Hopefully, everyone in the US was able to take some time to enjoy Memorial Day as we remembered the men and women serving or served in the US armed forces. But as the summer begins here in the states, I wanted to put together a quick blog post to recap Informatica World 2018 for those who could not attend.
Last year Informatica decide to switch it up an have Informatica World in San Francisco, but this year they decided to bring it back to Las Vegas! Las Vegas, home of all conferences and a bunch of other things I won’t mention. This year a lot was happening before Informatica World 2018 in Las Vegas. When I arrived on 05/20/2018, Las Vegas was packed with folks ready to attend Electric Daisy Carnival or the Billboard Awards. So typical Las Vegas was packed with people. But as the people coming in for Informatica World started to arrive, either at the Venetian or Palazzo, the atmosphere changed from partying hard to learning the new initiatives around Data 3.0 and beyond.
With a jammed packed agenda, I will highlight some of the events I attended!
Day 01 was the start of the registration, and like every year the lines were long, and Informatica provided everyone with another book bag full of advertisements from every consulting firm you could image. But though it was hectic and packed, the process registration was pretty smooth and quick!
After the buffet style breakfast, the crowds gathered into two different rooms for the “Welcome to Market Perspective Day” session. Since I was running late waiting for a colleague I was forced head into another view room. But either way, the event was kicked off by Amit Walia President, Products & Strategic Ecosystems of Informatica. If anyone who has attended an Informatica World event or any Informatica event where Amit has spoken, you would know speaking is one of his best skills sets as he is able to command an audience with his well-spoken, humor and engaging speech. Amit kicked off the event with a light Informatica opening and discussing the Generational market disruptions and data 3.0. From there he had an open discussion with Anurag Gupta Vice President, Amazon Web Services. They both spoke about the 4-year Informatica partnership and the future growth of data increasing and some of the patterns of data itself and how businesses will use them. Overall the conversation was great to hear about Informatica’s collaborative partnership with Amazon AWS and how they plan on keeping the partnership for years to come while supporting their customers. What was funny though was how Amit tried to find out anything new going on in the AWS world in which Anurag could share. Unfortunately, Anurag could not share this information.
After Amit’s opening and discussion with Anurag, the next speaking event was from Massimo Pezzini VP & Gartner Fellow at Gartner. Massimo discussed how to untangle the digital integration spaghetti. I thought this was a fitting title for his event as I see man customers quickly onboard new data sources and sometimes don’t look to think why. Just because a business user says so does it make it right? Is there a similar trusted data set this business user could use? But regardless of my 101 questions spinning in my brain, I liked how Massimo approached this discussion and disused a strategy and enablement such as the ISET. ISET stands for Integration Strategy Empowerment Team. A team to focus more on just governance but to enable a bimodal approach and not be tactical about data but more strategic. Many of this is known in our industry, but it was a refresher for him to speak about it at the event to have customers and prospects hear about some of the trends and best practices in the industry.
The next couple events included, “Next Gen Analytics” hosted by Ronen Schwartz, “Data Governance & Compliance Perspectives” hosted by Jitesh Ghai Sr. VP & General Manager, Data Quality, Security & Governance at Informatica and “360 Engagement Perspectives” hosted by Suresh Menon SVP and GM, Master Data Management at Informatica. Though I could not attend these events I heard from my customers that the events were more discussions with industry-leading customers and partners of Informatica in which allowed them to get some insights on how other companies are tackling some of these topics. Now the reason I could not attend these events, I was busy working with my team NGDATA setting up our booth for everyone to learn about our CDP solution, which was a hit!
Day 02 Informatica World kicked off with a party with some dancers, music from Bruno Mars and some light up bracelets!
The Informatica opening was great as it got the crowd excited which allowed Anil Chakravarthy to come in and wow the crowd! Anil started off thanking everyone again for joining and discussing some of the main topics covered during Informatica World as well as some of the new exciting changes coming to Informatica. He then discussed the importance of Cloud and had his guest speaker Scott Guthrie, Executive Vice President at Microsoft discuss the Informatica partnership and some of the new and exciting MS Azure features as well as the kickstart features with Informatica.
In addition, Anil and Scott partnered together to offer Ford with the Industry Leading iPass for Microsoft Azure Intelligent Disruptor of the Year award!
Next, a demo of Informatica Cloud and MS Azure was performed by John Macintyre, Product Management for Azure SQL Data Warehouse and Ron Lunasin Sr. Director, Ecosystem Program and Product Management at Informatica. Both did a great job in showcasing the Informatica and Microsoft Azure capabilities.
Amit Walia took it home and closed the opening event to discuss Data 3.0 and the new changes we need to start looking and thinking about when we think about Data 3.0. He discussed 5 points that need to be focused on when thinking about Data 3.0 which are, the Platform, Scale Metadata, AI, and Governance. Many of these points he addressed were covered in various different speaking events and roundtables that were conducted on Day 2.
Now Day 2 as I mentioned was packed and many addressing Data 3.0, GDPR, Cloud, MDM and etc. Most of the events I attended were geared to Cloud solutions. Some of the events included how National Instruments hosted by James Humphrey, Principal Software Architect at National Instruments who talked about utilizing Informatica B2B Cloud to simplify many of there complex B2B integration points.
Danielle Beringer, Sr. Manager & Regional Data Officer, Data Management & Analytics at Nissan North America who spoke for a second time at Informatica World sharing her Informatica journey with solutions such as DIH, DQ, Axon & DVO.
Overall day 2 was jam packed for me seeing how others implemented their cloud solutions and what lesson learns they had to offer to the attendees.
Day 3, was an early day for me but not so true for many people. From the looks of breakfast and some of the events, many of the attendees decided to sleep in or press the snooze button due to some late night festivities. I mean it is Vegas, right? :p But overall all Day 3 really had 3 major events I wanted to talk about which I believe had a lot of impacts.
The first was the “Transforming to the Customer Engagement Model of the Future” by Steven Noels, CTO at NGDATA. I mean Steven is my CTO so of course, I had to list this event as my top 3 events! But kidding aside Steven did a great job to talk about how NGDATA has partnered with Informatica utilizing solutions such as Informatica PwC, Cloud, BDM and MDM to feed our CDP solution to provide the business not only a 360 view of the customer but the actual customer DNA allowing business to provided actionable triggers and events.
The next big event that happened on Day 3 that almost brought tears to my eyes was when Sally Jenkins EVP and CMO at Informatica provided 25 lucky students from a local Las Vegas STEM students being offered a scholarship the stories they provided and their dreams showed so much hope and potential for our digital future!
Finally was the last main attraction. Last year Informatica unveiled the new logo and Claire. This year Amit showcased something out of the movie Minority Report. As many of us love Siri or Alexa Amit showcased the future of Informatica’s Claire and it was VOICE!
Day 4 was the wrap-up day in which many Informatica attendees packed up and head home. But for some such as myself stayed the extra day to be certified in some of the Informatica solutions! Lucky for me I was able to successfully take the Informatica Cloud Data Integration, Specialist certification so that I could have one more certification under my belt!
Hopefully you all enjoyed my Informatica 2018 recap post and I hope to see everyone at the next Informatica World event in 2019!
