Data management provider Informatica LLC said on Thursday that its board of directors has appointed longtime insider Amit Walia as chief executive officer.

Walia, who is taking over the reins from outgoing CEO Anil Chakravarthy, most recently served as the company’s president of products and marketing. He previously held the role of chief product officer. 

Walia’s appointment to the top post is part of a broader management shakeup that will see two other senior leaders promoted to new positions as well. Tracey Newell, Informatica’s top field operations executive, will take on an expanded role as president of global field and marketing operations to bring all the company’s customer-facing go-to-market activities under one roof. In addition, Vineet Walia, the company’s chief strategy officer and senior vice president, has been named executive vice president.

The changes were announced against the backdrop of Informative announcing a symbolically important growth milestone. The company said it expects to close the books on the 2019 fiscal year with $1.3 billion in sales, of which more than $1 billion is projected to be recurring revenue.

Informatica has spent the past few years transitioning its software portfolio to a more modern, and more lucrative, cloud-based subscription model.  Chakravarthy had led that effort since taking the helm in 2015. He was named to the role after private equity firm Permira and the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board took Informatica private in a $5.3 billion deal that same year.

Now that he’s taking the reins, Walia will be responsible for continuing the company’s growth trajectory. The executive provided a glimpse into Informatica’s roadmap in an interview earlier this year on SiliconANGLE Media’s theCUBE studio. Walia drew attention to CLAIRE, a family of artificial intelligence features for automating data management that ships with Informatica products, and highlighted the central role machine learning plays in the company’s development efforts. 

“We are helping customers take the value proposition of our AI, CLAIRE, [to] find patterns that statistical models cannot,” said Walia, who was Informatica’s president of products and marketing at the same time. “So I look at both of those: leveraging ML to shape our products, which is where we do a lot of innovation, and then creating CLAIRE to help customers make smarter decisions.”

Walia went on to provide his thoughts how the data management landscape is evolving in response to the rise of AI and other emerging priorities. “We believe that data is becoming a platform in itself,” the executive told theCUBE host John Furrier. “Whether you think about it in terms of scale, in terms of governance, in terms of AI, in terms of privacy — you have to think of data as a platform.”

Here’s the full interview with Walia:

Photo: SiliconANGLE