Considered by many to be the sage and the historian of the technology industry, Bruce Chizen (pictured), board member and special advisor at Informatica LLC, has an impressive decades-long career. He has worked at Microsoft and Apple Computer, been the chief executive officer of Adobe Inc., and sits on the board of many high-ranking technology companies — including Informatica LLC.

Chizen has plenty insight into the multicloud adoption cycles he’s seeing across tech’s landscape, weighing in on the impact of this new wave in enterprise computing, and how companies can stand out in today’s fiercely competitive world.

“There’s been so much excitement about the movement from on-premises to cloud, about artificial intelligence and machine learning — I don’t think people really appreciate how early it is,” Chizen said. “People need to be patient and continue to invest aggressively in what’s going to transpire ten years from now, not six months from now.”

Chizen spoke with John Furrier (@furrier) and Rebecca Knight (@knightrm), co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the Informatica World event in Las Vegas. They discussed the current state of cloud technology, future innovations, and Informatica’s role in all of it (see the full interview with transcript here). (* Disclosure below.)

An open platform, ability to scale, and innovation

As the world’s economies shift to data-driven models managed in disparate data centers and cloud applications, service providers such as Informatica are moving away from point products to platform-driven models, according to Chizen. The platform is the key to a great customer experience, evolving to keep pace with customer demands for an open platform.

“Customers have gotten smart. No customer wants to be held hostage to one individual platform,” Chizen said. “They want to make sure that if they choose one platform, they could easily migrate to another. It’s one of the reasons why Informatica is in such a sweet spot, because we allow our customers to choose which cloud infrastructure providers they want to put their workloads on.”

The marketplace for cloud continues to gr0w, attracting a wealth of startups eyeing Informatica’s space. They all face the challenge of scaling computing platforms, often running out of resources, according to Chizen. The ability to scale is an asset requiring a flexible, agile platform that can meet the demands of growth, he explained.

So how can a startup even stand out in this day and age?

“I look at the great new startups– what makes them great is that they have an innovative technological solution that’s hard to replicate,” Chizen said. “Then they get the funding, and they’re able to scale. That’s what it takes to be a startup. It’s going back to innovation — to technical innovation.”

But despite the growing competition, Informatica is in a great spot to meet the demands of enterprises, according to Chizen.

“If an enterprise really cares about their data, and they really care about having choice in the future, and they don’t want to be held hostage to any one platform, Informatica is the only game in town,” he concluded.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the Informatica World 2019 event. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for Informatica World 2019. Neither Informatica LLC, the sponsor for theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE