Everything is going to the cloud. Things get complicated, though, when one realizes everything is also going to multiple clouds. Data might live here, applications there. Customer-facing platforms could be on another cloud service entirely. Cloud vendors all offer environments that benefit one service over another, so this state of affairs is likely to continue, according to Ronen Schwartz, senior vice president and general manager of data and cloud integration at Informatica LLC.

“The world has moved from a world of cloud to a world of clouds. The “s” is very important,” Schwartz said.

He was speaking to John Furrier (@furrier) and Peter Burris (@plburris), co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE’s mobile live-streaming studio, during Informatica World in San Francisco, California. Schwartz talked about the many clouds, Informatica’s cloud strategy and where data fits in. (* Disclosure below.)

Finding the center among clouds

The cloud is important for many reasons, in Schwartz’s view, one being that cloud vendors are leading the way to a new generation of analytics. They’re opening new possibilities for data. When applications live on different clouds, that data becomes the center of gravity between everything, Schwartz explained.

Informatica supports businesses in their efforts to keep this data asset and bring it to full value. They consider clouds as three types, according to Schwartz. There’s cloud integration, managed by the service vendors who depend on data coming to their applications. Then there’s the platform vendors, providing space for data and applications in the cloud. Finally there are the cloud infrastructure vendors, hardwiring it all together. All three groups depend on data to operate with the efficiencies demanded by today’s real-time pace of business.

“Data is the lifeline of the application. It is also the lifeline of the platform,” Schwartz said. Informatica wants to play a key role in empowering that data to be part of all those clouds. As a product strategy, the company is delivering a suite of integration and data management tools designed to be part of one platform for building the center of gravity around data.

As for data management itself, applications and data sources have been shifting to a distributed environment. Streaming, Internet of Things and other use cases have brought new requirements to the field, Schwartz stated. This demands more integrated data management. These changes are shifting and shaping the data management world.

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