Microsoft's cloud boss explains why it's partnering with Informatica to make AI a reality for more companies

anil chakravarthy informatica

Informatica, a data management company, announced a deepened partnership with Microsoft this week, making it easier to bring lots of data to the Microsoft Azure cloud.
Informatica CEO Anil Chakravarthy says that this has a major benefit of making it easier for customers to take advantage of artificial intelligence.
Microsoft Executive VP Scott Guthrie says that this is a reflection of Microsoft's partnership strategy: Let partners like Informatica handle the complicated nitty-gritty of enterprise software, while it focuses on the bigger picture.

Companies like Microsoft have spent the last few years championing so-called digital transformation, a catch-all term for businesses embracing cloud computing, artificial intelligence, and all the other wonders of modern technology.

The problem is that it's not always smooth sailing to get there: Lots of companies, especially older ones, are sitting on mountains of data that have accumulated over the years. That data might be sitting in different systems, on different servers, in different parts of the world. And it's not like a company can simply discard decades of data and start over.

Enter Informatica — a 25-year-old data management company that famously took itself off the public markets in 2015 following a $5.3 billion leveraged buyout deal.

This week marked the annual Informatica World conference, where the company announced a deeper partnership with Microsoft. Now, Informatica customers can easily shunt all of their data to the Microsoft Azure cloud, from which they can apply the tech titan's formidable database wizardry. Conversely, the Informatica data management platform, which lets customers mash-up data from different sources, will run natively on Microsoft Azure.

From Informatica's perspective, this is a big step towards that ideal of digital transformation, CEO Anil Chakravarthy tells Business Insider.

Once the data is in the cloud, it becomes easier to put it to new and novel uses. Indeed, Chakravarthy hopes that partnerships like this make it easier for its customers to start using artificial intelligence in earnest, by making the data more usable. For its own part, Chakravarthy says, Informatica has bet big on integrating AI into its own products.

"We see ourselves as both a provider of AI, as well as a consumer," says Chakravarthy.

The Microsoft perspective

From Microsoft's perspective, partnerships like the one with Informatica are reflective of its broader approach to growing the Microsoft Azure supercomputing cloud — a huge driver of growth for Microsoft, and a platform that's second in the market only to the leading Amazon Web Services.

"One of the things that's allowed us to be so successful is to recognize that the enterprise space is a very complicated space," Scott Guthrie, the Microsoft executive VP in charge of cloud, enterprise, and AI products, tells Business Insider.

In other words, not even Microsoft can build all the tools and services necessary to consolidate and combine data, says Guthrie. That leaves a huge opportunity for a specialist like Informatica, which is happy to play that role, and which can focus all of its energies on filling those complicated needs, he adds.

Further to that point, Microsoft has been investing heavily in artificial intelligence, positioning it as the wave of the future in both enterprise and consumer software. Indeed, Azure offers many AI services. Yet, without partners like Informatica, companies wouldn't be able to wrangle the huge amounts of data necessary to make AI really useful.

microsoft scott guthrie

"Data is the heart of that transformation that's happening," says Guthrie. And Informatica's Chakravarthy says that there's a "big gap" between having data, and making it useful.

Notably, Informatica has integrations with Google Cloud and Amazon Web Services, too. Chakravarthy says that Microsoft is a key partner, however, because of its inroads with the largest companies in the world. In other words, Microsoft gets a way to offer customers better data management, and Informatica gets access to Microsoft's customers. Indeed, the Ford Motor Company is a mutual customer of Microsoft and Informatica.

"This [partnership] gives us a way we can talk to customers together," says Guthrie.

"The real winner is gonna be the customer," agrees Chakravarthy.

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