 From the SiliconANGLE Media Office in Boston, Massachusetts, it's theCUBE. Now, here's your host, Stu Miniman. Welcome to a special presentation of theCUBE. As we get towards the end of 2017, and I'm recently back from the Amazon Web Services re-invent show in Las Vegas, we've been talking about all the permutations of cloud, and especially how data really fits into a multi-cloud world. Happy to welcome to the program, first-time guest, but from a company we've watched for many years, Chris McNab, who's the CEO of Dell Boomi, which of course was an acquisition Dell made back in, I believe, it was 2010. And thanks so much for joining us. Stu, it's great to be here. I appreciate you taking the time and having me here. All right, so our audience knows Dell real well, of course, in the news a ton over the last year with the largest kind of merger acquisition in the technology industry. And there's so many chess moves going on in the industry. Dell buys EMC, they've got subsidiaries, and they've spun certain pieces off. And at Dell World, there was a lot of discussion about certain software assets that come out of the core Dell piece, but the piece that is staying in, of course, is Dell Boomi. So maybe for audience just kind of, who is Dell Boomi today and why is it so important that Michael keep that inside the core group? Great question. So Dell Boomi is a very strategic asset to Dell very simply because we are the glue that ties together all of the cloud applications that enterprises are having, all of their legacy backend systems that the people have, they want to share data amongst and so on and so forth. They want to be able to get data exposed to mobile applications, create web services and so on. And we act as a unified platform to do that. So when you think about Dell being an end-to-end solutions provider, they're going to need a technology like that to bring together all of the various aspects of their solution and we act right in the middle of that. So we're very fortunate and just blessed to be the only asset that remains from the Dell software group sale. All right, and Chris, what I remember about Boomi is, it really ties into kind of that SaaS layer. So there's always those arguments, oh, the infrastructure layer, where kind of things like Pivotal fit in the stack, but from our research, two thirds of cloud revenue is on software as a service and that is a highly fragmented, every vertical in industry has lots of solutions. So companies therefore end up with lots of different SaaS pieces and that kind of is where you fit, correct? That's correct and Stu, what happens is as people buy multiple SaaS applications, it's very much a hybrid thing. All these different vendors make that and now your data is spread across all these different vendor solutions and to get it to act together as a suite requires a series of services for the CIO. They have to be able to move data from anything, they have to be able to manage it, govern it and orchestrate it and that's what we're here to help them with. Well, I just put it all on Microsoft and they'll do Active Directory and take care of everything for you, right? Well, it doesn't typically work that way. Most enterprises, while I think many vendors, including us to some degree, want to sit there and say, buy everything from us, that's not how enterprises operate. People will go to different SaaS applications because they need the best of breed to be competitive advantage. They'll get competitive advantage in the market. So I don't think you're going to see everything in an enterprise from one vendor anytime soon. Yeah, so we mentioned the merger of EMC and Dell and you were even telling an interesting story about how you've helped the Salesforce come together and how does Bumi play into something like that and from an M&A standpoint? Yeah, it was a real challenge. As the largest IT merger in history, you were trying to bring together 40,000 sales makers and so as we worked on that, we wanted to have on day one of the merger go live to have all 40,000 sales makers be able to communicate with each other and collaborate with each other. And Bumi act as the underpinning. So changes in Salesforce orgs that were run by former EMC and those run by former Dell, sales makers, they were synchronized. So if we were the rep at your EMC, I'm Dell, we're a rep at this company here. If I showed up and updated my Salesforce org, you would see what I'm doing there. And if you went in and saw an opportunity maybe for me to come in, you could share that information with me. And that all happened on day one, leveraging Bumi technology. That's pretty cool. So how does this work in sharing data, identities, all these pieces? How do you clean that up for people? Well, it's a series of things that we have to do and it's a complicated question, but we have services that allow you to move things. We have the ability to allow you to manage data changes. So if a sales rep goes into Salesforce and goes to change billing address, you really want to ask, should they, are they authorized to do that? Is it of quality? Does the billing department require it? Cause you certainly don't want your invoice to go to the wrong location and all those kinds of questions. So we do that. And then there's also the governance side as we try and get to it. Identity, provisioning, deep provisioning of user access and user management and things of that nature. So we help organizations through all of those major service areas because they have all of these different products from different vendors. Okay, Chris, my understanding you have a recent release kind of set some updates, some new pieces and things. Maybe you can walk us through some of those. Yeah, so we have a recent product release, our winter release that's come out. We've come out with a whole variety of new user experience changes to continue to accelerate developer productivity. It's critical for our customers that they complete integration activities in the shortest amount of time, the shortest amount of time to value. So we've got a lot of things in that area. Got some things in the API management area where people can now create and publish different APIs. We have a management layer that allows you to sort of mediate changes to multiple APIs behind the scene which is very big for developers today to help simplify a complicated environment. We've done an awful lot in security, identity and some other backend things to help us scale across the enterprises. Yeah. Very exciting release. Really interesting space. I mean, we've been talking about the API economy for a number of years. Kind of that API management's been pretty hot. Google made an acquisition in Apigee recently. They did. You know, can I ask, where does your solution, where do you tend up selling it to and then who's the one that kind of, or who are the groups that touch your product? So we tend to, when it comes to API management that tends to be mostly an IT kind of a sale and it tends to be in the larger enterprise. So these are organizations that have an existing API management strategy. So as they evolve in that, they need a management layer to secure it, monitor, measure it, have a catalog, search it, find APIs, et cetera, et cetera. So it's the larger enterprises on the IT side that we sell the API management to. Okay. And do you do anything to help people when they've got all these pieces kind of manage the different pieces? You know, which solutions? You know, do you get any of the licensing piece or is that kind of outside the scope of what you go through? We don't do too much on the entitlement and licensing side. We do have a lot of management when it comes to our operation. So there's a complete DevOps kind of capability in our platform. So if you create an integration process, we version that, we upgrade that. Our customers never go through software upgrades for versions of our software. And so we have complete DevOps for all of that kind of stuff as a part of our subscription. Okay. And yeah, how does your software keep up with all the new versions? I know you've worked with Azure and Amazon and of course I'm always on the latest version and they keep pushing out new updates. Yeah. And if you look at our press release today, you'll see 15 to 20 different connectors that we've updated just in the past few months. And that's a constant source of activity for us and our customers help us prioritize which are in demand and the highest level kind of connectors. So we build connectors, we create them, we keep them upgraded. And we have an SLA that says if vendors come to the market with changes to their API and they're our connector, we try and get that update out within 90 days. Okay. So being a part of Dell, you guys don't have to share some of the revenue pieces but what can you tell us about number of customers growth, things like that? So Boomi's been experiencing a tremendous amount of growth over the past few years. We are the only company in the integration platforms of service market to be positioned as a leader by Gartner, Forrester, both Forrester reports as a matter of fact, and the OVM radar radar range. So that being said, we have over 5,000 customers worldwide today. We are adding roughly four customers a day at this point to our growth rate is very high. Our compounded annual growth rates for the business are very high way above market at this point, virtually double the market growth rate. So we're much, much larger than we're about six or seven times larger than we were just four years ago. Must give you some interesting visibility into kind of customers. We've actually got a survey that we did with Northbridge Ventures, so Wikibon, Northbridge Ventures, about 1,000 customers that we're going to be sharing the data on December 13th actually. Okay. And what we found is, of course, SaaS, everybody's multi-vendor. Infragrate, when it comes to infrastructure and platform as a service, found actually about little over 60% of customers were choosing one vendor as kind of their primary. And a lot of that feedback I get in the community is things like training, skill set, leverage of buying and complexity tie into a lot of that. So on the SaaS side, I mean, is it just this great proliferation out there? What do you see as to, are people choosing strategic vendors or are they very tactical as to how they buy things? I think how we experience the market is people have a pretty clear idea of how the key systems in their enterprise, and that varies from vertical to vertical. But how those key systems and what vendors they want to use for those. And they create a core, I'll call it a virtual ERP, right? This CRM system, this retail system, if I'm in retail and et cetera, et cetera. And in a middleware system, integration platforms of service, et cetera, and they'll create a core stack. And then they'll start adding around that. And they'll have other systems of engagement. They'll create mobile apps to augment it and things of that nature. So that's very typical on how we experience it. But what we don't see is somebody trying to do everything with a single vendor, best of breed, because it brings that competitive advantage is driving people to select what's the best thing out there today. Yeah, absolutely. And I mean, the diversity of applications that enterprises have, of course, kind of lend to that. Question for you though, something we kind of posited a bunch of years back, will we ever get to the point that we can really just have an enterprise app store? Customers want to be able to choose that best of breed, use what they want, but it's not that simple when it gets to the customers. Does your solution help enable that kind of deployment? I love that as a vision statement. I think it's a terrific vision to have. And I wish we could get there sooner. But our platform does enable that. Our platform glues together all of these systems from different vendors and gives you a common way to share data, gives you a common way to make sure you're managing changes to the data that are in those systems from different vendors, gives you a common way to govern user access roles, what people can do, what they're allowed to do and not allowed to do, et cetera, et cetera, across that space. So we're, I think, the next great step there, we can provide a tremendous amount of value to our customers and being able to help solve those problems. I think we're a little bit a distance away from your vision. All right, so you mentioned governance. Can you just walk us through how kind of security, governance and compliance fit into how you do things? You know, the public cloud guys in the past tend to be, well, here's our policy. You know, where do the policy lives? How do people manage it? How do you fit into that? So there's a couple sides to it. So when you think about identity management in terms of your users and your employees accessing data in various applications and so on. So when you onboard a new employee, you have to provision them and set up accounts in all of these systems across your enterprise and that's a large task. And then they change roles as they get promoted throughout your organization. And then finally, when they leave the organization, you need to make sure from a client, compliance perspective that they're in fact, their access is removed and so on. And we've got systems to help our customers automatically provision, automatically update, automatically deprovision and then provide reports for auditors to say, this is when Stu left, this is how I can prove that their access is removed. So that's it from an employee side. We're not an identity broker. We interact with the active directories, LDAPs of the world and so on. And then you have it from a service side, API side. So now you're offering up services and you have to make sure that the people calling in have the right credentials, have the right authorization and so on. And that's another side of the whole identity thing that we do. Okay. Fascinating. Multi-cloud world I kind of set up at the beginning, you know, I've got things lots of place. I've got my SaaS, I've got my on-prem, I've got my public cloud. And how do I really get more value out of my data? Is that something you guys help with? Is that something kind of the parent company, you know, ties into, where does that fit? Well, I think there's a number of things that certainly the larger Dell EMC can do. You know, if you look at, at virtue stream, you know, they provide infrastructure as a service for mission critical applications. And that's essential for people in trying to achieve their cloud first strategies and things of that nature. Certainly as people get migrated to their infrastructure as a service, there's an integration challenge presented once you move those things. Pivotal Cloud Foundry is a terrific platform for people to create custom applications. You know, the folks at Pivotal are normally saying, listen, everybody's in the software business. And if you really want competitive advantage, you've got to be in the software business. And once you start creating your custom apps, they typically work better when they're integrated and getting and sharing data with other things. And we can help that as well. So when you look at the vision of what Dell Technologies and the combination of just those two examples can bring to the table for our customers, it's very compelling and it's engaging and it's thought-provoking and it's things that our customers can really achieve success with as we go down the road. All right, Chris, what are you hearing from users as we kind of head into 2017? What's the biggest challenges they're facing? What can we do more as an industry to kind of help them with their whole cloud journey? Right now, Stu, the biggest challenge that customers come to me, and they come to me with a number of different ways of saying it. But quite frankly, it's the challenges that are presented by the hybrid IT environment, which is I've got cloud from multiple things. I'm trying to do some IoT stuff and mobile stuff. Integration demand is increasing exponentially because of all these new endpoints and I'm trying to manage in government and it gets hard. So it's presented this way. You take, you have a new CRM and so on and you have a different contracting system that you pulled out of your old-fashioned ERB. CEO used to come to the CIA and say, print me out a list of customers. And you'd go into the reports menu and print and literally a minute later, out comes your customers. That doesn't happen anymore. Now that you've spread your data out all over the place and people are changing Salesforce and it's different than what's in your ERP. That's different in your contract system. Now they ask the question, say, print me out my list of customers and you're like, what list of customers? The list of my closed one in Salesforce, my list in my ERP that I'm billing, my list in my, I don't know what my list is now. Now the CIO comes back and says, I need two weeks. Let me, let me figure that out for you. And people just don't understand why it's that complicated. That challenge, that hybrid IT challenge is at the core of all the different requests that I get. Yeah, wasn't cloud supposed to really simplify all this? We'd make it real easy. I mean, I hear all the IoT discussion and I'm like, wait, order magnitude surface area, way broader scope of everything and boy, things get a lot more complicated as we look at the future. They actually have gotten much more complicated but it's the integration platform as a service vendors that are helping simplify that and helping make that manageable again. It's taking us a little bit to recover from what has been lost and we're addressing those needs as our customers scale into new areas. So we are making really good progress there and helping people quite a bit to address those. So now the good news is you can buy all the cloud apps you want from all the different vendors you want, get your best of breed, get the thing you need to drive competitive advantage and you have a reference implementation that glues it all together for you and provides the pre-integration, the management and the governance. Well, it's terrific. Chris, I think that's a perfect way to end our discussion. All the pieces in a multi-cloud world, you've got all of your SaaS, you've got your data and the integration platform as a service from companies like Dell Boomi, pulling it all together. Chris, thanks so much for coming to the office here. It's been a pleasure to have you and be sure to check out silkenangle.tv for lots more of our event coverage around the enterprise tech industry. Thanks for watching theCUBE.