In 2016, he was faced with a question: When should a company founded on on-premises computing make a hard turn toward cloud computing, with a nod toward artificial intelligence? He rolled the dice, and his multibillion-dollar gamble has paid off for Informatica, the cloud data-management company where he is CEO.
The proof is in the profits. Informatica shares INFA, +0.99% rose 10% in extended trading Aug. 2 after the company reported second-quarter earnings that included a 37% jump in cloud subscription sales and a 23% increase, to 213, in the number of customers committed to more than $1 million in annual subscriptions. Informatica’s stock has climbed 18% this year, surpassing the S&P 500 SPX, which has increased 14%.
Larger companies have famously missed on emerging markets before — Microsoft Corp. MSFT, -0.68% with the smartphone market and Facebook parent Meta Platforms Inc. META, -2.25% with the internet are two examples — before scrambling to catch up. They often found themselves in the ticklish situation of maintaining their success using older technology while trying to predict, and invest in, the next wave.
‘A fabulous journey’ “It was a fabulous journey to [initial public offering] and beyond,” said Eric Brown, Informatica’s former chief financial officer, who is now CFO of Cohesity, a privately held data-management and security company. “We had a great team from the beginning.” Nonetheless, Informatica got there fast. Instead of navigating from licenses to subscriptions, the company took the unusual step this year of abandoning the traditional model completely and only selling its cloud service, according to IDC analyst Stewart Bond. Walia had incorporated AI into Informatica products as early as 2017, when he was still chief product officer.
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