“We are all things data for our customers,” said Amit Walia, EVP & CPO, Informatica LLC. “What matters is the data, that’s what is important for our company. … We want to be the one place you go, to be the data platform, the data fabric.”

Sitting down with Dave Vellante of theCUBE, from the SiliconANGLE Media team, at BigDataNYC 2015 in New York City, Walia discussed security and governance issues in Big Data and how becoming a private company has changed Informatica’s strategy.

“We help our customers go through any kind of change,” said Walia, who remembers back in the beginning when customers would take an existing product and “try to jam stuff through it.” Informatica understood that remodeling was not the answer and went back to the drawing board, taking the best existing ideas and designing something from scratch.

Security and governance big issues in Big Data

“If I have all my data on Hadoop, I better understand my security, my risk – who is touching it,” said Walia, introducing Informatica’s new product Secure@Source that gives users a single pane of glass to see who is accessing the data lake.

He gave use-case examples, including Informatica customer Western Union Holdings, Inc., which uses Hadoop for secure money transfers, creating large-scale data and fraud detection issues. “We understand data problems, and we can do them at scale for them,” said Walia.

Informatica becomes a “mega unicorn” of private companies

Wallia listed three benefits to becoming a private company:

• The company can now work with customers to choose whatever business model it wants.
• It can take greater investment risks without worrying about short-term results. Walia said it “allows us to take the long-term view rather than getting caught up in the short term.”
• Informatica has the opportunity to come out a bigger, more valuable company benefiting both employees and customers.

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

Photo by SiliconANGLE