Informatica in the spotlight this week after revealing it will be acquired by Salesforce as part of the $8 billion deal. Salesforce plans to invest in the cloud data management company's ecosystem of data and infrastructure partners here to discuss this and more we have Informatica CEO, Amit Walia. Amit, it's good to see you and congrats on this deal, Amit. Um, I do want your take on the deal and some of the analyst reaction, Amit, because there are skeptics, and we had one such skeptic on on the show this week. Covers your company, knows it well, and we asked him why he was skeptical, and I want to get your take on this, and it was because in part he says Informatica is cheaper than it was a year ago. And he says it's cheaper than it was a year ago because there are major execution challenges at this company. That's how he's talking about it and describing it to his clients. He talked about you all reporting, again, his words, rocky quarters. What's your response to that?

Well, thanks for the opportunity here. Look, as we step back, it's you've seen it, right? It's the uh, the generative AI opportunity, the agentive AI opportunity that's early stages in enterprise, and what we do is data management for that. Look, from where we ended, we've are headed towards a billion dollar cloud ARR, which is what we guided to growing 25% for the year. And we at the end of Q1 grew 30% against it, so we feel great about it. We just had a user conference that had more people attend across the globe. So we announced our agents. We announced many new offerings of Claire, which is our uh Gen AI engine, and when we look to come together with Salesforce with their agent force, data cloud, all of the massive distribution and the innovation engine we have, we couldn't be more thrilled about our joint customers and the whole acceleration of the Gen AI across the enterprise world, and I couldn't be more excited about it.

Um, Amit, I want to ask you as well about the sort of integration, the role that you'll play within um, Salesforce, because um, as our colleague Brian Sozzi asked um, Marc Benioff last night when they spoke, he said, Informatica has been sort of known as the Switzerland of data, being an independent third party with a range of different customers, um, Oracle, AWS among them. And I want to play for you what um, Marc Benioff said about, uh, you know, about the competitiveness of Informatica within Salesforce. Listen to what he said.

Well, we of course buy companies that deeply integrate with all of these companies all the time, and so, you know, like a product like Tableau, you could say the same thing, and it's been a great success for us.

And so, Amit, how do you see, you know, that sort of fitting within and still catering to that broad range of clients?

Well, like Marc said it very well. First of all, Marc's an awesome visionary. I've talked to him so many times. They've been involved with us from the early days. They're investors in Informatica. We're partners. They use our products, we use their products, we know each other very, very well. And look, Tableau's a great example. Nothing changes to our place in the ecosystem that we support every data type, every hyperscalar, every data platform, the unique place we have. In fact, that's the strength we have in the world of Gen AI to bring all of that data together with high quality, high governance, high metadata, high mastering to help the thousands and thousands of customers, enterprise customers across the globe to truly operationalize Gen AI, because that's where customers are stuck, which is where we come into play.

I'm always curious, Amit, to just get your take on the pulse of demand out there, the broad demand environment, because as you said, you got a lot of customers, they're all over the world. How would you characterize what you're hearing from customers on it, you know, are are they eager to spend right now? Do you hear more of a, of a cost cutting mode out there? What are you hearing?

Well, we just had a user conference, and we had, like, as I said, more users this year than last year who showed up, tremendous excitement. I think I've said that, look, Gen AI in enterprises is at a stage where it's getting into production mode. It's not yet full production mode like consumers. We are, and partly because of all things around data, the governance, the quality and all of the stuff around data that needs to be managed. It has to be trusted AI, and I see every customer has invested in Gen AI, and they're all in varying levels of pilot, POC, small production to full production. So it's not a matter of, uh, if, it's a matter of when. I see towards the end of this year, walking into next year, that cycle to generally have a much more steeper curve of adoption and usage.