 Live from Washington DC, it's theCUBE, covering Boomi World 19, brought to you by Boomi. Hey, welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of Boomi World 19 from Washington DC. I'm Lisa Martin with John Furrier and John and I have a CUBE alumni sitting with us. We have the Chief Product Officer of Dell Boomi, Steve Wood, Steve, welcome back. Yeah, thank you. Now it's great to be back. Good to see you again, John. Great. Nice to meet you, yeah. Likewise, enjoyed your keynote this morning. Man, there were so many nuggets in there. I couldn't type fast enough, but one of my favorite things that you said is that no one is asking for less data slower. Yes, okay, yeah, yeah, I did. I kind of like saying that because it frames things very clearly. It's just like, because it's clearly a problem, everybody relates to them and the audience thought it was kind of amusing, so everybody got it immediately. I was like, yep, that's a fair statement, so. So, and then you kind of took us the audience back to 11 months ago at Boomi World 18. Some of the things that you guys said, this is what we're going to be really focused on, redefining the eye and eye pass to be intelligent. Give our audience who wasn't able to see your keynote a little bit of that historical from 11 months ago to what you guys are delivering today and what the Boomi platform looks like today. Yeah, yeah, sure. So, I mean, a lot of what we showed last year, I mean, we kind of owe the, we feel like we as the kind of creators of the industry have to kind of try and lead it, where where is it going next? That's our big kind of duty, I guess. And so it's been taken over by me. We had the founder of Boomi attend, which was nice. But yeah, so the big thing we showed last year was kind of the next generation, which is really a unified look and feel. So it's super easy to build applications that spend all of the portfolio in our, that we offer our customers. We wanted to make it very collaborative, so users of, you know, in the business or business analysts or quite technical people can work together and use our platform as a collaboration space with the right controls in place. So stuff like that was really good to show that, our new solutions overview. We've been definitely encouraging partners to put more intellectual property into our platform to help accelerate their customers, help accelerate our customers, just get people onboarded as quickly as possible. In fact, actually onboarding, employee onboarding was the solution we showed last year. That was fantastic. I couldn't believe how complex that was at Boomi. And when you guys said, we've got to change this, huge improvements. Yeah, yeah, well it was sort of a discovery that came up from one of our sales engineers, this guy Andy Tiller did a fantastic job. He didn't enjoy his onboarding experience at Boomi. And then sort of building a solution and we were like, whoa, we could actually do this way better on the platform. But what was amazing was that even for a company the size of Boomi, which is about a thousand people, we had like nearly a hundred integration points and systems that had to be coordinated to onboard a single employee. Yeah, it's a lot, you know. So it became a real like connectivity problem. Actually the onboarding bit's relatively easy. It's just like connecting to all these systems. That's the hard bit. So yeah, we're excited to show that. I think we've got to kick out of seeing it again and then we give progress on how we're moving that forward with various demos. I was- Steve, I want to ask you last year we asked the chief operating officer and the CEO of Boomi what their investment priorities were going into the next year. And they said number one was product. So that was a key thing. First and foremost, go to market and then customer equation. But the product was been a big focus here. It continues to be, what is the product? What does it mean product? Like when you're chief product officer, what are you overseeing? Talk about what is the product? What is the platform? And is there a difference? Yeah, I mean, so we talk about the product because we're in the product group but we definitely see it as a platform. The investment in product is great. It means I get to spend lots of money. Like I bought my new Converse. I won't try to show them but- They're fabulous, teal by the way. But yeah, I mean the investment in product has been that we know that as we get more, as this economy keeps building of integration and connectivity, we want to continue to hold our leadership. We need to invest in product to make it easier. The expectations of our users is that they get a really premium experience when they're onboarded onto the platform. We have to make sure we keep up to date with all of that effort. So a lot of what we talk about is how one is that we break our product up into discrete services to allow us to move faster from an engineering perspective and there's a lot of stuff that goes on there to thinking about ourselves as a platform to make sure we're fully extensible and then providing more and more services that people can build on our platform. So a lot of that investment is just driving those activities. And Rick was on yesterday talking about the big bets they made early on that are paying off. One of them was obviously cloud. And seeing that as you look at the architecture of this kind of new era of cloud, we're in cloud 2.0, we calling it. There's new requirements. It's the glue layers being built out. You need data to be accessible and addressable and available in real time and have multiple systems to talk to hence the integration you guys are doing. But there's new mega trends happening. There's event-driven architectures which you guys talk about. There's APIs just going from restful to state. And so you have microservices here. So these are new dynamics. Can you take a minute to explain like what all this means and what is event-driven infrastructure? Yeah, event-driven architecture. But yeah, that's what we've been calling it. But yeah, I mean it's basically that we're going to models where we're responding in real time to things that are happening out there. And that involves a whole new level of scale. But we're also getting into things like streaming. So as data comes in, it's coming in not in these packets but it's constantly being fed to you. So you're constantly having to process it. Before in the integration space, it was like, well you'd set up a schedule you'd say move that data at midnight from there to there. And then it got faster and Bumi provided real time which was like request response. Like you send it, we'll send you a response back but now it's like, now we're not going to just send it to you as a discrete thing. We're going to send it to you constantly. So event-driven architectures, but how do you handle this continuous influx of data? And it's not getting any less. So how do you kind of manage this? We're being pulled at both ends. We're being pulled. There's never been more data that you never wanted to have faster. So it's like, how do you manage that? So for Bumi, that's why we're investing so heavily. It used to be in the old days when things were slower, events were like a trigger in a network management software, alarm or notification. Now they're happening all the time. There's more and more events. And paying attention to what events becomes a non-human thing. It's a software thing. Is that kind of where this is going? Yeah, well we've been thinking a lot about that. Like we sort of feel like one is that we're going to grow up from being an iPass to more of a data management vendor. We think that the data manager in the future will come from an iPass, that we will be managing your data across like all of these systems from the cataloging and preparation to actually integration and surfacing it up in real time and all that kind of streaming side. So I don't know, it's an evolving field for sure. One final point on this product. APIs have been great. They really made the market. Going back to the original web services, early 2000s to cloud. Where does API go, API 2.0 or whatever we call it? What's the next gen place for APIs? Well, so it's an interesting question. So we have a slightly different view of API management than maybe the typical API management space, which is one thing to declare openly. But I think, I'm going to go with that we're right in the sense that, because I would think that because I'm the product guy. That's a good thing for a product guy to think, so go for it. And we're more than a little opinionated, so you know what I mean. Let's hear it. But yeah, sure, I mean with API you need a gateway, you need to build a proxy APIs wherever they may be, wherever they may be developed, either you build them in Bumi or you code them yourself. We need to be able to manage those and throttle and scale and add policies and have developers register to use them and monitor their usage and cut them off and have quotas, all that kind of stuff. That is all fantastically good stuff. And we know there's lots of vendors who are doing a lot of that. We're adding more and more capabilities there. But for us, API is really about API enabling absolutely everything. Like we're in this world where you've got refrigerators, to autonomous vehicles, to cloud infrastructure, to pivotal, to all these different environments, and you have to have a tool that, how do you manage an API across this incredibly disparate landscape of tools, technologies, things, infrastructure? And it's one thing to say, okay, we can manage APIs and you install our software. Well, that's not good enough because with our customer like Jack in the box, they have 2,200 plus retail locations. And I just have joked in my keynote that it's like painting Golden Gate Bridge. If you had to upgrade your gateway every time there was an upgrade needed, it's like painting the Golden Gate Bridge, you get to the end and you start all over again. That's 2,200 plus retail locations. I work for Dell, ultimately, is the holy owner of our business. He put five billion PCs on the planet. What if you had a gateway on five billion PCs? Like how do you manage that from a single control plane in the cloud? And that's what we're after. How do you do that at huge scale, API enabling literally everything? And this was kind of under the construct of run anywhere that you were talking about this morning? It was, yes, yes, yes. And that was because we wanted to emphasize that it was about running APIs and API enabling things wherever they may be. That's why we put it under the run anywhere better. What's the biggest thing that you guys have done this year from last booby world that you're proud of in terms of product or technology or something that could be obscure or something prominent? What are you proud of? What's the big thing? Yeah, well, from a product perspective, it would be the API side for sure. Because that was a big lift. There was a lot of work involved. We kind of moved ourselves forward very, very quickly in our capabilities on API with gateway portal proxy, literally within the span of just over a year. So that was a big lift. Because I also run engineering, so I feel like I need to geek out a little bit. I mean, one of my proud things is actually we started wrestling and wrangling that 30 terabytes plus of metadata and starting to see what's in there. And like anything in data science, you're kind of like looking and going, we can start, we started seeing all sorts of cool new things. Now I'm not going to talk about it, the inside side, but you start to see new things. We start to see ways that that metadata can be applied. So we built the infrastructure at huge scale, massive scale, the amount of metadata we're ingesting and then analyzing is helping us improve productivity across the platform. So we talk a lot about being more efficient and more effective. So you'll see more of that in the platform. Can you clear up the, just the commentary around, the definition around single tenant instance and when customers do multi-tenant because the benefit of the single tenant is what the main core value proposition with the data, the unification of the data. That's awesome. But there's also potentially opportunities where customers might want, have payroll run through things. So there's, you have flexibility. Is that true? Is that the difference? Take us through what the difference when when multi-tenant kicks in and what's- Well, so our platform multi-tenancies, so if you think about the build experience, when you're dragging, dropping, pointing, clicking, building your workflows or your processes for managing your data, you do that in the cloud. And then you can decide where you want to put that. So where is that actually going to be executed? And you can put it in our cloud, which is our multi-tenant cloud, and then you can, we manage it all for you and that's fantastic. You can deploy it to our managed cloud services if you have very specific requirements, usually around security, sometimes around hyperscale. We'll maybe put you in a managed cloud service environment. But then if you have very sensitive data, you may want to run that workload and install our little runtime atom, you know, behind your firewall. So we never see the data. So if it's super sensitive, we don't see it. We see how it's running and we manage it and we upgrade that infrastructure for you. But we never see your data. So it kind of gives you the best of both worlds. You can be a cloud-first, cloud-only vendor and you can be a traditional on-prem vendor or you can be a hybrid of both. So it's not a requirement for the product, it's a customer choice option. It's a total customer choice. Yeah, and it's pretty cool. Yeah, and I think actually we're one of the few that does it the way we've been doing it for a long time and it's hard by the way because it's like maintaining that compatibility for 10 plus years is quite difficult to make sure that everything works every time. And we have like 9,000 plus customers. 9,000 plus customers in 80 plus countries? Yeah. But on the 30 plus terabytes of anonymized metadata, you were very clear this morning in saying that it's just the metadata. That's not the actual, you don't have any, any, you know, private information from any of our customers. But in terms of leveraging that data for those insights, what are some of the things that, from last Boomi World to this one, that access to all that data has, what are some of the announcements maybe that came out today that you guys looked at saying, these are some of the nuggets that we're able to pull up because we have the access to this, using maybe it's AI or whatnot. Yeah, I'm going to give you some examples. I mean, one was the suggested filters. And it was a simple thing. I did sort of make that joke of it's one small step for Boomi customers, but a giant leap for Boomi engineering. But it's because we rebuilt a whole bunch of infrastructure to do it. The suggested filter is just making it easier to query information in various systems. And it is cool because it literally is looking at your system, comparing it with other customers' systems based on how you've configured, in this case, the teleo environment, and then working out actually, based on what people are doing, this is kind of what the filter might look like for you, which is very, very personalized to the user based on intelligence. So we have more, that's on the build side. We have more on the deployment side, because we can show you actually, hey, if you have built an API and you want to deploy it out to a Raspberry Pi, well, actually you probably want to configure the API like this or you may find you see some issues here. And that's not static information that's evolving from the metadata. We can see the performance of your systems. We can see actually, all right, in that environment, I'd do it a bit like this. Or if you deploy to, say, Azure, we might make recommendations based on that process or that API or that data quality hub that you want to make your systems run like this. So it's kind of predicting how you deploy. I was just about to say, are you helping customers get predictive with this? Yes. And there's lots we can do there. I mean, like, so we'll do more and more, but we can automatically optimize your deployment. So if it's in our cloud, that all happens automatically. So it helps us too. But for customers, it's awesome. They can just go, okay, we'll deploy it and then leverage the community to see what works best. The most successful deployment, the most successful architecture and the way you've deployed it is what you'll be matched with. And then the same with the runtime with monitoring, we can start to look at things and see, well, that's slowing down a little bit. Actually, it's slowing down and starting to error a little bit. Actually, based on what we've seen before, that system may be about to fall over. So you might want to get on that before it completely does what it's going to do. While we got you here, I want to get to our definition of cloud 2.0. And we've been riffing on this been more of a takeoff on web 2.0, because cloud 1.0 is anything Amazon, you know, storage, compute, some networking, but it's Amazon networking. But you know, scale up, startups all go there. It's a beautiful thing. But now it's enterprise start to embrace cloud with hybrid on-premises and deal with all these hard problems and challenges and creates an opportunity for an operating model for on-premise and cloud. So cloud 1.0, Amazon really easy to work with. Scales are beautiful. Cloud 2.0 is different. You got things to deal with. Observability is a hot thing. You got, you know, Kubernetes, containers. You got, how would you define what cloud 2.0 is for enterprise? Well, I think because we're all about the data, cloud 2.0 is really like for us a data problem. I mean, it's just like, I think before, I mean, I was part of Salesforce for a while. It was this whole idea of like, pull your data in the cloud and we'll manage it all for you. But when you're getting into the kind of environments we're seeing today, there's just too much data. Like you can't, it's not feasible. I mean, to give you an example, Boomi itself, we moved our infrastructure, customers, it was transparent to customers from Rackspace to AWS last year. It was a big engineering lift to do. You can imagine moving 9,000 plus customers over on our cloud design surface there. But so we did that, but actually to move the data, it was so much, it was actually faster to put the disk drives in the back of a van. It's no mobile. We move it over using the wheel network, you know, the engine, motory one, and then put the hard drives in and then we did a sync to bring them back up so that we had the same data in both locations. And that's just an example of the kind of data that customers are routinely struggling with. And the cloud wasn't set up for that, but that's becoming day-to-day now. So you need a highly distributed architecture. That was probably why we announced the Atom Fabric, which is really a fabric of connectivity as much as it is a fabric of data. So we don't need to move your data around. You can leave it where it is, but we can do some analysis on it as part of an end-to-end process. We had a CUBE alumni that was on the CUBE a couple weeks ago, he said, data is the new software, data is software. What's your reaction to that? When you hear that? To some extent, I think that's, as a bit of a business process geek, I think there's, you know, there's process around data for sure. But I do think like I've heard similar things with like actually, you know, applications come and go, business processes come and go, but the data remains. So I think maybe in some respects, data is the new software could be a term. I could buy into it, probably. Well, Steve, it's been great having you on the CUBE with John and me sharing all of the things that you guys have done in the last 11 months. You can't wait to see how everything becomes API enabled till next Boomi World, so you got to come back. Yeah, sounds great, yeah, thanks very much. All right, our pleasure. For John Furrier, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching the CUBE from Boomi World 19. Thanks for watching.