Informatica, a leader in enterprise AI-powered cloud data management, brings data and AI to life by empowering businesses to realise the transformative power of their most critical assets. Graeme Thompson, CIO at Informatica, helped lead the company’s complete transformation into a cloud-based company. He discusses the challenges he has faced in driving the organisational change, how he sees the CIO role changing and the most exciting emerging technologies within the industry.
What were the biggest challenges in driving the cultural and organisational change needed to move Informatica to a cloud-based model?
When we went private in 2015, a significant number of our customers had already started migrating their applications (which are the sources of most of the data they want to use) and it was only logical that they would also want to handle their data management in the cloud. As a result, the investment idea was that we could significantly increase the company’s value by evolving into a genuine cloud- and subscription-based business.
The transformation we’ve driven in pursuit of that goal has faced plenty of challenges. Every one of our products had to be redesigned as a cloud-first offering, while staying true to our history of being data-agnostic and supporting cloud, on-premises and hybrid environments alike. While the product team were focused on that effort, my team partnered with operations and strategy groups to completely reinvent our front- and back-office systems and processes to power this new cloud-centric company. This has not just been an IT or sales shift – it’s been a full-scale reinvention of the business. Change on that scale takes serious effort.
How did you build buy-in across the company for such a fundamental shift in the business model?
Actually, we had full commitment from both the board and the broader leadership team right from the get-go. I never had to stand up and pitch: “Here’s the plan, here’s why it matters and here’s the price tag.” I was encouraged that our board were willing to start without pushing for a final cost estimate or even a firm time estimate. The change was large and would impact every function and the technology selections. and other decisions that would drive cost would be made incrementally. There was no way to know with any degree of accuracy at the beginning.
I also explained to the board that I couldn’t predict how long the transformation would take, but I was certain it was the direction we needed to head to create a solid foundation for the future – and that we needed to start now. They backed that conviction wholeheartedly. Securing buy-in is often one of the toughest challenges for organisations, but thankfully it wasn’t for us.
Another factor was that being privately owned (at that stage) gave us a huge advantage. We could execute the transformation away from the spotlight, without having to justify revenue swings or spending every quarter to public markets. That freedom allowed us to make decisions with a true long-term view and help cement our future leadership position as the foremost cloud-based data management platform provider.
How did you align IT strategy with the broader business strategy during Informatica’s transformation?
It was all about connecting the move to the cloud with the success of the business. We made sure people knew that while we were implementing an entirely new architecture, the real aim was to establish a sustainable, cloud- and consumption-based business model. The architecture itself was simply the path to that goal.
We also made sure the transition was gradual. We designed the new operating framework from the ground up while still running the legacy business. We continued to manage our core licensing and maintenance operations while we overhauled everything else – from CRM and revenue recognition to reporting and customer success – to align with the new cloud-first operating model.
How do you ensure IT isn’t just supporting the business but is also a driver of competitive advantage?
I talked earlier about how the new architecture wasn’t the end game but the path to something bigger: building a sustainable cloud-based business model. And that’s something we’ve reached. Our cloud subscription annual recurring revenue (ARR) increased 28% year-over-year in the second quarter of 2025, to US$901 million. The success of our cloud business over this time was a true cross functional effort across the company. I’m proud of the part IT played in that transformation by delivering the process and technology capabilities required to operate a true cloud company at scale.
Can you share an example of how you reimagined a front- or back-office process to better support a subscription-driven cloud company?
One thing that changed hugely was the KPIs we used to evaluate the business. Under the old model, for instance, churn wasn’t a top priority. In the cloud, churn is critical. Net retention rate and ARR also rose to prominence – new concepts for the entire organisation at the time.
Introducing new metrics meant we needed to establish a clear, agreed-upon definition for how they’re calculated. That might sound straightforward, but it rarely is. Consider sales territories: we have many global customers who may have buying centres in different countries. If the majority of the selling effort happens in Europe but the approval and purchase agreement comes out of North America – where do you count that sale? As a leadership team, we had to work through these scenarios, settle on the rules, document them and then build these calculations directly into the data model so they can be used by multiple functions.
This process was beneficial for the entire organisation because it pushed us deeper into data governance – a space we obviously already knew well. These definitions had to be set at the highest levels of leadership.
What were the most significant hurdles in modernising legacy systems and how did you overcome them?
One major hurdle I hadn’t fully appreciated before we hit it, was that we were fundamentally changing how our employees did their work and that each person would face their own challenges with change at different times. I learned that no matter how intellectually ‘on board’ someone is and no matter how much they support the end goal, adapting to new day-to-day responsibilities can still be difficult.
For teams in sales, marketing and customer success, for example, these changes affected their compensation and that’s deeply personal. I hadn’t anticipated how much pushback that would create. Looking back, we should have invested more in regular conversations to make sure the whole team was still on board. Just because everyone agreed on the plan at the start of the year didn’t guarantee we’d still be aligned nine months on. We learned that regular, open communication is crucial when implementing big changes.
What qualities do you look for when building a ‘world-class’ IT team?
IT teams need to be built to support the forward-looking strategy of the company. The leader’s first job is to figure out what the company needs from IT over the next few years.
Of course, the common IT attributes remain important – the quality of day-to-day operations and the tools employees rely on every day need to be modern, fit-for-purpose and consistently reliable. You also need people who can innovate to improve capabilities.
You need people who can astutely manage cost and actively design ways to drive out inefficiencies. With so much of our budgets dominated by SaaS and people costs, reducing spend is harder, so you need people who take pride in finding efficiencies.
The most differentiating capability that I think is important to our success is having IT team members who understand how the business works and who can partner with stakeholders across functions to deliver real outcomes. My team contributes directly to the company’s most important objectives by partnering with go-to-market functions, customer success and supporting functions like HR, finance and legal. Our measures of success are the same as theirs – not the traditional project completion, operational uptime and other measures that are disconnected from direct business value. To succeed here, it helps to have a few IT leaders who came from business functional backgrounds.
How do you see the role of CIO evolving as companies accelerate cloud adoption and Digital Transformation?
The era of CIOs as purely technologists is over. Technology has become so democratised that team members and colleagues often know more about specific tools and systems than you do. While we still spend time managing physical infrastructure, tracking laptops and scaling storage, we need to devote equal attention to anticipating the future.
At a leading tech company, in a tech role, change is constant. That’s why one of the biggest responsibilities I carry as CIO is that of a change agent – or as some have dubbed it, Chief Inspiration Officer. My job is to help people stay motivated to embrace change, execute it well and make the personal and emotional commitments necessary to make it stick. CIOs have a distinctive vantage point because we see how different business functions and processes interconnect to produce outcomes. At our best, we can leverage that cross-company perspective to drive initiatives that deliver exceptional results.
What emerging technologies are you most excited about for driving future customer success?
GenAI and Agentic AI have the potential to remove capacity constraints, shift productivity and make things that were unaffordable almost free. Beyond the excitement about LLMs and new application capabilities, it’s clear that data is both the fuel and the roadblock for these solutions. They’ll only ever be as good as the data they’re trained on. That’s why businesses that invest in governance, building a trusted data foundation and training their staff will be the ones to see real benefits at scale.
I’m incredibly excited about what’s ahead. We’ve just launched a comprehensive strategy for Agentic AI, building on our position as the industry’s first AI-powered cloud data management platform. We’re helping customers discover, govern and orchestrate every AI agent they need, all grounded in trusted, enterprise-wide data and protected with enterprise-grade security.
And the applications are wide-ranging. Whatever agents a customer chooses to build, from a custom AI agent for employee onboarding, to a healthcare diagnostic agent or even a creative agent for content generation, they can design, connect and manage multi-agent systems quickly, securely and at scale. That’s what excites me most.
