CEO Q&A: This Smarter Cloud Can Finally Manage All of Your Data

There are few people who can get their minds around the supernova of data that our digital age has ignited, and how valuable this ever-expanding information trove can be for companies that can truly make sense of it.

Amit Walia is one of those few. As CEO of Informatica, an enterprise cloud data management provider with over 4,000 global customers, Walia has been a firsthand witness to the digital information explosion. He’s also seen how companies have struggled to gather insights and drive efficiency as their data has grown more fragmented across multiple clouds and in different on-site premises. While 92 percent of companies have a multi-cloud strategy, 49 percent are still siloing workload by cloud, according to this 2021 ‘State of the Cloud’ report.

Walia set an ambitious goal of putting an end to data isolation, and this April, he and his Silicon Valley-based Informatica team rolled out a breakthrough innovation: the first Intelligent Data Management Cloud (IDMC). 

We caught up with Walia to find out how the IDMC can supercharge innovation, what good data management really looks like, and why “data is the soul of digital transformation.”  

What are the challenges faced today by companies trying to achieve digital transformation, and how important is data management to that process?

Data today is so fragmented, so distributed and growing at such scale. But it is the critical foundation of digital transformation. And there’s a big difference between digital modernization and digital transformation. It’s easy to do digital modernization—you buy a few cloud applications and put some data in —but you haven’t changed your business.

Digital transformation is rethinking your entire business. Simply starting and experimenting in the cloud is not the way to holistically move to the cloud. You want to think about artificial intelligence and how to operationalize it on a day-to-day basis to drive value for the business. That requires good and clean data. From our point of view, data is the soul of digital transformation—that’s what makes it real.

What are the best practices that leaders should think about when approaching data management today?

First, it has to begin right from the top with the right culture. You need a data-led culture and a data-led mindset in the organization. Data is not just for the sake of creating and storing—it has to have a purpose, just as you have a purpose in your life. Second, you have to think about governing the data, securing the data and making sure to manage the right data privacy. That’s incredibly important, and not just for regulated industries. 

In addition, you need to think about democratization. You want to open it up for everybody to use it, but with an emphasis on data governance, data security and privacy; you can’t just democratize it for the sake of democratizing. And, finally, you want to choose your technology partners carefully—partners who have the best technology available and also have the holistic, end-to-end suite of offerings, so that you don’t have to start everything from scratch. 

You believe that Informatica’s new Intelligent Data Management Cloud is that technology. Can you describe how it works?

This is the industry’s only cloud-native platform, with a single-code base on which all of our best-of-breed products sit that operates at enterprise-scale. It’s multi-hybrid and cloud-native, so it connects to not only any cloud, but also any on-prem to cloud, to ensure that data can move as seamlessly as possible across any boundary of any infrastructure.

This platform runs at 17 trillion transactions a month and the AI on the platform, which we call CLAIRE, runs on 11 petabytes of metadata which is data about data, so that’s where the secret sauce comes in. CLAIRE enables companies to turn data into insights at enterprise-scale, and in minutes vs. months.

We also allow our customers to connect to, access, consume, govern and secure data wherever it is and however it flows. And they know that they can scale their cloud and move their on-prem data footprint to the cloud comfortably, at the pace that works for them. 

Why do companies need a solution like IDMC to handle their data needs?

We are like the Switzerland of data. We can manage the heterogeneity of any infrastructure landscape, the heterogeneity of data, any type of data, anywhere that data gets created. We sit in the middle and connect it.

That’s critically important for a large enterprise, because they don’t want to be captive; they’re managing data across many types of applications and infrastructures. Our AI engine allows companies to view their entire data landscape in one place, whether it’s on-prem, in AWS, in Azure, in Salesforce—wherever it is. We index the entire metadata across the enterprise and create a system of record for metadata.

Just like Google indexed the worldwide web, we use our technology to index the entire metadata across an enterprise. On top of that, we apply machine-learning algorithms available today in the industry. That gives rise to all kinds of things, where CLAIRE can automatically help you find something or tell you what you should be looking for.

How do you see enterprises harnessing the value of data as this technology begins to scale?

Last year, we had two large vaccine providers use data management from us to make sure that they had trusted data to make the right decisions, because they were mission-critical decisions that had to be made in record time. Informatica also has helped the FDA’s Center for Drug Evaluation and Research integrate and master data from tens of thousands of facilities, business entities, and products—creating a single source of data truth. If data can play such a big role for two vaccine providers and in major government drug research, imagine how data can help accelerate other medical research and disease prevention around the globe. We can eradicate diseases and improve human life, all based on the foundation of great data.

Looking at all the transformational impact we’ve seen over the past 12 months, if we think of the next five to 10 years, we’ve just scratched the surface of how much we can digitally transform the world around us.

Amit Walia joined Informatica in 2013, leading the firm’s product organization. He became President, Products and Marketing, in 2019 and was named Informatica’s CEO in January 2020.