Do old incumbents really have a chance against nimble, zero-baggage startups? The automotive industry is a good place to dig out the answer to that question. Established giants like Ford Motor Co. and Toyota Motor Corp. are leveraging data compete against transportation service startups like Uber Technologies Inc.

The days when auto makers only had to worry about other auto makers outperforming them are long gone, according to Smail Haddad (pictured, right), senior information technology director of data governance, data delivery and architecture at Toyota Motor North America.

“Our new competition is all the technology companies — the Google, the Apple, the Amazon,” Haddad said. Luckily, Toyota — and many incumbent companies across industries — already owns tons of data from its decades in business. The company is breaking it out of silos to gain a competitive advantage in consumer experience, operations and other areas.

Haddad and Jitesh Ghai (pictured, left), senior vice president and general manager of data quality, security and governance at Informatica LLC, spoke with John Furrier (@furrier) and Peter Burris (@plburris), co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, at the Informatica World event in Las Vegas. They discussed how data cataloging can prevent system-overload from unsiloed data. (* Disclosure below.)

Bringing data together to break it down the right way

Toyota’s awakening came around 2008 when production was out of sync with a dip in demand; data on consumer activity could have predicted such, and the company would have throttled down production and saved expenditures. The company started to get serious about using data to run a tighter business and better serve customers.

“So we built our big data solution where the data is coming from various departments and various business lines. And it’s been blended together and correlated,” Haddad said. “What that gives us is really that 360 view of our business, which we were missing, because we were looking at the business in silos, in pieces.”

The perfection of safe, reliable, self-driving cars, in particular, will require tons of quality data, he added. Toyota relies on Informatica’s big data catalog to wade though its considerable data stores.

“The promise of big data is bringing together data that hasn’t been analyzed … in a new context,” Ghai said. Visibility and governance are crucial to separating the wheat from the chaff for analytics, he added.

“The data catalog gives you a sense of what data do you want to bring in the lake, and what data frankly is noise,” Ghai concluded.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the Informatica World event. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for Informatica World 2018. Neither Informatica LLC, the event sponsor, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE