Informatica CEO Abbasi on Data, Scale, Leadership and Innovation

To put Abbasi’s tenure in perspective it’s worth noting that Hewlett-Packard in the last decade had six CEOs, including interim ones, and Yahoo had seven fully-installed CEOs. SAP over the last decade has had two teams of co-CEOs, with one-half of the second duo later flying solo as leader. And CA Technologies has had three CEOs during that spell.

Informatica’s $1 billion-in-sales mark is also worth noting because it often serves as an inflection point for enterprise software companies.

Some vendors pass $1 billion and simply keep growing after a few growing pains. Oracle, SAP, Microsoft, and others hit that revenue mark — think Novell — and run into a brick wall.

Abbasi’s challenge now is to scale Informatica into a $3 billion company. Clearly, the stars — cloud, mobile, social and big data — have aligned with the data integration company’s strategy. Companies’ lifeblood is data and, to really tap into analytics, they need technology to pull information together from multiple systems. Informatica spends 17 percent of revenue on research and development to solve those data integration issues.

Read more: ZDNet