Informatica to ramp up channel investment in ANZ

Data managament specialist Informatica is an enterprise market household name, and the company is now looking at ramping up its channel presence in Australia and New Zealand.

We caught up with Sydney-based Richard Scott, who has been leading the effort since joining Informatica in 2020, managing the Asia Pacific and Japan region.

CRN Australia: Can you give us an overview of what's happened at Informatica in recent years?

Richard Scott: About five years ago, Informatica went through a major transformation, delisting from the stock market and investing over a billion dollars in completely rewriting our portfolio as a microservices-based architecture with a low-code, no-code approach.

We've maintained our reputation for excellence while completely modernising our products, being known as a power centre, best of breed, and now being recognised as a leader in cloud and data management.

While we have that kind of 30-year history, we're now kind of at the bleeding edge with our microservices-based architecture and cloud-only offerings.

W've got data centrer across Asia Pacific Japan, and teams across Asia Pacific Japan and engaging with our markets in that space. 

CRN Australia: How important is the channel to Informatica's strategy?

Richard Scott: The channel has always been incredibly important to us, being one of the top two focus areas for our business.

We've been heavily engaged with the channel in the ANZ region, across APJ, and globally, working predominantly with global system integrators like Accenture, Deloitte, and Capgemini.

[Informatica has] recruited 15 additional partners in the last 18 months across both New Zealand and Australia, and we've been adding a lot of people to our partner business.

We've hired across the last 12 months, a significant uplifting in capacity. So from my perspective, it's one of the top two core tenets of our go-to market and also our growth opportunity.

CRN Australia: What about distributors like Dicker Data and Westcon-Comstor? How do they fit into your strategy?

Richard Scott: We previously experimented with a two-tier model, but it wasn't very effective for us due to the sophisticated nature of our product and our focus on the enterprise market.

In Australia, we primarily engage directly with the system integrators, while also working closely with ecosystem providers like Oracle, Google, Azure, and Amazon.

This allows us to work effectively in a "party of three" type engagement with the GSIs, system integrators, and these ecosystem providers.

CRN Australia: How does your availability on hyperscaler marketplaces benefit your customers and partners?

Richard Scott: Our products being available on various hyperscaler marketplaces allows customers with multi-year agreements to use their committed spend to buy or consume Informatica capabilities.

This flexibility is a real advantage for both customers and partners, as it allows them to leverage existing commitments and simplifies the procurement process.

CRN Australia: Can you share some recent case studies or examples of your work in the market?

Richard Scott: We recently worked with Helia, a mortgage insurance company, implementing the Informatica Data Management Cloud to streamline and speed up their approval processes.

We're also working with several universities in Australia and New Zealand, including La Trobe University, on mastering their data and managing quality and governance to better handle the student lifecycle.

Our two biggest industry sectors are banking, finance, and insurance, and state and federal government, with projects varying from full data management platform implementations to focused areas like data quality.

CRN Australia: How is Informatica incorporating AI into its offerings?

Richard Scott: We've recently announced two new AI capabilities in the United States: CLAIRE GPT, which enables interaction with data using natural language, and CLAIRE Copilot, which guides users through tasks like data quality or data governance.

Part of the thing that fuels that capability of CLAIRE GPT is that we do 97 trillion transactions a month across our platform globally.

That metadata is training CLAIRE GPT around you know how to best run that data projects.

CRN Australia: How are you using AI internally at Informatica?

Richard Scott: We have an in-house Informatica GPT for our employees, helping them find information about products, customers, and how to do things.

CRN Australia: How does Informatica work with other major platforms like Salesforce?

Richard Scott: We're present in many Salesforce customers' environments, providing best-in-breed data integration, data quality, data governance, and mastering CRM data.

It's very common to see SAP, Salesforce, and Informatica in one client environment, where we can master both the SAP and Salesforce data and keep it well-managed.

CRN Australia: What's your take on data sovereignty issues? Are they still a major concern?

Richard Scott: Data sovereignty remains a significant issue, which we address by having data centres and high-level security capabilities in all our markets.

Data sovereignty is either specific to a legislation or to a use case.

I guess one of the things that cloud, cloud vendors like Informatica, need to kind of be on top of is this continually increasing legislation.

The GDPR has been in place for some time, but in the last sort of 24 months, you've had the Californian data protection rules to be implemented.

So that ever changing landscape means you need to be working with a vendor who can kind of react to that.

That's a real key point for Informatica. 

If you're a New Zealand Company and you're dealing with California and you're dealing with Europe, you can be complying with California Rules and GDPR rules at all times through that data, access, management, policy capability because they're not quite the same, are they?

We recently acquired Privitar, which specialises in Cloud Data Access Management, allowing companies and governments to establish and enforce policies in line with various local, regional, or global legislations.

CRN Australia: What can we expect to see from Informatica in the near future?

Richard Scott: We're continuing to invest in our platform with three major releases and three minor releases each year, and working closely with our ecosystem partners on initiatives like our recently announced Oracle infrastructure template for generative AI.

Our focus is on helping organisations modernise their data to enable effective AI strategies, as reflected in our catchphrase: "Everybody's ready for AI, except your data."

CRN Australia: Are you seeing any AI fatigue in the market?

Richard Scott: We're not seeing AI fatigue, but there's a broad acknowledgement that while everyone's ready for AI, the data often isn't.

Boards and senior leadership are pushing down on the teams saying:  we want some AI.

The teams are sort of scrambling to say, well, you know, our data is not ready, or it's in silos, or it's of low quality, or it's not governed, or we have societal concerns or ethical concerns, and they're trying to deal with all those issues at once.

I think what you're we're starting to see is people experimenting with AI, but we, I don't think we're going to be seeing AI at scale until we start solving those, those issues the connectivity of the data, the ethical issues.

Organisations need to prepare their data for AI before we'll see widespread adoption, addressing issues like data silos, quality, governance, and ethical concerns.

CRN Australia: What's your perspective on the current economic outlook and its impact on your business?

Richard Scott: Whether it's New Zealand which has been in recession, or Australia which is not in recession, and Japan's currency fluctuations and so forth, I think what we're generally seeing, though, is projects like security and data are still being prioritised by governments and enterprises.

That's because they are mission critical to improving customer service, lifting revenue or making greater efficiencies.

Really, that's all underpinned by data. 

We're seeing high demand for data governance and data quality solutions in the APJ region, and there's strong interest in data mastering, particularly in areas like SAP modernisation to S/4HANA.

Overall, it's still a very exciting time for cloud data management and Informatica, and we feel really optimistic about the next 12 months.

CRN Australia: Any final thoughts on your channel strategy?

Richard Scott: We work with a range of partners in New Zealand and Australia, including Datacom, DXC, ISW, InterWorks, NRI, and FA Tech, in addition to global system integrators and hyperscalers.

I mean, I grew up as a channel manager when I first started in my career at IBM and I'm deeply passionate about the channel.

And, you know, I think I'm the kind of the driving force, if you like, to ensure that we really can materialise this robust channel environment for our business.