The Cloud is enabling more than just off-site storage. According to Mark Smith, CEO and chief research officer at Ventana Research, it’s facilitating a revolution in the departmental politics of businesses around the globe. In an interview during Informatica World 2015, he told theCUBE, SiliconANGLE’s Media production team, that as business environments shift, the politics of data architectures and the IT role are changing dramatically.

“If you look at organizations today, they’re going through a massive change in IT,” he said. “We’ve got application data architectures that are changing radically. We’ve got businesses going out and still being good renegades or bad renegades, renting applications, creating new data repositories. And then you’ve got the poor analysts that are trying to figure out how to get the data together, do some analytics.”

This directly impacts companies like Informatica Corp. “The environments are significantly different across organizations, the politics are still pretty heated in many places, [and] Informatica gets quite challenged in trying to figure out how do you be nice to everybody at the same time and get them to move to the new world of how we interact with applications, Cloud, data,” Smith said.

A look at the political shifts

What do those political shifts look like in practice? “You go into any company, you’ve got sales, you’ve got marketing, you’ve got customer service, you’ve got finance, HR — they run their own destiny,” Smith stated. “They’re held accountable for their business processes.” IT, on the other hand, functions more like a service center.

“So when IT comes out and dictates this is how you run your business with these tools and this approach, it doesn’t necessarily always mesh,” he said. “So the last three to four years, Cloud has taken off because businesses said, ‘I’m going to rent apps, I’m going to onboard, I’m going to use tools that my team can use, not… the service organization.’”

Big Data has also played a role in these shifts. “When you get the business side, they start from the front end of what they’re trying to accomplish,” Smith explained. “They’re trying to actually do some discovering, exploration of their data, they’re trying to gain some better insights. It’s basically faster and smarter. How can they become faster and smarter? And most companies have realized that just putting out more visualizations is really dead end. I’m not sure if you’re trained on interpreting scatter plots and bubble charts, but you start looking at these things, and you go like … what does that mean?”

Interconnecting the data

This gives analysts more power in negotiating architecture with IT — and offers opportunities for Informatica.

“The analysts are really driving new needs for data in different forms, shapes, interaction data, behavioral data, and they’re looking for faster ways to bring that data into their own repository,” said Smith. “Now that’s absolutely conflicting with IT data architectures. But guess what? Businesses [have] got money. They have the priority. And now they have to figure out how to interconnect those systems. Which actually comes back to Informatica — you’ve got to interconnect all this data.”

Watch the full interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s coverage of Informatica World 2015.

Photo by SiliconANGLE