I guess you could say involvement. Especially when you're talking about data and being able to go and master data management and understanding metadata and how that goes across silos. What other innovation and what connections do you see from an Informatica perspective and from an AWS perspective?

Sri Raghavan

>> Yeah, maybe I'll take the question first and then Sri can chime in. So when I say it's innovation, some of the major innovations we announced, the latest ones with AWS was at re:Invent. One thing I would like to also mention here is you heard about cloud data access management, which is part of our original acquisition which we had. But when we brought cloud data access management, it was actually co-developed along with S3 access grants, which was one of the new launch solutions from the S3 universe. But the purpose of all this stuff is to have that trusted data framework for the customers in the cloud. And the reason why I'm saying that is all that has become the foundation for what we are working on now, which is around generative AI. So when it comes to, as you were saying, trusted data, how do we bring the trusted framework? How do we get the right preparation for the data sources? How do we interact with the model as a service through Bedrock or how do we work with Q, all that stuff? So today the innovations, the current work is in analytics, it is in data, and it has now gone beyond that into generative AI space. And AWS has been doing a great job on that. And again, without data foundation, there is no AI. This partnership is built and it is in the right position, right space now for us to work with them. You always talk about Bedrock and-

Sri Raghavan

>> I do.

>> Go ahead.

Sri Raghavan

>> Gopi, I do. Now I'd like to answer this question in terms of four areas of joint work that we've done. Number one, we've done a lot of enablement activities with customers. Now, keep in mind, for a lot of customers, they understand the importance of data, but until they actually physically see these things in action, it's never easy to understand how governance is very important, how having the right data assets are important and all that. It's very easy to talk about these things, but they have to see it. So Informatica and AWS do a lot of things like innovation days, immersion days where they provide access to the infrastructure on the AWS cloud with Informatica solutions for hands-on activities, number one, which allows them to be able to do these things in real-time. So we've done a lot of investments in that. Number two, no surprise here, we are a cloud service provider, and for us, it's important for modernization to happen. A lot of Informatica customers are interested in taking advantage of cloud-native services. So which means what? We provide a lot of workload migration programs and other kinds of funding vehicles for our joint customers to move to the cloud. And here's where Informatica has done some phenomenal work. They've provided self-service capabilities for migration, which is really important. Now they can do these migrations by themselves. It's automated. It's a trusted platform by which , these things have happened as well. The third area is that we've done a lot of verticalization of solutions. Our customers, as you can imagine, they're across all the different verticals. So we provided verticalized solutions for us to specifically address use cases like patient healthcare outcomes, or customer 360, or fraud detection and so on. Again, guess what? Informatica and AWS have come together to be able to address these kinds of use cases. Number four, generative AI. There are three important components within generative AI: you need to have holistic data, you need to have data that's trusted and you need to have good data governance. How do you ensure the right kinds of people get the right kinds of data over time? So with generative AI, and as Gopi mentioned, we have Amazon Bedrock. Now, Informatica does all of the security and the governance. The data is then fed into the RAG architecture, and then our native LLMs like Titan, Claude and other LLMs pick up all that information, enhance the models, provide enriched insights to the customers. So it's a very seamless workflow from the standpoint of being able to get the right holistic data, govern it, provide the right kinds of security to it, cleanse it, feed it into the other one, address these various use cases. Now you tell me, is that cool or what?

Rebecca Knight

>> It's cool. It's cool. I'll give you the final word there. It's really evident that this is such a fruitful and productive partnership. I wonder if you can talk a little bit more about those hands-on innovation days, because I think that's really the question that's overhanging this conference here is really, how do we get people to play with this stuff, understand it, and really see it and see its potential? Can you talk a little bit about how those are structured and what customers actually do and how they then perhaps even form their approach to innovation and then what they're going to do with the data?

Sri Raghavan

>> Yeah. Look, when both Informatica and AWS in this relationship approached our customers, a lot of them had very specific use cases that they wanted to address. We went and spoke to a financial services customer who said, "Look, I need to do fraud detection." And we provided all of the architectural diagrams and all that, which is great to look at. They're very colorful, kind of like our outfits.

>> Yeah.

Rebecca Knight

>> Yeah.

>> Right.

Sri Raghavan

>> Now, one of the things we then realized was that the customers actually needed to see the proof of these things working. So what these innovation days, these immersion days do is that they physically provide access to the AWS cloud where an Informatica solution is stood up. And there are hands-on instructors there. There's a huge demand generation machine that works in the background to be able to get the right kinds of customers in places and whatnot. But all these hands-on instructors have that specific use case that flashes up on the screen for fraud detection or whatever the case might be. And they take the customers through each step of the process, collecting the data, curating the data, providing the right kinds of governance. So you'll actually see the Informatica solution validating, "Hey, do you have the right permissions to be able to access the right kinds of data and all that rest of stuff?" So when they see that in action, they realize that, "Hey, this actually works." And immediately the next question is, "Can I have it yesterday?" So that's how innovation days, immersion days work.

Sri Raghavan

>> Yeah, you're absolutely right. I have to give credit, there's a lot of work which gets done prior to getting into that innovation day, because the innovation days can be of many formats. It is a one-to-one, one-to-few, one-to-many, and depends on that how you structure the innovation day. But I want to take a step back as to what is it you want to achieve as part of the innovation. That is always the first thing you take into account is when you take into account in that way, it is having a hands-on experience on the tool or having a better understanding of what is that use case in this XYZ company that is going to get validated? So you start to develop from that. And the second part of that is now if you have to peel that onion, the next one you think of is what sort of personas are you going to have at that innovation days? Is it a data practitioner, is it a cloud practitioner? Are they new to cloud? Are they actually, they have been very well-versed in AWS, they're very well-versed in Informatica, but how do they have to tie both of them together? So now when you figure out all this stuff, now you structure the innovation day, based on the personas, based on the use cases, and then identify to them as to what is that right outcome. They want to hear, feel, validate it, which then results in, "Can I have the solution yesterday?"

>> Right.

>> But doing that innovation day, yeah, we call it as innovation day, but there's a lot of preparation which happens. But post-innovation day is when once they try it out, more questions. They start to understand, "Hey, how I can explore it further? What I do need to learn?" And it creates that conversation with the customer where now you have the trusted advisor for a customer rather than you're just going and selling some, "Hey, I have a tool, take it." Rather than that, you did it and now you become a trusted advisor. And we engage in that conversation again and again with all -

Sri Raghavan

>> That's right. That's a very important point that Gopi makes. Both our companies are all about the customers. They always come first. We gather some very valuable intelligence in these innovation days because customers come and tell us, "Hey, this stuff is not working. Fix it and fix it now." We take it back to our product teams. We do a lot of back-end engineering, which is very important because now the voice of the customer becomes the predominant driving force behind all of these things. So it's a very symbiotic relationship.

>> Let's stay right there with the customer, because again, you have some joint customers that have really gone through this, one in the pharmaceutical, one in the product-centric. Why don't you give us an idea of the use cases and why they went down this road together?

Sri Raghavan

>> You mean as why they went down on the innovation day?

>> Yeah. I think one of them was Gilead, for instance.

Rebecca Knight

>> Yeah. So Gilead is an interesting use case because they are one of the top reference customer of AWS. And as they started to modernize their overall platform across both their industry use cases and also technology use cases, they started to look at, "Hey, at the end of the day, as we modernize and do all this stuff, we still need to build that trusted data foundation. To do the trusted data foundation, what else? How I should be thinking about it in the cloud?" And that started with some of the modernization stuff, but then going and looking at it as what data sources they have. The thing is that when you start to embark on the journey, even when we are starting to do this innovation day, the first thing you look at, "So what data sources should we think about?" And that might be the first time they're also ... "Do you know that we have so many enterprise data? These are my known data sources, these are my maybe I think I have all these data sources, but I have to go validate." So then you go through that operation to say that, "Okay, from that I'm going to take ... Here are the major ones, these are my tier one data sources for the innovation day, how we should be thinking of it." So when we started to work at Gilead, it was around thinking of what is a data foundation and using that. And in the case of Gilead, it was very specific on master data management. It was a 360 use case. And to do the 360 use case, what people don't understand is master data management does not work, "Hey, I just mastered the data." No, it has the quality, it has the governance, it has to have the integration, do all this stuff, and to do it as a SaaS MDM platform on AWS. So that became our, "Okay, that is a functional use case. Let's start to identify, is a reference 360 data, which you need to do for trials management or client management? Take that business use case, match it up with the functional use case, work with our partners, figure out where they are in their cloud journey." So when we say it's partnership, this is in the field, people are working every day, whether it is across marketing, it is across the pre-sales team, it is across the architects, it is across the people who run the labs. On both the sides, we have to go and figure it out and how it is going to land. And then we have to also figure out where we are going to run it. Is it virtual? Is it in Gilead's office? Is it in AWS's office? You have to think about it. It takes a village to put this all together.

Sri Raghavan

>> We talk all the time, as you can imagine, because of the numbers of people who are involved in these things. It's a fascinating journey. One day we hope you'd come and actually see that. That'll be great.

Rebecca Knight

>> Go into the field-

Sri Raghavan

>> Yeah, go in the field....

Rebecca Knight

>> and watch you guys work.

>> Kudos to those guys. We can come here, we can speak all this stuff, but it is the field on both the organizations-

Sri Raghavan

>> That's right. Which does the work.

>> Without them, nothing would've happened. All this stuff.

Sri Raghavan

>> Absolutely. Absolutely.

Rebecca Knight

>> Excellent. Well, Sri and Gopi, always a pleasure having you on theCUBE. Thank you so much for coming on Informatica World.

Sri Raghavan

>> Thanks for having us. I appreciate it. It's terrific.

>> We appreciate it. Thank you very much.

Sri Raghavan

>> Thank you very much. Good luck to you.

Rebecca Knight

>> Thank you. Stay tuned for more of theCUBE's live coverage of Informatica World. I'm Rebecca Knight. For Rob Strachay, you're watching theCUBE, the leader in enterprise tech news and analysis.

Sri Raghavan | AWS & Gopi Sankaran | Informatica

search

Rebecca Knight

>> Hello everyone, and welcome back to theCube's live coverage of Informatica World here in Las Vegas. We have three days of wall-to-wall coverage. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, sitting alongside my co-host and analyst, Rob Strachay. Rob, we're having a lot of great conversations here on theCube, per usual, but really talking today about partnerships.

>> Yeah. I think, again, it's a lot about how you really bring up all this data and the management of it and how you go and you're going to bring data to AI and AI to the data and how that happens, not only on-premise but in the cloud in particular, and again, how Informatica is really bringing a layer above that and partnering for the pieces underneath.

Rebecca Knight

>> Well, with that, I would like to introduce our next guest. They're both CUBE alum. We have Sri Raghavan, manager of AI data and analytics partners in AWS Center of Excellence. Welcome back, Sri.

Sri Raghavan

>> Thank you.

Rebecca Knight

>> And Gopi Sankaran, he's the Vice President, Strategic Cloud Ecosystems at Informatica. Thank you both so much for coming on.

Sri Raghavan

>> Hey, thank you. Appreciate it.

Rebecca Knight

>> So I'll start with you, Sri. Why don't you tell our viewers a little bit about this partnership and then the joint innovation that's going on?

Sri Raghavan

>> Yeah, this is one of the longest relationships that we've had between the two companies. In fact, I think Informatica has been a partner of AWS for the past 13 years. And if you looked at the trajectory, it's been fantastic. I take it as a personal point of pride for two reasons. Number one is Informatica has, with AWS, a strong trajectory of innovation with different kinds of products. In fact, you folks were-

>> The launch partner of Redshift....

Sri Raghavan

>> the launch partner for S3, for Redshift, for Lake Formation, if I remember right.

>> Yeah.

Sri Raghavan

>> I take it personally for Redshift because I was involved in many of the integration discussions. So it's fantastic. The other thing I want to make sure I point out is these folks were some of the first to be leaned in heavily into the AWS Marketplace. Now, as you know with the AWS Marketplace, it is a platform which makes it very easy for our customers to easily procure solutions. So you don't have to worry about looking at your consumption, because all the reports and the consumption are provided to you. You pay only for what you use. It's very intuitive for you to be able to use the different kinds of products, and as you know, Informatica has got a number of products. The IDMC is a central part of the marketplace. So our joint customers are thrilled that they're able to adopt and adapt to Informatica on the cloud Marketplace with AWS. It's a fantastic partnership, years in the making. The momentum has increased significantly and we're thrilled with this relationship.

Rebecca Knight

>> Yeah, absolutely. To add to it, you have heard many people talk about, "Hey, this is a strategic partnership, it's a strategic relationship." This partnership is a definition of what that word strategic means. Because when you think about when you're a launch partner of Amazon Redshift, Amazon Redshift was launched, what, 2011, 2012 timeframe. From that timeframe, we have been working all across from deep integration with the engineering team, go-to-market efforts. With respect to the marketplaces, how do we actually go talk to our joint customers so that we have the customer-focused innovation, customer-centricity as Amit was saying this morning. And that is actually the foundation also for this partnership. And it has been going great. I'm glad to also be in the position to manage the partnership also, and there is lots more to do in this and we are thrilled for that.

Sri Raghavan

>> And the advantage to this thing is we've just begun. Hard as it seems to believe that we've been in this 13 years, but there's a lot more that we're going to be able to do with this relationship. It's great.

>> Yeah, no, I think what's been really interesting is that, like you were talking about with Marketplace and being able to use customer's EDPs so that they can actually burn down credits within their agreements with AWS utilizing the Informatica product set. I think one of the things has always been ... okay, there are not just Redshift, there's a number of other places that integration can happen in product, I guess you could say involvement. Especially when you're talking about data and being able to go and master data management and understanding metadata and how that goes across silos. What other innovation and what connections do you see from an Informatica perspective and from an AWS perspective?

Sri Raghavan

>> Yeah, maybe I'll take the question first and then Sri can chime in. So when I say it's innovation, some of the major innovations we announced, the latest ones with AWS was at re:Invent. One thing I would like to also mention here is you heard about cloud data access management, which is part of our original acquisition which we had. But when we brought cloud data access management, it was actually co-developed along with S3 access grants, which was one of the new launch solutions from the S3 universe. But the purpose of all this stuff is to have that trusted data framework for the customers in the cloud. And the reason why I'm saying that is all that has become the foundation for what we are working on now, which is around generative AI. So when it comes to, as you were saying, trusted data, how do we bring the trusted framework? How do we get the right preparation for the data sources? How do we interact with the model as a service through Bedrock or how do we work with Q, all that stuff? So today the innovations, the current work is in analytics, it is in data, and it has now gone beyond that into generative AI space. And AWS has been doing a great job on that. And again, without data foundation, there is no AI. This partnership is built and it is in the right position, right space now for us to work with them. You always talk about Bedrock and-

Sri Raghavan

>> I do.

>> Go ahead.

Sri Raghavan

>> Gopi, I do. Now I'd like to answer this question in terms of four areas of joint work that we've done. Number one, we've done a lot of enablement activities with customers. Now, keep in mind, for a lot of customers, they understand the importance of data, but until they actually physically see these things in action, it's never easy to understand how governance is very important, how having the right data assets are important and all that. It's very easy to talk about these things, but they have to see it. So Informatica and AWS do a lot of things like innovation days, immersion days where they provide access to the infrastructure on the AWS cloud with Informatica solutions for hands-on activities, number one, which allows them to be able to do these things in real-time. So we've done a lot of investments in that. Number two, no surprise here, we are a cloud service provider, and for us, it's important for modernization to happen. A lot of Informatica customers are interested in taking advantage of cloud-native services. So which means what? We provide a lot of workload migration programs and other kinds of funding vehicles for our joint customers to move to the cloud. And here's where Informatica has done some phenomenal work. They've provided self-service capabilities for migration, which is really important. Now they can do these migrations by themselves. It's automated. It's a trusted platform by which , these things have happened as well. The third area is that we've done a lot of verticalization of solutions. Our customers, as you can imagine, they're across all the different verticals. So we provided verticalized solutions for us to specifically address use cases like patient healthcare outcomes, or customer 360, or fraud detection and so on. Again, guess what? Informatica and AWS have come together to be able to address these kinds of use cases. Number four, generative AI. There are three important components within generative AI: you need to have holistic data, you need to have data that's trusted and you need to have good data governance. How do you ensure the right kinds of people get the right kinds of data over time? So with generative AI, and as Gopi mentioned, we have Amazon Bedrock. Now, Informatica does all of the security and the governance. The data is then fed into the RAG architecture, and then our native LLMs like Titan, Claude and other LLMs pick up all that information, enhance the models, provide enriched insights to the customers. So it's a very seamless workflow from the standpoint of being able to get the right holistic data, govern it, provide the right kinds of security to it, cleanse it, feed it into the other one, address these various use cases. Now you tell me, is that cool or what?

Rebecca Knight

>> It's cool. It's cool. I'll give you the final word there. It's really evident that this is such a fruitful and productive partnership. I wonder if you can talk a little bit more about those hands-on innovation days, because I think that's really the question that's overhanging this conference here is really, how do we get people to play with this stuff, understand it, and really see it and see its potential? Can you talk a little bit about how those are structured and what customers actually do and how they then perhaps even form their approach to innovation and then what they're going to do with the data?

Sri Raghavan

>> Yeah. Look, when both Informatica and AWS in this relationship approached our customers, a lot of them had very specific use cases that they wanted to address. We went and spoke to a financial services customer who said, "Look, I need to do fraud detection." And we provided all of the architectural diagrams and all that, which is great to look at. They're very colorful, kind of like our outfits.

>> Yeah.

Rebecca Knight

>> Yeah.

>> Right.

Sri Raghavan

>> Now, one of the things we then realized was that the customers actually needed to see the proof of these things working. So what these innovation days, these immersion days do is that they physically provide access to the AWS cloud where an Informatica solution is stood up. And there are hands-on instructors there. There's a huge demand generation machine that works in the background to be able to get the right kinds of customers in places and whatnot. But all these hands-on instructors have that specific use case that flashes up on the screen for fraud detection or whatever the case might be. And they take the customers through each step of the process, collecting the data, curating the data, providing the right kinds of governance. So you'll actually see the Informatica solution validating, "Hey, do you have the right permissions to be able to access the right kinds of data and all that rest of stuff?" So when they see that in action, they realize that, "Hey, this actually works." And immediately the next question is, "Can I have it yesterday?" So that's how innovation days, immersion days work.

Sri Raghavan

>> Yeah, you're absolutely right. I have to give credit, there's a lot of work which gets done prior to getting into that innovation day, because the innovation days can be of many formats. It is a one-to-one, one-to-few, one-to-many, and depends on that how you structure the innovation day. But I want to take a step back as to what is it you want to achieve as part of the innovation. That is always the first thing you take into account is when you take into account in that way, it is having a hands-on experience on the tool or having a better understanding of what is that use case in this XYZ company that is going to get validated? So you start to develop from that. And the second part of that is now if you have to peel that onion, the next one you think of is what sort of personas are you going to have at that innovation days? Is it a data practitioner, is it a cloud practitioner? Are they new to cloud? Are they actually, they have been very well-versed in AWS, they're very well-versed in Informatica, but how do they have to tie both of them together? So now when you figure out all this stuff, now you structure the innovation day, based on the personas, based on the use cases, and then identify to them as to what is that right outcome. They want to hear, feel, validate it, which then results in, "Can I have the solution yesterday?"

>> Right.

>> But doing that innovation day, yeah, we call it as innovation day, but there's a lot of preparation which happens. But post-innovation day is when once they try it out, more questions. They start to understand, "Hey, how I can explore it further? What I do need to learn?" And it creates that conversation with the customer where now you have the trusted advisor for a customer rather than you're just going and selling some, "Hey, I have a tool, take it." Rather than that, you did it and now you become a trusted advisor. And we engage in that conversation again and again with all -

Sri Raghavan

>> That's right. That's a very important point that Gopi makes. Both our companies are all about the customers. They always come first. We gather some very valuable intelligence in these innovation days because customers come and tell us, "Hey, this stuff is not working. Fix it and fix it now." We take it back to our product teams. We do a lot of back-end engineering, which is very important because now the voice of the customer becomes the predominant driving force behind all of these things. So it's a very symbiotic relationship.

>> Let's stay right there with the customer, because again, you have some joint customers that have really gone through this, one in the pharmaceutical, one in the product-centric. Why don't you give us an idea of the use cases and why they went down this road together?

Sri Raghavan

>> You mean as why they went down on the innovation day?

>> Yeah. I think one of them was Gilead, for instance.

Rebecca Knight

>> Yeah. So Gilead is an interesting use case because they are one of the top reference customer of AWS. And as they started to modernize their overall platform across both their industry use cases and also technology use cases, they started to look at, "Hey, at the end of the day, as we modernize and do all this stuff, we still need to build that trusted data foundation. To do the trusted data foundation, what else? How I should be thinking about it in the cloud?" And that started with some of the modernization stuff, but then going and looking at it as what data sources they have. The thing is that when you start to embark on the journey, even when we are starting to do this innovation day, the first thing you look at, "So what data sources should we think about?" And that might be the first time they're also ... "Do you know that we have so many enterprise data? These are my known data sources, these are my maybe I think I have all these data sources, but I have to go validate." So then you go through that operation to say that, "Okay, from that I'm going to take ... Here are the major ones, these are my tier one data sources for the innovation day, how we should be thinking of it." So when we started to work at Gilead, it was around thinking of what is a data foundation and using that. And in the case of Gilead, it was very specific on master data management. It was a 360 use case. And to do the 360 use case, what people don't understand is master data management does not work, "Hey, I just mastered the data." No, it has the quality, it has the governance, it has to have the integration, do all this stuff, and to do it as a SaaS MDM platform on AWS. So that became our, "Okay, that is a functional use case. Let's start to identify, is a reference 360 data, which you need to do for trials management or client management? Take that business use case, match it up with the functional use case, work with our partners, figure out where they are in their cloud journey." So when we say it's partnership, this is in the field, people are working every day, whether it is across marketing, it is across the pre-sales team, it is across the architects, it is across the people who run the labs. On both the sides, we have to go and figure it out and how it is going to land. And then we have to also figure out where we are going to run it. Is it virtual? Is it in Gilead's office? Is it in AWS's office? You have to think about it. It takes a village to put this all together.

Sri Raghavan

>> We talk all the time, as you can imagine, because of the numbers of people who are involved in these things. It's a fascinating journey. One day we hope you'd come and actually see that. That'll be great.

Rebecca Knight

>> Go into the field-

Sri Raghavan

>> Yeah, go in the field....

Rebecca Knight

>> and watch you guys work.

>> Kudos to those guys. We can come here, we can speak all this stuff, but it is the field on both the organizations-

Sri Raghavan

>> That's right. Which does the work.

>> Without them, nothing would've happened. All this stuff.

Sri Raghavan

>> Absolutely. Absolutely.

Rebecca Knight

>> Excellent. Well, Sri and Gopi, always a pleasure having you on theCUBE. Thank you so much for coming on Informatica World.

Sri Raghavan

>> Thanks for having us. I appreciate it. It's terrific.

>> We appreciate it. Thank you very much.

Sri Raghavan

>> Thank you very much. Good luck to you.

Rebecca Knight

>> Thank you. Stay tuned for more of theCUBE's live coverage of Informatica World. I'm Rebecca Knight. For Rob Strachay, you're watching theCUBE, the leader in enterprise tech news and analysis.