 Live from the Julia Morgan Ballroom in San Francisco. Extracting the signal from the noise. It's theCUBE, covering structure 2015. Hi, welcome back, everybody. Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We are live in downtown San Francisco at the rebirth of structure. Went away, there were some things going on, but really happy the structure's back. We're here for the first time, coming out, extracting the signal from the noise. And really one of the fun things about a show like this is talking to some new startups that we haven't met before. So we're excited for this next segment to be joined by Mark Genie, co-founder and CEO of Cloud Elements, so welcome. Thanks, thanks for having me here. Yeah, it's great to see structure back again. So for the folks that aren't familiar with the company, give us kind of the basic background. Yep, Cloud Elements is a API integration and management platform. So we essentially are an integration platform as service all in the form of APIs. So developers can integrate lots of APIs into the apps faster. So let's dig into that a little deeper. So we're living in the API economy, right? Everything's connected, a lot of cloud applications, people are coming out with new cloud applications all the time. So that part's pretty much done. But what you guys are really addressing is now the new challenge, which is now I have them. Now what do I do with them? How do I manage them? How do I integrate them? Yeah, if you really look at the first generation of API management, it's about publishing APIs, right? So, and developers have figured out how to do that really, really well. There's now millions of available APIs, promise they're all different. They all have their own data structure, their own syntax, their own format. So what we do is help developers kind of normalize those APIs so they can consume them faster, right? So now the next generation of API management is about how can I consume all these millions of APIs that have been developed? So what do you find in the field? What's kind of the breaking point? What are some of the catalysts that get people to say, okay, I have to slow down on my implementation of all these things and actually start to worry about managing it? Yeah, well, what's happened is if you look at the typical enterprise now, they have 15 to 20 SaaS applications they're using. Then you've got the aspect of like its structure here, this multi-cloud environment where the world's become multi-cloud. So now you're using multiple cloud environments, et cetera. Every layer of the cloud has APIs and they're all unique and they have their own structure. So now we've really reached this tipping point where you're now consuming dozens and dozens of APIs in an environment, in an enterprise at all layers of the cloud. And now how do I get them to work together and consume and use those and manage all those APIs that I'm using? Right, and I think we talk about kind of the big name cloud applications all the time with Salesforce, et cetera, but there's a whole kind of rash of specialty applications under the covers that are SaaS-based that most people don't know unless you're in that particular industry. Yeah, I mean just look at the marketing automation. This is a space that didn't even exist five or six years ago. Now it's estimated to just one year alone that they went from 1,000 marketing automation applications to 2,000 applications in the last 12 months, right? So it's doubled and they each have their own API. They each have to all integrate with whether you have a HubSpot or Marquette or whatever, but there's all these ancillary applications now, right? So this proliferation of software has created this challenge of how do I now consume and make it all work together? And then how do you guys keep up? I mean, is your business model that you're just a management layer? Do you offer kind of pre-configured connectors? I mean, where do you kind of fit in? How do you manage in this kind of really dynamic space? Yeah, so we offer over 100 connectors to the leading SaaS applications, but then, so everything from Salesforce, to HubSpot, to Zendesk, NetSuite, et cetera, but then we've also built tooling that you can easily publish in integration to the next one, right? So those thousands of marketing automation applications, we can add them in, our customers can add them in, or integrators or partners that we work with can add those into the platform as well, yeah. And then from the customer perspective, do you see any kind of one plus one makes three effects when you're starting to tie some of these disparate applications together in ways that maybe you either couldn't or you didn't think about it, or you're getting kind of some synergies there that maybe you couldn't do before. Absolutely, well, what's happening is you can build applications faster than ever now because you can say, hey, I want to build a new mobile app, but I want to use a company object from Salesforce, files and folders from Box. I want to use servers on EC2, and I want to use my ticketing system from Zendesk. You can take APIs from all those and now build a new application on top of that, right? So all those data structures to create a company object or something like that, you don't have to do anymore, right? Because you can glue these services together now into new apps and new services, right? And now if you really look at the advent of microservices, right, where you can just pick a small little service to do notifications or whatever it might be, you can combine those together now into new services, right? And so you can make new APIs out of APIs or you can make new applications out of APIs. And again, are you seeing that as an accelerant to the developing of these kind of API-based applications or is it more the pain that we've been doing that and now we're running into all these management issues? Yeah, well, I think you have both going on, right? You can accelerate now building new API-based applications, but then you've got to deal with all the challenges of the ones you are using, making them work together, right? How do I, you know, I was just talking to somebody today and it's like their company got bought by Western Digital where they use a core set of business operational systems, Western Digital uses a different set of systems. Well, now Western Digital has to face how do I make that all work together, right? How do I combine that? And so where do you see it kind of evolving over the next several years as, you know, everyone obviously, APIs are everywhere. Everybody wants to work with other applications. How do you see kind of the evolution of this market space? Yeah, I think you're right now, you're at the phase where you've got millions of APIs with microservices coming along where you're going to have tens of millions of services or APIs available, right? So you're going to see these just continual exponential growth in the amount of services available. And that's again where kind of consuming those APIs is about how do I transform the data payloads between them? How do I consume events when there's changes at different endpoints? How do I manage the logging of all that, right? And so that's a kind of a whole set of services that are going to be about using APIs and making them work together, right? Because of that, just again that exponential growth that we're going to continue to see. And then the other thing that comes up, some of the shows we go through, they talk about the kind of the permanence because now these things are so easy to build these microservices that they may not necessarily have a long lifespan. They may be singles use or short-term use. How do you continue to manage that as these things are proliferating so fast and some of the old ones end the life or go away, but maybe it's integrated into a really key application? So I think of dealing with this future of so many services, like you said, and a lot of them having a temporal type of approach, you're going to find two skills are going to be really important, right? There's going to be aggregation and abstraction, aggregating APIs together by abstracting them into a normalized set, right? So if I'm going to use a ticketing service, abstract the concept of a ticket or abstract the concept of a contact from all those marketing automation systems so that can work independently and don't make your application dependent upon the endpoint, right? Right to an abstracted object and then use transformation services to go the individual service. Does that make sense? Yeah, yeah. Just another layer of abstraction. Another layer of, but you have to, because if there's a temporal nature to these services, you have to shield your application, right? It's dependent upon data structures from those services or other things that you want to shield it in case you change that provider underneath, right? And that's where, again, a set of type of consumption type of services fit in. And then what do you find in the field in terms of kind of the percentage of APIs that people need to manage that from a third-party application like Salesforce or Zendesk or whatever, versus one that's from an in-house application that they've built. Maybe it's historical, it's legacy they just, they built and what's kind of that landscape look like as the delta between those two? Well, you know, enterprises are faced with APIs from three places, right? So there's APIs we were talking about which are from the apps that I use to run my business, right? Like Salesforce or Workday, whatever. Then there's the APIs that you just buy that are just APIs like SendGrid, Twilio, Authorize.net, they're just APIs, right? They're not even an application available for them. But you buy to use to build new apps. And then there's the APIs you build, right? To run your business and to operate your business. And those are, you know, again, enterprises have been building and opening up more and more of their functionality as APIs. But their challenges combine all those together, right? The ones they build, the ones they buy, and the ones they use are from the apps they use are that population they have to deal with. Right. All right, Mark, so I'll give you the last word before we head out. What are your priorities for 2016? What's kind of top of mind awareness you guys are working on? Well, key priorities for us is just continue to advance our product platform. We're growing sales and marketing team. We've raised more capital. And, you know, just reaching more customers. We'll have over a hundred paying customers at the end of this year. Another thousands using our product on the freemium version. And just continue to integrate to more endpoints and keep up with this, you know, this expansion that's happening in the API world. Yeah, awesome. Thanks for stopping by Cloud Elements. The opportunities to grow startups and really continue to leverage this thing morphs and morphs and morphs and abstraction, abstraction, abstraction just continue to grow. So thanks for taking a few minutes. Thanks for having me join you. Absolutely. So Jeff Rick, we're here at the Julie Morgan Ballroom at Structure. We'll be back with our next guest after this short break. Thanks for watching.