A sold out conference with 3,000 attendees, Informatica World 2016 could be the Big Data event of the year. And why not? Informatica Corp. has set itself apart from the crowd by positioning itself as a data company — period — not another IT company dabbling in data. John Furrier (@furrier) and Peter Burris (@plburris), cohosts of the theCUBE, from the SiliconANGLE Media team, discussed Informatica World buzz by trading opinions on who will pull ahead and take the lead in Big Data.

Furrier recounted theCUBE’s interview with Informatica Corp. board member Jerry Held, who Furrier said nailed it when he said, “It’s not about looking back for insights — yeah, that’s OK — or looking forward — predictive and prescriptive. It’s about the now.” In other words, real time is “data at the speed of business.”

Coming out on top

Furrier said that Informatica is in a good position to lead if it can keep data open and free without blowing the compliance and regulatory problem. “If they can maintain the Master Data Management aspect and benefits of what that means” while staying within the bounds of compliance and regulation, and at the same time enable growth of SaaS apps and cloud, “They will have a winning formula,” Furrier said.

Burris said, “The value of data is most obvious in its application to a particular task.” He said companies need to go deep into the stack to see how they can make all aspects of data operations more goal oriented. “How do we tie data back to those promises?” he asked. “That’s where the winners and losers are going to be separated.

On Wednesday, theCUBE will have more exclusive interviews with Informatica customers, as well as interviews with Anil Chakravarthy, CEO of Informatica Corp.; Bill Burns, chief information security officer and interim CIO at Informatica; and Bruce Chizen, board member and special advisor at Informatica, among many others.

Watch the full video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s coverage of Informatica World 2016.

Photo by SiliconANGLE