Some of our latest AI products are co-invented at our India centre: Krishna Narasimhan, MD, Informatica 

Krishna Narasimhan, Managing Director, India, and Global Vice President, Global Customer Support, Informatica  sheds light on Informatica’s 20-year journey in India, evolving from a Global Capability Centre to a pivotal hub driving innovation, including co-developing cutting-edge AI technologies like CLAIRE GPT. He also discusses the company’s shift to cloud-based services, efforts to enhance customer support, and how Informatica is addressing data governance, AI innovation, and the growing significance of the Indian market in its global operations.

Could you give a brief overview of Informatica’s operations in India and what is its position in the Indian market?

We started Informatica India 20 years ago, initially focusing on engineering capabilities as a Global Capability Centre (GCC). Over time, we expanded to include multiple business units, the first being customer support, where I was the first employee in 2004. Our initial focus was data integration, known then as ETL (Extract, Transform, Load), aimed at connecting, transforming, and loading data for analytics.

As our work evolved from ETL to data integration and full data management, the India centre contributed to various product journeys, including data quality and unstructured data management. Most recently, we co-innovated CLAIRE GPT in India. From product management to engineering operations, we handle everything here.

Customer support has grown significantly, with India now managing 60% of the global support load through a 24-hour “follow the sun” model. We also added shared services like IT, HR, finance, and built alliances to enable global partners such as TCS, Wipro, and Infosys. Professional services and Informatica University, which offers certification courses on our products, also operate from India.

In terms of acquisitions, we gained our Hyderabad Centre through AppliMation, and our Chennai Centre through AllSight, both of which now contribute to all product journeys. We added customer success to ensure customers adopt our cloud products successfully, and cloud modernisation to help customers transition from on-premises solutions to the cloud.

Today, Informatica considers the India centre its second headquarters due to the extensive capabilities we’ve developed here.

What specific initiatives have been implemented to improve customer support and satisfaction in India? How are you addressing the unique challenges and needs of the Indian market?

Yes, the significance of the cloud is something I definitely wanted to touch upon. This is one of the key transformations that Informatica has undergone—moving from a perpetual licence on-premise software model to cloud and subscription-based services. When customers buy a cloud product, their cost of ownership is significantly reduced. 

From a customer support standpoint, if you look at on-premise software, customers take their time configuring and setting up servers and our software, which takes a lot of time. With cloud-based software, it’s already configured, and you can start using the product almost immediately. 

This shift has made adoption and consumption a major focus for post-sales teams. 

How AI-powered innovations like GenAI CLAIRE GPT are transforming business operations?

If you look at it from a broader perspective, Informatica introduced CLAIRE way back in 2017. Initially, CLAIRE was more focused on predictive analytics, but today it has evolved into the generative space. Informatica has always been closely associated with data, and data remains a critical component. If your organisation has a strategy, data plays a key role. Good data ensures that, from an enterprise standpoint, you’re making informed decisions.

We launched CLAIRE because we recognised our strong capabilities in cataloguing and business velocity. This allowed us to help customers identify and use the right data sources. Through our metadata capabilities, we could tell them exactly where their data resides—whether it’s customer data, ID information, or something else. Once you’ve catalogued your data using our product, you gain a clear understanding of your data landscape from an enterprise perspective.

When we moved to generative capabilities, we introduced an interface where customers can use natural language to query where their data sources are. In an enterprise, customer data might be scattered across multiple applications, but once they’ve catalogued using our product, the generative interface makes it easy to query and retrieve the data they need. The system understands the query, and using prompt technology, it delivers the relevant sources in natural language.

Previously, customers with limited technical expertise would have had to rely on their internal IT teams to access data. But now, with CLAIRE GPT, they can use natural language to locate their data sources, preview them, and determine if they are useful for decision-making. If they are satisfied with the data, they can even operationalise an integration workflow, ensuring they receive the data regularly. 

Our goal is to make life easier for integration administrators and business users by simplifying how they access and manage their data landscape within their enterprise.

How is Informatica addressing the increasing importance of data governance and privacy in India? 

We have had a data governance and privacy product for a very long time, ever since privacy laws began emerging across the world, especially the significant ones in Europe and other regions. Through our data governance and privacy product, we can thoroughly understand sensitive data from a compliance perspective. 

We identify where sensitive data exists and, through governance, enable our customers to decide who should have access to it. There’s a security process where requests for data access are made, approved, and then granted. Another feature we offer is data masking, which comes into play when someone only needs the data for testing or analytics purposes. We have data masking rules that ensure the data is masked and sent accordingly.

Our customers using the data governance and privacy product can define rules on who can access the data. We also create a marketplace where authorised data can be subscribed to and accessed by individuals with the right permissions.

Do you have a strategy in place for fostering AI innovation in India to propel its growth?

Some of our latest AI products are co-invented at our India centre. From an AI strategy perspective, we are more focused on the enterprise level. It’s not like a free flow of queries; instead, we focus on business data. That’s what is most important for us.

If you look at some of our products, we have developed our own LLMs. We don’t rely on platforms like OpenAI because they cover a broad range of things. Our concern is more specific to the enterprise. That’s why we have trained our own model to provide suggestions and answers tailored for enterprise implementations.

What are your growth expectations from the Indian market?

A lot of innovation is happening at our India centre. If you look at it, we have been recruiting actively. Since 2023, we’ve closed nearly 200 positions. If you visit our careers website, you’ll see that more than 50% of the openings are for our India centres, located in Bangalore, Hyderabad, and Chennai. 

We continue to recruit, and we also have a strong college hiring program. We visit various colleges to hire fresh graduates, and we support the government’s Apprentice program as well. This means that we not only offer internships but also provide opportunities for graduates who have completed their studies, ensuring we maintain a strong apprentice pipeline.

Do you think the current generation of teenagers or young adults needs AI-related courses or training, either in the education system or through fellowships, to use AI more responsibly and support better governance structures?

Going forward, in any profession, it’s not strictly limited to IT, professionals will be aided by co-pilots that will cross-verify many of the tasks they perform. For instance, a doctor or any other professional will increasingly rely on technology, utilising co-pilots that enhance their work. So, definitely, having a good awareness of AI is going to propel your career much better than without it, at least that’s my thought process.

In any way are you currently leveraging the benefits of GenAI?

I also run the customer support business, and within that, we’re exploring how we can develop a plausible co-pilot for our engineers. For instance, when a customer opens a case, we’ll review the contents to see if there are relevant articles the customer can browse. From an engineer’s perspective, the system will suggest, “Hey, these are the aspects you should be looking at. This problem has been solved before.” It will involve a lot of prompt engineering to help generate responses.

We’re focused on saving time for our engineers. This will not only allow them to offload some of the more basic tasks they’re handling today, but also let AI generate responses for customers. While this is happening, engineers can focus on higher-level tasks, becoming specialists in their roles.

I believe we’re on a good path in terms of adopting generative AI to drive efficiencies within our business. The customer support example is just one case—there are other departments, like finance and IT, that are also leveraging these technologies. For example, our internal help desk is using AI, and even in finance, we’re using intelligent bots to handle employee queries about payroll and other matters.

These implementations give engineers more time to focus on becoming specialists, rather than spending time on routine tasks. Overall, I see these technologies as a positive development, offering great benefits and efficiencies.

What will be your focus area for the next 12 months in the Indian market?

We’re focused on ensuring that our customers successfully adopt our products. Since we have such a large presence in India, I feel that many of our Indian customers can directly benefit from the capabilities we have here in our Indian centres. We’re definitely looking forward to hosting some of our Indian customers in our offices to demonstrate the full power of our capabilities.

I’ve done this several times, where we’ve had some of our employees join their all-hands meetings or participate in events in their offices. We send our employees there to engage with them directly, which really showcases the strength of having a centre in a country with so many technology opportunities.