Informatica World 2024 | Vamsi Krishna Dhalli | The NRMA & Sumeet Kumar Agrawal | Informatica

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Sumeet Agrawal

Vice President of Product Management

Informatica

Vamsikrishna Dhalli

Head of Data – Technology

NRMA Motoring and Services

National Roads and Motorists’ Association leverages Informatica for enhanced customer experiences

Some of the most interesting conversations at this year’s Informatica World, including about enhanced customer experiences, have been with the customers of Informatica Inc., including the National Roads and Motorists’ Association Ltd., which has been a customer for many years.When considering data values, Informatica thinks about customers first, according to Sumeet Kumar Agrawal (pictured, right), vice president of product management at Informatica. That involves working with Vamsi Krishna Dhalli (left), senior data manager of technology at the National Roads and Motorists’ Association

play_circle_outline The Significance of Customer Conversations: Insights from NRMA and Special Guests Vamsi Krishna Dhalli and Sumeet Agrawal

play_circle_outline The Power of Collaboration: How NRMA and Informatica Forge a Strong Partnership, Led by Vamsi

play_circle_outline Enhancing Data Integration and Quality with Informatica on Google Cloud: Leveraging BigQuery for Unified Sources

play_circle_outline Collaboration between Informatica and NRMA in understanding use cases and pain points

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Vamsi Krishna Dhalli | The NRMA & Sumeet Kumar Agrawal | Informatica

Sumeet Agrawal

Vice President of Product Management Informatica

Vamsikrishna Dhalli

Head of Data – Technology NRMA Motoring and Services

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Rebecca Knight

>> Good afternoon everyone, and welcome back to day three of theCUBE's live coverage of Informatica World here at the Mandalay Bay Convention Center. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, sitting alongside my co-host and analyst, Rob Strechay. Rob, we're smack dab in the middle of day three. We're having great conversations. The conversations that always are the most interesting to me are the ones with customers. This is where the rubber meets the road.

>> I was going to say, even if you're driving on the other side of the road, which is real important to understand for this next customer as well.

Rebecca Knight

>> Our viewers will soon understand that very funny aside there.

>> Yes.

Rebecca Knight

>> Our next guest I'd like to welcome to the show, Vamsi Krishna Dhalli. He's the head of data technology at NRMA. Welcome, Vamsi.

>> Thank you so much, Rebecca.

Rebecca Knight

>> And Sumeet Agrawal, VP of product management at Informatica. Thank you so much for coming back on theCUBE.

Sumeet Agrawal

>> Great to be here.

Rebecca Knight

>> Great to see you again.

Sumeet Agrawal

>> Yeah.

Rebecca Knight

>> So Vamsi, I'm going to start with you. Why don't you tell our viewers who are unfamiliar what the NRMA is, and they will soon understand, Rob Strechay's amusing aside.

>> So NRMA is the largest mutual based organization within Australia, and we have got close to 2.7 to 2.8 million members. It's mutually owned from past 100 years. We actually operate a roadside resistance. That is our prime business unit, along membership runs horizontally with six rental car. You can get the international driving permits, as well as some of the nicest holiday parks across Australia. We have close to around 60 of them. So wide variety of business units.

Rebecca Knight

>> Okay and what do you do there.

>> Which by the way does not prevent me from getting a speeding ticket with the cameras that are in Australia, which they mail to you magically in America.

Rebecca Knight

>> And actually you raised a very good point, Rob. The reason is we recently launched a roadside safety advisory board, and we are actively participating in that.

>> Yeah, I needed that. I should have paid better attention to the rules of the road there. And I was going down to see some of the sites south of Sydney, and definitely could have used some tutorials on not exactly the same as America about getting tickets.

>> That's really good to know.

Rebecca Knight

>> So Vamsi, and what do you do at the NRMA?

>> Okay, I lead the data space within NRMA as head of technology within data, and my prime function is getting all the data together within our data platform on Google using Informatica. So we have wide variety of disparate data sources like we need to procure all the data in respect of what kind of connection it is and ensuring the data is available on a timely basis for our self-server analytics and also self-server marketing. That is my prime role.

>> And so are you using BigQuery or Vertex? What are the pieces underneath it-

>> Okay, so that-...

>> that you have underneath Informatica?

>> That's quite a good question to ask. The reason is we use three prime tools, the cloud data quality, cloud application integration, and also the CAI, sorry the CDQ, CDI, which is the cloud data integration. So all three of them combined together, we actually get all the disparate data sources into the BigQuery world of Google Cloud platform. And from there, actually we power up our data scientists, data analysts, and also the data analytics teams for doing their self-server analytics, and also the customer experience. So we recently launched a multi-channel marketing tool called Brace for our customer experience journey, and within which the entire power up is using our CAI processes. So that's what I would call out. We have around close to 3000 our integrations, 10,000 plus events running every hour. So it's a vast variety of use cases which we deliver using Informatica and Google Cloud put together.

Rebecca Knight

>> So Sumeet, I want to bring you in here a little bit. So Vamsi was talking about the customer experience journey. So how, when you are working with NRMA, how are you helping this organization think through exactly what the customer needs and how to think through solving that customer's problems?

Sumeet Agrawal

>> Absolutely. So first of all, thank you, Vamsi, for joining us. He's been a long-standing customer from us from many years, and I'm very happy with our partnership with NRMA. So I think my role is very simple. So at Informatica, we go with data values, and one... The key part of that is think about customer first. So all our informaticans are about how we can help customers, how we can help them to solve their pain points. So what we do at Informatica is we work closely with Vamsi and his team to make sure that we understand his use cases, his concerns, and also try to figure out how we can give them the best practices from other customers as well. For example, if I see there are a better way of doing few things, then I try to pass it on to Vamsi and his team so that he can incorporate that in his thing, in his roadmap. In fact, a lot of things we are putting in our roadmap is also influenced with some feedback which is coming from Vamsi and his team, so it's a very strong collaboration between us.

>> Thank you, Sumeet, and that's wonderful to hear.

>> Yeah. And it's, I think, as part of being a base layer for how you do your business because you figured out different use cases on top of that as well. And like you were saying, the multi-channel marketing, customer 360 things of that. What do you look at as the biggest use case that it helps you? And it can be more technical, hey, it's helping us wrangle the data together, and really, like you talked about data quality. Because when I look at it in most organizations, the data is coming from all different places. It has to be rationalized into the entities, and it has to be then... The metadata has to be carried over so that you can come out with an accurate answer. Is that a lot of what you're using in Informatica to do, is really-

>> So the prime use case within our industry is the single customer view. If you see a lot of business units, a wide variety of different data sources, to bring in and procure all the data into our data lake and forming the single customer view across multiple clusters of information on the source identifiers, it was very unique to Informatica where we should be able to contextually match based on their PI information and bring that to the survivorship layer so that who exactly we need to cross-sell, upsell, sending the right communication at the right time. So that is where Informatica really powered us up and forming that master golden ID, along with the customer data platform integrations, ensuring that Informatica is critical with all these integrations on top of the Google Cloud platform.

Sumeet Agrawal

>> And maybe I'll add on to what Rob said once. Maybe you want to share this whole conference is about AI and about how Informatica is helping to build your AI applications with the trusted data. So maybe do you want to share how you are using Informatica to augment your AI use cases?

>> Definitely. So, okay, so I can't talk much about our AI use cases yet, but definitely I can tell you this. The current CAI process is all in all. If I need to talk to a GenAI model, either it can be Palm or a Bison model, or any large language model on our Google cloud platform. It's a simple REST API call from Informatica. It's just like click and drop, low code, no code. So that means all my CAI developers are ready for use and ready to deploy all the AI solutions using Informatica. So that is one thing. But the critical point here is you need to be data ready for AI to be successful. Without data, there is no AI. So that's the fundamental way in which we ensure that all the data is coming at the right time with the right data quality in our Google Cloud platform to power up our AI use cases. That's what I would say.

>> Yeah, help us understand, or help the customers understand what your journey's been to get to that point, because I think again, it's not like you... I wish it was this way, but you don't just put Informatica in and all your data management problems go away. There's a journey that you went on. Help people understand that journey to get to where you are today where you can be API driven from a CIA perspective to use AI.

Sumeet Agrawal

>> Okay, so excellent question. If I need to dig down on our past, because of the individual business units, all our data platforms and data management were siloed, completely disparate, different teams working together.. Coming to us as a strategy that why not we use one single data management tool and a single data platform where in which we dig down deeper. We were power center customers earlier using our Oracle BI apps journey. So using that, we could able to see the Informatica value it has provided to the organization from the trusted data warehouse sales applications or anything, whatever we would like to deliver from corporate analytics world. So looking at that, we saw, okay, Informatica is the right tool for purpose, and we are the first IDP or IACS customers within Australia where in which we ingrained the IP model. So that's what Alex from sales director nicely helped does out in that journey to procure Informatica. And also, we know the Google blood platform being the pay as you go service, because instead of buying a huge licenses, it's better to go as a pay as you go, and a serverless model where in which large infra teams are not required to manage the entire infrastructure. So that is where we thought, okay, one is SaaS. Obviously, the entire metadata is going to decide our data is going to secure on our on-prem secure agents or cloud secure agents so that we can easily procure the data and nicely load it into the target areas. So from collecting all this data from wide variety of sources coming up to the data lake, we thought now is the journey to form the single customer view and the customer 360 on top of it, and the customer data platform and the customer experience. So if you see the success keeps on evolving, but we started with baby steps or slow steps, quick wins. I would say that is my first proof in the pudding. We decommissioned several appliances on-prem. So much of infrastructure, we are completely on cloud right now. That's where we are.

Rebecca Knight

>> It sounds like you are a case study, and especially what you were just talking about with the starting slow, the quick wins, and then making sure you're evangelizing that, doing away with the silos and changing the way people do their jobs too. I was really fascinated by something Sumeet was saying about how it's really a symbiotic relationship. You're hearing about NRMA's pain points, and then you are getting feedback from them about, okay, that seems to be a problem, we need to work on this and really changing the product. What are you hearing at this conference? And are you talking to customers like yourself who, even if it's in a completely different industry, and it maybe even a different functional role from you, but are you hearing about the challenges that they're facing and obstacles that they've overcome that are giving you ideas about what you want to see from Informatica or what you want to implement when you get back to Australia?

>> So I would call out my journey here is especially for learning and the collaboration with Informatica. So I would like to connect to the people because the next one year, it's going to be humongous for us as a company on the AI-based use cases. So that's why I came here for learning. And I'm really confident that we are data ready for the AI using Informatica and Google Cloud. That's what I would call out.

Sumeet Agrawal

>> Yeah, maybe, Vamsi, we should talk about... Vamsi and I were discussing yesterday that how he started with predictive AI, like how he used Informatica for doing predictive AI use case and now how he's thinking about going to a next future GenAI maybe after hearing from our conferences, do you want to share, Vamsi, what's your plan on GenAI is and how thinking about it?

Sumeet Agrawal

>> Definitely. So increasing the productivity and the process automation is my gut feel. I have got a team size of five under tens, I would say augmented external resources as well, time and time, but using GenAI with Informatica, all my CI developers, all the developer productivity is going to be up to the next level because it is so easy. It's just a drag and drop to call any LLM API service using the CAI. So I would say it's just like the tool is there ready to be used. That's what I can say. We are all powered up already.

>> Yeah, I'd loved it. I loved it in the demo that you did during the keynote, and seeing that it was very powerful. And I think one of the things that I look at is when you're here next year, and when we're all here next year, what do you hope you can say that you're not there yet today, but you hope you can say that, "We completed this and we're happy about here in our journey"?

>> Okay, so our focus is providing member value across all the group organizations. The amount of value we provide with the tools we got, that is what I really would like to see my success as the head of data in technology. So that's my role, and I really would like to put my energy into that and ensure that Informatica really supports in that journey as well, and which is already supporting them, supporting us. And I'm really kind of Sumeet and team, and they have come across wide variety of use cases. And here specifically, we can cater to those, and they can also improvise their products. Always, our customer success manager, it's not even month, I can reach out to them whenever I need or they need me. So it's like collaboration activity. So much is going on. If I at all, I need to raise some enhancement requests, team is there for me to support. One of the few KPIs for my team is to raise enhancement requests so that the product gets better and better for increasing the entire productivity. So that is... I would say I'm really enjoying this, guys.

Sumeet Agrawal

>> Thank you for your partnership, Vamsi. It's been great.

Rebecca Knight

>> Well, I mean, it sounds like you're both very enthusiastic partners and it's really a match for the ages here.

Sumeet Agrawal

>> Absolutely, yes.

Rebecca Knight

>> Absolutely. Well, Vamsi and Sumeet, this has been such a fantastic conversation. And like I said, your enthusiasm for the partnership is infectious.

Sumeet Agrawal

>> Thank you.

>> Thank you.

Rebecca Knight

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

Vamsi Krishna Dhalli | The NRMA & Sumeet Kumar Agrawal | Informatica

search

Rebecca Knight

>> Good afternoon everyone, and welcome back to day three of theCUBE's live coverage of Informatica World here at the Mandalay Bay Convention Center. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, sitting alongside my co-host and analyst, Rob Strechay. Rob, we're smack dab in the middle of day three. We're having great conversations. The conversations that always are the most interesting to me are the ones with customers. This is where the rubber meets the road.

>> I was going to say, even if you're driving on the other side of the road, which is real important to understand for this next customer as well.

Rebecca Knight

>> Our viewers will soon understand that very funny aside there.

>> Yes.

Rebecca Knight

>> Our next guest I'd like to welcome to the show, Vamsi Krishna Dhalli. He's the head of data technology at NRMA. Welcome, Vamsi.

>> Thank you so much, Rebecca.

Rebecca Knight

>> And Sumeet Agrawal, VP of product management at Informatica. Thank you so much for coming back on theCUBE.

Sumeet Agrawal

>> Great to be here.

Rebecca Knight

>> Great to see you again.

Sumeet Agrawal

>> Yeah.

Rebecca Knight

>> So Vamsi, I'm going to start with you. Why don't you tell our viewers who are unfamiliar what the NRMA is, and they will soon understand, Rob Strechay's amusing aside.

>> So NRMA is the largest mutual based organization within Australia, and we have got close to 2.7 to 2.8 million members. It's mutually owned from past 100 years. We actually operate a roadside resistance. That is our prime business unit, along membership runs horizontally with six rental car. You can get the international driving permits, as well as some of the nicest holiday parks across Australia. We have close to around 60 of them. So wide variety of business units.

Rebecca Knight

>> Okay and what do you do there.

>> Which by the way does not prevent me from getting a speeding ticket with the cameras that are in Australia, which they mail to you magically in America.

Rebecca Knight

>> And actually you raised a very good point, Rob. The reason is we recently launched a roadside safety advisory board, and we are actively participating in that.

>> Yeah, I needed that. I should have paid better attention to the rules of the road there. And I was going down to see some of the sites south of Sydney, and definitely could have used some tutorials on not exactly the same as America about getting tickets.

>> That's really good to know.

Rebecca Knight

>> So Vamsi, and what do you do at the NRMA?

>> Okay, I lead the data space within NRMA as head of technology within data, and my prime function is getting all the data together within our data platform on Google using Informatica. So we have wide variety of disparate data sources like we need to procure all the data in respect of what kind of connection it is and ensuring the data is available on a timely basis for our self-server analytics and also self-server marketing. That is my prime role.

>> And so are you using BigQuery or Vertex? What are the pieces underneath it-

>> Okay, so that-...

>> that you have underneath Informatica?

>> That's quite a good question to ask. The reason is we use three prime tools, the cloud data quality, cloud application integration, and also the CAI, sorry the CDQ, CDI, which is the cloud data integration. So all three of them combined together, we actually get all the disparate data sources into the BigQuery world of Google Cloud platform. And from there, actually we power up our data scientists, data analysts, and also the data analytics teams for doing their self-server analytics, and also the customer experience. So we recently launched a multi-channel marketing tool called Brace for our customer experience journey, and within which the entire power up is using our CAI processes. So that's what I would call out. We have around close to 3000 our integrations, 10,000 plus events running every hour. So it's a vast variety of use cases which we deliver using Informatica and Google Cloud put together.

Rebecca Knight

>> So Sumeet, I want to bring you in here a little bit. So Vamsi was talking about the customer experience journey. So how, when you are working with NRMA, how are you helping this organization think through exactly what the customer needs and how to think through solving that customer's problems?

Sumeet Agrawal

>> Absolutely. So first of all, thank you, Vamsi, for joining us. He's been a long-standing customer from us from many years, and I'm very happy with our partnership with NRMA. So I think my role is very simple. So at Informatica, we go with data values, and one... The key part of that is think about customer first. So all our informaticans are about how we can help customers, how we can help them to solve their pain points. So what we do at Informatica is we work closely with Vamsi and his team to make sure that we understand his use cases, his concerns, and also try to figure out how we can give them the best practices from other customers as well. For example, if I see there are a better way of doing few things, then I try to pass it on to Vamsi and his team so that he can incorporate that in his thing, in his roadmap. In fact, a lot of things we are putting in our roadmap is also influenced with some feedback which is coming from Vamsi and his team, so it's a very strong collaboration between us.

>> Thank you, Sumeet, and that's wonderful to hear.

>> Yeah. And it's, I think, as part of being a base layer for how you do your business because you figured out different use cases on top of that as well. And like you were saying, the multi-channel marketing, customer 360 things of that. What do you look at as the biggest use case that it helps you? And it can be more technical, hey, it's helping us wrangle the data together, and really, like you talked about data quality. Because when I look at it in most organizations, the data is coming from all different places. It has to be rationalized into the entities, and it has to be then... The metadata has to be carried over so that you can come out with an accurate answer. Is that a lot of what you're using in Informatica to do, is really-

>> So the prime use case within our industry is the single customer view. If you see a lot of business units, a wide variety of different data sources, to bring in and procure all the data into our data lake and forming the single customer view across multiple clusters of information on the source identifiers, it was very unique to Informatica where we should be able to contextually match based on their PI information and bring that to the survivorship layer so that who exactly we need to cross-sell, upsell, sending the right communication at the right time. So that is where Informatica really powered us up and forming that master golden ID, along with the customer data platform integrations, ensuring that Informatica is critical with all these integrations on top of the Google Cloud platform.

Sumeet Agrawal

>> And maybe I'll add on to what Rob said once. Maybe you want to share this whole conference is about AI and about how Informatica is helping to build your AI applications with the trusted data. So maybe do you want to share how you are using Informatica to augment your AI use cases?

>> Definitely. So, okay, so I can't talk much about our AI use cases yet, but definitely I can tell you this. The current CAI process is all in all. If I need to talk to a GenAI model, either it can be Palm or a Bison model, or any large language model on our Google cloud platform. It's a simple REST API call from Informatica. It's just like click and drop, low code, no code. So that means all my CAI developers are ready for use and ready to deploy all the AI solutions using Informatica. So that is one thing. But the critical point here is you need to be data ready for AI to be successful. Without data, there is no AI. So that's the fundamental way in which we ensure that all the data is coming at the right time with the right data quality in our Google Cloud platform to power up our AI use cases. That's what I would say.

>> Yeah, help us understand, or help the customers understand what your journey's been to get to that point, because I think again, it's not like you... I wish it was this way, but you don't just put Informatica in and all your data management problems go away. There's a journey that you went on. Help people understand that journey to get to where you are today where you can be API driven from a CIA perspective to use AI.

Sumeet Agrawal

>> Okay, so excellent question. If I need to dig down on our past, because of the individual business units, all our data platforms and data management were siloed, completely disparate, different teams working together.. Coming to us as a strategy that why not we use one single data management tool and a single data platform where in which we dig down deeper. We were power center customers earlier using our Oracle BI apps journey. So using that, we could able to see the Informatica value it has provided to the organization from the trusted data warehouse sales applications or anything, whatever we would like to deliver from corporate analytics world. So looking at that, we saw, okay, Informatica is the right tool for purpose, and we are the first IDP or IACS customers within Australia where in which we ingrained the IP model. So that's what Alex from sales director nicely helped does out in that journey to procure Informatica. And also, we know the Google blood platform being the pay as you go service, because instead of buying a huge licenses, it's better to go as a pay as you go, and a serverless model where in which large infra teams are not required to manage the entire infrastructure. So that is where we thought, okay, one is SaaS. Obviously, the entire metadata is going to decide our data is going to secure on our on-prem secure agents or cloud secure agents so that we can easily procure the data and nicely load it into the target areas. So from collecting all this data from wide variety of sources coming up to the data lake, we thought now is the journey to form the single customer view and the customer 360 on top of it, and the customer data platform and the customer experience. So if you see the success keeps on evolving, but we started with baby steps or slow steps, quick wins. I would say that is my first proof in the pudding. We decommissioned several appliances on-prem. So much of infrastructure, we are completely on cloud right now. That's where we are.

Rebecca Knight

>> It sounds like you are a case study, and especially what you were just talking about with the starting slow, the quick wins, and then making sure you're evangelizing that, doing away with the silos and changing the way people do their jobs too. I was really fascinated by something Sumeet was saying about how it's really a symbiotic relationship. You're hearing about NRMA's pain points, and then you are getting feedback from them about, okay, that seems to be a problem, we need to work on this and really changing the product. What are you hearing at this conference? And are you talking to customers like yourself who, even if it's in a completely different industry, and it maybe even a different functional role from you, but are you hearing about the challenges that they're facing and obstacles that they've overcome that are giving you ideas about what you want to see from Informatica or what you want to implement when you get back to Australia?

>> So I would call out my journey here is especially for learning and the collaboration with Informatica. So I would like to connect to the people because the next one year, it's going to be humongous for us as a company on the AI-based use cases. So that's why I came here for learning. And I'm really confident that we are data ready for the AI using Informatica and Google Cloud. That's what I would call out.

Sumeet Agrawal

>> Yeah, maybe, Vamsi, we should talk about... Vamsi and I were discussing yesterday that how he started with predictive AI, like how he used Informatica for doing predictive AI use case and now how he's thinking about going to a next future GenAI maybe after hearing from our conferences, do you want to share, Vamsi, what's your plan on GenAI is and how thinking about it?

Sumeet Agrawal

>> Definitely. So increasing the productivity and the process automation is my gut feel. I have got a team size of five under tens, I would say augmented external resources as well, time and time, but using GenAI with Informatica, all my CI developers, all the developer productivity is going to be up to the next level because it is so easy. It's just a drag and drop to call any LLM API service using the CAI. So I would say it's just like the tool is there ready to be used. That's what I can say. We are all powered up already.

>> Yeah, I'd loved it. I loved it in the demo that you did during the keynote, and seeing that it was very powerful. And I think one of the things that I look at is when you're here next year, and when we're all here next year, what do you hope you can say that you're not there yet today, but you hope you can say that, "We completed this and we're happy about here in our journey"?

>> Okay, so our focus is providing member value across all the group organizations. The amount of value we provide with the tools we got, that is what I really would like to see my success as the head of data in technology. So that's my role, and I really would like to put my energy into that and ensure that Informatica really supports in that journey as well, and which is already supporting them, supporting us. And I'm really kind of Sumeet and team, and they have come across wide variety of use cases. And here specifically, we can cater to those, and they can also improvise their products. Always, our customer success manager, it's not even month, I can reach out to them whenever I need or they need me. So it's like collaboration activity. So much is going on. If I at all, I need to raise some enhancement requests, team is there for me to support. One of the few KPIs for my team is to raise enhancement requests so that the product gets better and better for increasing the entire productivity. So that is... I would say I'm really enjoying this, guys.

Sumeet Agrawal

>> Thank you for your partnership, Vamsi. It's been great.

Rebecca Knight

>> Well, I mean, it sounds like you're both very enthusiastic partners and it's really a match for the ages here.

Sumeet Agrawal

>> Absolutely, yes.

Rebecca Knight

>> Absolutely. Well, Vamsi and Sumeet, this has been such a fantastic conversation. And like I said, your enthusiasm for the partnership is infectious.

Sumeet Agrawal

>> Thank you.

>> Thank you.

Rebecca Knight

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