UPDATED 14:13 EDT / MAY 18 2017

BIG DATA

Will the real digital transformer please stand up? Informatica CEO tested on big data

Marketing 101 for today’s tech company: Tell customers it’s number one for digital transformation without telling them what that transformation is or what’s on the other side of it, because, frankly, very few know.

Tuning out the bluster, John Furrier (@furrier), host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile live streaming studio, asked Anil Chakravarthy (pictured), chief executive officer of Informatica LLC, during Informatica World in San Francisco, California, to explain digital transformation and how Informatica makes it happen. (* Disclosure below.)

The foundation of digital transformation is data, Chakravarthy said. If there is a twist to Informatica’s take on data, it might be emphasis on totally integrated, horizontally scalable datasets.

“All the data you have in the enterprise that you have generated over the years — that is still very valuable,” he said.

This data must be fully combined with all the data in the cloud — and that does not mean simply moving two silos closer together, he explained. “We believe we are the only ones that can really manage that, and that’s why we are supporting every major cloud platform or cloud system just like we are supporting every major on-premise system,” Chakravarthy stated.

Informatica’s prominent place in the launch of the Google Spanner horizontally scalable database perhaps shows that it means business here; it is one of three data partners on the front end of it.

At the end of the (digitally transformed) day

Products aside, what does a digitally transformed business really look like? How does a company know which vendor can get it there? Old metrics like Magic Quadrants are not viable for the digital transformation, Furrier said, asking Chakravarthy what new yardstick measures digitization?

The customer experience is one way to verify that a software provider is in fact digitizing subscribers’ businesses.

Chakravarthy gave the example of a customer who wants to do all business through a mobile app without talking to any service reps. In banking, this is a common scenario today. Perhaps the customer executes 20 different transaction through the app — without a single picture across all of them on the back-end, a fully digital experience is not possible, according to Chakravarthy. “Because the customer knows what they are doing with me, and I don’t know what they are doing with me,” he said, noting that horizontally scalable data is required to provide the whole picture.

Another yardstick is the quality of customers using software to make the digital transformation. Amazon Web Services Inc. currently uses Informatica for marketing-data analytics, and Tesla Inc. uses it to drive synergies in its SolarCity acquisition, Chakravarthy noted.

When picky customers at the fore of digital innovation vouch for Informatica, others should be able to trust it for their own transformation, he said.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s independent editorial coverage of Informatica World 2017. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for Informatica World. Neither Informatica Corp. nor other sponsors have editorial influence on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE

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