'Transforming an on-premises company to a cloud-only platform company': Amit Walia, CEO Informatica

Please start by introducing yourself - your educational background and your journey so far.
 
I come from a small family of four. I went to school in Lucknow and completed my undergrad from IIT Varanasi, (IIT BHU). I have a younger brother who is serving in the Indian army. My first job after graduation  was at Tata Steel in Jamshedpur as part of their graduate training leadership program which converted to a full-time position. I spent a year at Tata Steel.
 
I knew I wanted to do something in technology. So, I joined Infosys, spent another couple of years at Infosys before I came to the US. I had a startup here and then went on to do my MBA from Northwestern University in Evanston, Chicago area. 

After completing my MBA, I did an internship with McKinsey and then I joined them full-time in San Francisco, Bay Area and have been  here ever since. I spent about five years with McKinsey. I did not aspire to be a consultant for life, so I joined Symantec, a security software company. After Symantec, I tried consumer software, but I am an enterprise software guy. I love enterprise software. So, I joined Informatica in October 2013. I just completed eleven years with Informatica, which has been a terrific journey. 

I started with running a product group, became the head of products, became the president of the company, and then in 2020 I became CEO of the company. So that is a little bit of my educational and professional journey in a snapshot. 
 
Can you brief me about  your journey from being an engineer to becoming the CEO of Informatica? 

Sure, I mean life journeys are never predictable, never planned. When I joined the company eleven years ago, it was a vastly different company which  has changed a lot. I ran the largest product group at Informatica. Over time, I became the company's chief product officer, which encapsulates all engineering and everything related to building and shipping the products, which was gratifying. I led the company through a significant transformation, took the company from on-prem to cloud-based, and had a product vision that I laid out for the board.  
 
Additionally, we went from being a single-product  to a multi-product platform company. To do that, we took the company private in 2015. That was a massive transformation, which has been incredibly successful.  I went on to become the CEO just before COVID hit. Leading the company remotely as a newly appointed CEO proved a considerable challenge. I led the company through this transition period and took us public again in the fall of 2021. We are a public company, and for almost three years, we have been trading on NYSE - Informatica (NYSE: INFA). 
 
We are now a cloud-only company growing significantly and a leader in our space. So, that's been my journey within Informatica to date.  

Q. Could you brief me about your leadership style and any strategy that you have in your mind? 

A leader isn't a leader just by claiming to be one. Of course, you can impose your leadership, but that is just not my style. To me, values, and empathy drive leadership. You must have your value system; it comes down to how much of your values people can relate to. And for me, this means a human-centric value system. Make sure you are empathetic to others and have clarity of strategy and purpose as a leader. I cannot overemphasize this - you must be clear with your vision and strategy. People want to follow a vision and a strategy. If they don’t, that's fine. However, at least clarity of strategy and vision is number one. 

Second thing is extremely clear communication because you have to communicate constantly; the larger the organization, the more effectively you have to communicate. We have employees from across the globe, with diverse cultures and nationalities, and we have distinct functions within the company. Somebody in sales, somebody's R & D, somebody in finance, you have to communicate, and you have to speak to them with clarity and purpose and keep their priorities in mind. So that's number two, communication. So, clear strategy and vision. Very clear communication.  
 
The third one, to me, is empathy. You must have empathy for the people around you. You have to relate to them and empathize with their challenges. Each department faces unique obstacles and being empathetic helps in addressing them effectively. 
 
And finally, I've always believed in the philosophy of 'going slow to go fast.' Everybody wants to move fast, but you must have a clear strategy when you want to make progress. Go slow, ensure you got it right, align the building blocks, and then move fast. And now and then, check in as you're trying to move quickly, slow down, make sure you are headed in the right direction, and then you can accelerate. When you build a house, if you don't have the proper foundation or build a home in haste, the structure may not be sound. So, going slow to go fast is about creating the right structure. So those are my basic guiding principles.    

What are some of your key achievements? Not just about Informatica, but throughout your career. So, can you highlight those key achievements? 

Each journey has been different. As I mentioned  my first job out of college was at Tata Steel. Just after training, I was given my first assignment - to run a shop floor in production in a steel plant (they call it a senior officer). Production is mission critical. You know, steel plants don't stop. They operate 24*7 and 365 days a year. And I was running a shop floor of union employees. I didn't know how to manage the union. I was in my early twenties. Running a union shop floor, working with a union, empathizing with them, and relating to them as a young leader and a white-collared employee were significant learning experiences. And I still value those learnings. So, that was probably one of the most amazing experiences for me.  
 
I had learning experiences early in my career that I still cherish. I remember my first startup experience in the US; I had to build the product from scratch. We had a significant opportunity in Japan. I had to fly up there to present to an  important customer. My team asked me to explain the value proposition of a very tiny startup. I was a product guy and I had to explain to them what it could do. And I was not a salesperson; I was a product person. But they could relate more to me because they felt like honesty came from someone building the product, telling them what it could and could not do. I remember that experience as a beautiful learning experience. It gave me tremendous confidence to not just build the product but sell it, too. And selling is not selling as I thought it was. Selling is a relationship-building exercise. That was a valuable learning experience for me. McKinsey was excellent in the sense that I worked with many CEO's and many large companies. I can't name many of them for confidentiality reasons. 
 
I worked with a large hardware company that wanted to build a software business, made some significant acquisitions for them, and helped them build a software business, now a $20 billion software business. . 
 
Reflecting on Informatica, I would say some of the most life-changing and heartwarming experiences have been here. It is just transforming an on-premises company to a cloud-only platform company. Our industry has no platform player; no cloud company is growing at scale like we are. We are almost close to $850 million of cloud ARR going to  $1 billion this  year, which is  a huge pivot.  
 
Then, taking the company from private to public again was a significant transformation. I cherish these experiences. I'm sure there are many others, but these are some memorable ones that come to mind.
 
Coming to Informatica, what is your vision for the future of data management, especially in the context of this technology of evolution? 

If I step back and think about what data management is, data by itself creates no value. In the world of digital transformation, we are creating more data, but data by itself does nothing. You have to do something about it. That's data management at a very simple level. Moving the data from many places, making sure it's high quality, making sure you can govern it and put it to use - many things of that order. So that's the massive amount of opportunity we participate in. But when I think about the future and you think about the world of AI, generative AI is here and in the next five to ten years, digital transformation will be through the lens of generative AI. In that scenario, data management becomes even more critical.  
 
Imagine a large language model. If you want to use that, it is only as good as the quality of data that goes into it. It is as good as not a portion of data but holistic data going into it. You must ensure it has the proper governance guardrails when you want to use it. And that is what Informatica does. We bring data together, we do data quality, we do data governance, we do data privacy, and we do data cataloging. In the world of AI, these things are becoming mission critical. Second, customers want their AI to work, and they do not always have the time or expertise to stitch these aspects of data management together.  
 
Clients want one single place, one platform. And we believe that the platform that we have built is the early innings. And I see that it will take over our industry in the next five years. There is nobody even remotely close to the scale and scope that we have. To give you a sense, our platform runs over 100 trillion transactions a month. That is massive. Grows 60-70% every year. So, my vision is that Informatica will be a mega multibillion-dollar company with this platform (IDMC) helping large enterprises running generative AI, digital transformation at scale, with all of the governance and privacy and controls around it they need to be successful. We are uniquely positioned to deliver that.
 
Briefly explain the role that you have played in shaping  Informatica's overall strategy? 

As a CEO, strategy begins with me. The most critical job I have is to lay down the plan. So, when I became CEO and outlined the North Star - that we're going to be a cloud company - we began the first three-year plan, from 2020 through 2022. We called it cloud-first, cloud-native. We still had on-prem clients. We decided to  pivot towards the cloud.  
 
With the third year of that three-year plan, we are now a cloud-only company. We call it cloud-only consumption-driven. These are all massive strategic moves. We are the only cloud platform company in data management, number one. We are the only one with consumption-based pricing, which is of tremendous value to customers because they can buy $1 worth of consumption units and use all of our products or buy $10 million. So strategically taking the company from on-prem to cloud-first and now a cloud-only platform company and taking it public are some of the most transformational moves in the industry. And those are the ones I have driven. These shifts have been industry-defining because very few infrastructure software companies have transformed at our scale, if any.  

Who do you consider as major competition? And what is your competitive strategy? 

Well, the irony is that, in our case, competition only comes from smaller companies. We don't have any organization of our scale to compete with us. There's no platform. Our competitors are point providers. So, we have many different products. For each product category, many small startups compete with us. We have seven macro product categories on our platform. Each product category has 10-20, sometimes 30 companies competing, from $2 million to $50 million. Very few have reached even $100 million in revenue.
 
No competitor in the context offers all those services on a single platform. The irony is that even in those individual areas, we have these Gartner Magic quadrants that customers look at, which are report cards for innovation. We are the leader in every magic quadrant, and not a single startup has been able to get ahead of us. All of them are private. We're growing fast, at 37% for our cloud business. So, our competitors end up being very tiny, small companies.
 
Can you think of any personal interest, that has influenced your professional life? Would you like to share any anecdotes?

No two leaders have the same path to the C-suite. For many, spending their early years playing sports provided valuable lessons in teamwork and created a competitive edge. I loved sports growing up, too, but the place that helped shape my leadership style was not a pitch or field but a stage.  
  
I was active in school, head of the student body, and active in theatre. I did a lot of theatre back then (I don't have the time anymore) and enjoyed it. In my senior year of college, we swept the award for the best university team, and I won the national award for best actor. However, what stays with me is not the pride of accomplishment but the valuable experiences I had working with the company of actors  to produce something great. The parallel between capturing attention on stage and commanding a boardroom is clear. Still, I have found that the skills I learned as an actor have helped me lead more empathetically, collaboratively, and effectively.  
 
I am a values-driven, family-oriented person. So, I similarly approach work. I talked about values and empathy. To me, Informatica is like my child. When I come to the office, I ask myself, how do I make Informatica the best version of itself, and how can I ensure the company is the best it can be? I also know that at some point, if I leave - whenever that is - the company should be in the best place possible so that whoever takes over from me is proud of our work. So, that is how I've approached my work every day.   Informatica has never felt like work for me, as much as it takes time away from my real family. Eleven years in, I have an emotional bond with the company. And I think with each passing day, it gets deeper and more invested.

It happens over time. And so, any future initiatives for Informatica as a CEO, you have in your mind.

Well, we are planning considerable investments in the world of AI. As we say, everyone is ready for AI except their data, and there is no value in AI without data. So, we are leading the way. We have focused our innovation investments heavily on the CLAIRE® engine, our metadata-driven AI capability. We have a growing lineup of AI technologies, including CLAIRE Copilot, an assistive partner to deliver recommendations; and CLAIRE GPT, a conversational model to provide answers. The latest capabilities can help organizations optimize AI adoption while mitigating risks and improving operational efficiency.  We are making significant investments across the board in every product for AI so that our customers can use our AI to drive more productivity and more intelligence for them.  
 We call ourselves the Switzerland of data. We work with every LLM and every vector database out there to ensure our customers have a choice. So, to me, it's all about AI and ensuring we have the technology, leadership, and offerings that our customers want.  

Would you like to add anything more about Informatica? 

Our India journey is a source of pride for us. We recently celebrated 20 years of our largest R&D center in India, iLabs. From day zero, our vision for iLabs has always been to be an innovation center. Our AI technology is developed out of iLabs. Our primary R&D center is in Bangalore. We have two more offices in Chennai and Hyderabad. We have every function here in Bangalore led by R&D. I was just there celebrating our 20 years in September 2024. I took the whole team out for a celebration.
 
We've also played a pretty significant role in India's digital transformation. We have many well-known customers in the country, both government and private sector, such as Indian Oil, Dr. Reddy's Laboratory, and National Skill Development Corporation, to name a few.  We're very proud of the fact that we have not only invested in growing our talent pool in India's talent but also contributed to the digital transformation of the country. We are committed to investing in India. Half of our open headcount is for iLabs—especially the world of AI.