 Live from Washington DC, it's theCUBE. Covering Boomi World 19, brought to you by Boomi. Welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of Boomi World 19. I'm Lisa Martin with John Furrier. John and I have a couple of gents joining us. To my right is Jeff Emerson, the Global Managing Director for Custom Application Engineering at Accenture. Hey, Jeff. Hey. Welcome. Thank you, glad to be here. We're glad to have you. And we've got Steve Woodback with us, the CPO of Boomi. Hey, Steve. Hey, Lisa. It's been ages. It's been minutes, I think. Yeah, yeah. Great to see you. Yeah, yeah, see you again, John. So guys, we're now going to stick it into some research about the history of Boomi and iPads, and just looking at how the consumerization effect has infected, that's probably a bad word, has really infiltrated, how's that? Infiltrated, it's great. Every industry, organizations went from having enterprise applications, legacy applications, cloud applications, custom applications. Let's talk about custom applications. What are you seeing in the customer marketplace for the demand for having this level of customization, whether it's a retailer or a utilities company? It really doesn't matter what industry it is these days. Custom applications are going through a renaissance. It is truly the renaissance of custom where there was once a swing towards enterprise applications and the packages and so on, and now it's realized that, oh gosh, to separate ourselves from our competition, we have to create something that doesn't exist. Well that is by its nature, a custom application, and so these are coming up more and more across the industry and it's really starting to dominate the value chain for software. You know, we're here in DC and public sector is going through modernization as well. You look at government procurements. I mean, essentially with data, everything's instrumentable. You have unlimited resource with cloud computing. So essentially personalization's a hot trend so applications are being personalized. They're customized so every app should be, not general purpose unless it's either under the covers. So this is the conversation we've been having. You guys, Boomi has a platform, you enable apps, you guys are deploying it. How are customers responding to this? Because to me, they might go, well, custom apps means feels expensive, it feels one-off. The old adage, it's a one-off. But it seems to be coming back. It does, and the fact is you're able to do things so much more quickly today than you ever have been able to in the past and the ability to create new experiences quickly and react in an agile fashion to how those applications are being received in the marketplace. React to the data that is generated, both as the primary data and as the data exhaust from those systems to determine what your customers need, what they want, how they're going to act, what they're going to buy. All of those things are things that we can pull together so much more quickly today than we could ever in the past and so it's great. Steve, we were talking earlier about how data's a real big part of the equation now. But if you think about the application world, it used to be the infrastructure would dictate what you could build. Now you have application developers saying, this is what I want, and now the infrastructure is so programmable, it's kind of flipped around. They're dictating kind of terms, if you will. Well, there's definitely been this sort of emergence of these low-code platforms to kind of help manage that. I mean, and they're kind of taking care of a lot of the infrastructure so you can kind of scale them as needed, but yeah, I mean, it's been a huge part of me. I couldn't agree more. There's like the demand for applications. We're seeing a lot, sure there's the mega applications. We tend to leave those to our sister company, Pivotal to code those, but there's this whole other ecosystem of applications everywhere, the personalizations that the line of business needs to improve their business processes. So we're kind of after that layer, but we have to do it in the right way. It's making it super easy to do on the infrastructure that people expect it to be with the architecture they expect to see so they're highly customizable so they get exactly what they want. Yeah, Jeff, you know, we always talk on the industry and joke on theCUBE, you know, the game changes, but it's still the same, and you know, every time a new trend comes in, oh, it's the death of something, a media, we're in media, you got to say something's dying when something new starts, right? But nothing really changes. If you think about applications, it's the same game just with a different twist to it with cloud, how are customers responding to this? Because obviously there's benefits, business benefits, cost benefits, bottom line, top line, with how they're attacking the application development, then they got a data tsunami happening, but they got to build apps. It's not the death of anything, right? It was once said that apps are eating the world and now it's really the data is feeding the world, right? And so the amount of data that's out there and accessible and usable within applications is absolutely incredible. And so with the emergence of the cloud in order to support those massive amounts of data and to drive rapid development and then low code to make that development much easier, these things all come together and you talked about the death of X, Y, or Z. We talk now about living systems, right? And living systems are things that are easy to modify there. Absolutely attainable and usable and expandable for any kind of use and ultimately adaptable. So John mentioned the word one-off a minute ago and that reminded me of something where in whatever industry that you're in, not too long ago it was customers got some one-off, whether it's an application or part of their infrastructure that's expensive and it's not something that can be monetized. But now to your point, it's really custom applications are a big part of a business's competitive advantage. So what is it about the customized apps? Is it the fact that it's driven by an API that's programmable, that allows it to be customized at scale to where it's not a one-off from a support perspective, it's something that really a company can use as that competitive leg up? Right, in this living systems world, we really have agile engineering, agile methods, and so that we're doing development quickly and we're doing this in an engineering fashion that has microservices and small pieces of functionality that can be grabbed and plugged and played together to create different experiences. And so that granularization of software is something that drives this flexibility and enables us to make modifications and updates quickly. Yeah, actually I can give you a customer example of that, it was something that we'd done which is, I often sort of term it like how the oil and gas industry saved nurses in Africa, or saved people in Africa, which is we built a solution that allowed them nurses in Sub-Saharan Africa to visit patients out in the field. They built it on a low-code platform which is Flow, Port-A-Boomi, connected through APIs, connected to all their infrastructure, but a lot of their work was on Android tablets offline. So with the low-code platform, they could deliver this solution with all offline capabilities, all the connectivity, all the integration all built in, without writing really any code. The only code they wrote was to kind of customize the look and feel, to look exactly what they want. So they delivered that on an early version of our offline framework and then laterally, the oil and gas industry forage and energy deployed a similar solution to their rigs. That allows you to do some really complicated things with form validation and better validation rules, embedded data synchronization. They really forced us to improve our offline framework to something which was a big jump ahead of where it was before. And then lo and behold, the nurses in Africa came back to us and said, well, actually we want to update our app, but we want to run it on desktops, as well as iPads, funnily enough. And we were like, well, good news. We've actually already added that support. And so literally from three days of that phone call to them going live with it on laptops and iPads, that was all it took. They didn't have to write any code. They literally, we just, we give them access to the new UI offline framework. They installed it and off they went. And that's kind of the power of this kind of next gen of app building that for these kind of line of business applications where you just need to innovate how you work. You know, you don't want to have to spend three years rebuilding those for iPad and desktop. You don't have time. So Jeff, how is this that dynamic, which is pretty much, I think, consistent with a lot of these new apps? How does it change your business? Because, you know, the theme that we've been identifying as a mega trend is that there's more projects work going on, fast time to value agile. You guys have been doing exceptional work there in following what you've been doing, talking to Paul Darity amongst others. You got a huge data science team. So you guys are on. I know you guys have transformed, but big projects are now a bunch of little projects going on. So it kind of has to make you guys more agile as a practice, because you got to go out and solve the business problems with the customers. How has this dynamic changed essentially? You're right. We absolutely do. And we have to, as much as anything, it's helping our customers get into that mode of thinking as well. What was once a six months of gathering and documenting requirements is now done in a handful of hours at first to get the first small bit of what's going to be valuable functionality to put out there. You keep doing that iteratively over time instead of in a six month period that then gets thrown over the wall to have other people do this for another, build stuff for six or nine months. Yeah, I mean the iteration and getting those wins early gets proof points, gets momentum, validation. You're not waiting for a gestation period. You make good decisions about what to do next and what to not do that you were planning on doing, but turns out doesn't have the value. I want to get you guys' thoughts on something important. You mentioned humanization. We see that as a big trend. You guys are very people-centric in your thinking at Boomi. And we've had this debate on theCUBE. We kind of didn't come in on either side yet, but you know, iteration's great, iterate fast, but the old days of software, there was a lot of craftsmanship involved. You know, crafting the product, getting it right. Now it's ship, be embarrassed, ship it fast and then iterate, which is great for efficiency, but there's a trend coming back to crafting product. So, what is your thoughts on this? Because craftsmanship is now design thinking. What if you're calling it different names, but this is a new thing. It's happening all the time. Yeah, software craftsmanship is something that is more important today than it ever has been. Because you're going fast and because you're putting things out into the market very quickly, you can't afford to make big mistakes, right? You can make functional decision mistakes, right? Oh, that wasn't the right thing for the customer, but having it not work or creating it of bad experiences, right? Very bad, right? And so that craftsmanship building in all the DevOps pipelines and the error checking, the testing and gateways and security checking, all that happens automatically every time you check in code, right? That is critical and it drives that craftsmanship back to the developer, right? Pushing left so that you make a mistake, you fix it within minutes, as opposed to... You run product and engineering and you got a smile on your face. Come on, what's your angle on this craftsmanship? No, no, it's the same thing. Craftsmanship is obviously huge. I mean, when we thought about, like, Bumi, we kind of wanted to make sure that, you know, that we used to talk a lot about no-code platforms and I think that what they did was they left out the craftsmanship that developers can do. And then I've kind of thought it was like, hey, if you can put, like, the business or the person who really understands the process or the application into the beating heart of the creation process so they can be on the right side of the soft reading in the world, like they can be a creator and a producer as much as they can be a consumer of applications. If you can allow them to do that and then let developers radiate that out with new engagement models, you know, coding out new experiences that are really hyper-specific to the use case or the user, that's kind of the ultimate. You got the core business value and then you got the craftsmanship of the engineers together, I think is a good place. And I'm glad you said that because there's so many cases where I hear, oh, we want to push it so that we don't even need software engineers for our software and that's an interesting ideal. But it's actually not a good ideal or idea simply because there's an important aspect of software and how IT runs that even if you have low-code components in order to drive the functionality, right, there's things that have to be done that frankly professional software engineers know how to do. And it's better and faster and easier to do it that way. I think the iteration certainly makes the problem that you're trying to solve solvable, right? Don't take your eye off the main ball which is solve the problem. Yeah. But get it elegantly designed or right. So I think that's a good, this is a big discussion that you're seeing a lot with the low-code. So again, this is back to the custom apps. Custom apps just means a targeted app that solves a specific problem. That's right. Because if it's a unique problem and it's different than the other one, right? That's the speed game. It's a speed game too now, isn't it? That's right. Fast, fast, fast. And the engineering methods have changed really over the last couple of decades while I've been doing this where we talked a moment ago about the waterfall ways and then the agile ways and the simple fact of the matter is that you're developing small pieces of software to get out into the market quickly and you can do this in a matter of days and weeks as opposed to months and quarters. Right, which many businesses don't have that time because the competitors going to get in there. I'm curious as the development methods have changed so dramatically, have the customer conversations, like are you guys talking more with business leaders versus the guys and girls in DevOps? Is this more of a business level conversation that a CIO, a CFO, a CEO is involved in? So from our perspective at Accenture, the technology is always there to drive a business need and so that conversation is first with the business owners and that was true 20 years ago as well. As much as we do IT transformation, it's business led IT transformation and more often technology supported business transformation. Excellent, well guys thank you for joining John and me on the program today talking about all the things that you guys are seeing out in the field, exciting stuff. Thanks for having us. We appreciate your time. Thank you. Thank you. For John Furrier, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE from Boomi World 19. Thanks for watching.