 From San Francisco, celebrating 10 years of high-tech coverage, it's theCUBE, covering VMworld 2019. Brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem partners. Hey, welcome back everyone. We're here at CUBE live in San Francisco, California, VMworld 2019. We're here in Moscone, north lobby. I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellante, my co-host. Three days of coverage. Our next guest is Steve Wood, Chief Product Officer at Dell Boomi. Steve, thanks for joining us today. Appreciate you coming on. Thank you. So we got your event coming up in DC. theCUBE will be there covering it. Correct, yes. We're following you guys. Interesting opportunity. You're the Chief Product Officer. You get the keys to the kingdom. You're in charge. Yes, sir. Oh yeah, yes. Tell us what product roadmap, pricing, all the analysis. Take a minute to explain Boomi real quick for the folks that might not fully understand the product value. Sure, yeah, yeah, absolutely. So, I mean, Boomi is a platform. The goal of the platform is to solve really tough technical challenges that you often meet in order to get to a business outcome of some kind. So if I've kind of brought that into maybe sharper a focus, if you like. So Boomi started its life as an integration vendor. And its main goal was actually making it super easy to integrate your assets across cloud and on-prem. And that was a challenge at the time. What are the older integration tools? We're really ready for the cloud. Boomi brought for this awesome architecture, distribution architecture of containers that could run anywhere, integrating everything, moving your data around as needed. Oh, it was visionary. It was super visionary. It was early days. It was like almost pre-cloud to me. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And actually what was cool, I think, was that you got the benefits of cloud computing, but you still could run something like behind your firewall, which is a really unheard of experience, which actually starts to sound a lot like today with Edge, but I'll come back to that. But then we sort of expanded into B2B so you can connect to like Walmart with all those sort of traditional and some modern protocols, kind of stuff that's been around for a while. We launched Hub for data quality because we felt like, hey, if we're connecting all of your data together, you're probably going to find it's fairly inconsistent. So we have Hub to help you manage your data quality. And then we moved into API management. We've done a huge investment this year to API-enable your integrations, but also API-enable your enterprise. And then possibly my favorite, because it was an acquisition of my company, which is how I joined Boomi, an acquisition of a workflow business, which actually not only provides workflow for people-centric processes, so really the connecting the dots from your devices and things and your infrastructure on-prem and the cloud all the way up to your people driving those end-to-end experiences. But we also use the workflow product to help extend our existing products. So they're easier. So you were building a platform in your other company, and now Boomi's also on the same ethos, API-based, DevOps, complete DevOps, kind of low code, low code. Low code, yeah, for sure, absolutely, yes. So what did you guys jump on? Which wave is powering you guys now? Because if I look at VMware, for instance, they have all these acquisitions, their integration is going to be challenging. And just most enterprises that are not born in the cloud, I mean, their legacy is they've got everything under the sun. They're not necessarily talking to each other. This is a huge problem. No, for sure it is, and actually it's become more of a problem as we move into machine learning and sharing data across the enterprise, giving access to the data for sure, ensuring it's controlled. I think also for us, and we're seeing obviously data is getting faster, you know, so as I often joke internally, nobody's asking for less data slower. And we don't think that the volumes of data are going down anytime soon. So for us, it continues to be about the data. That for sure is the trend, the fact that it's moving faster, it's needed faster. We're going from batch to streaming, going to from, you know, it's a request response to real time. So what problems do you guys solve? You had to be nailed down and to give up the problem statement. What is the main problem statement that you guys are addressing today that's most relevant? Yeah, the biggest problem is actually, I would say it's just unlocking your data, but in the fastest time possible. So when Boomi kind of, I guess, does well in the market, it's because we bring kind of enterprise creds. We bring you a journey to the cloud, not a cloud-only picture. We're not like an on-prem, trying to be retrofitted to the cloud. So what customers experience is they get the agility that they expect. So they get the value very, very fast. But they're also kind of ready to kind of make that transition from maybe be an on-prem legacy, big vendor type ERP massive system to best of breed. And we help them with that. I always say to Dave and I in chat and just earlier, DevOps is about dev and ops, right? You want to have a great development environment so you can build those next gen apps, which by the way, I need data, they need machine learning, all these new things are going on within microservices that's very compelling and everyone kind of knows that. I should know it, but the dev scene is looking good. CID pipelining, good scene on the dev side. It's the ops side. So I've seen a lot of enterprise really trying to catch up their operations, which is why VMware is continuing to do well because they got operators. So I get that, like they're not going to shift overnight to the Nirvana, but the role of developing and operating that app is ultimately the core digital transformation. Yeah, for sure, for sure. What are your thoughts on that and what you guys are doing? Well, part of it also, like when we looked at, so actually with the acquisition of Flow, I think it was interesting for us because it moved us also to be able to provide apps. So for example, VMware has like a workspace one, which is there onboarding, helping employees onboard with an organization, connecting you to your endpoint applications. We actually are working with them on a similar thing. We have an onboarding solution to help employees onboard faster. But part of the thing, the value that we bring is that apps have traditionally, you know, be something that are heavily coded. They take a long time to do. So from integrations being heavily coded to APIs being heavily coded, and now for us apps being heavily coded, is we kind of solve those tough technical challenges, everything from like mobile and offline to, you know, APIs that are scalable and robust through the connected to all of your systems, including your things and having the ability to do that. We kind of solve all of that so you can focus on what, so the true innovation, but like any cloud vendor, even if you leave it alone, it's getting faster, richer, better. So, you know, it's unlike, say, coded solutions where they kind of sort of, they're a snapshot of that point in time and if you leave them alone, they kind of slowly fade away, whereas Bumi, we're constantly modernizing what you build on our platform. So the other piece about digital transformation is the data. Yeah. Right, and then you're talking about your data quality and information quality initiatives. Yeah. That's kind of been a tailwind for you guys. So where does it all fit in terms of digital transformation, data, some of the things you were just talking about, and then the rest of the Dell family, Dell, VMware, how does it all fit together? Oh, sure, okay, yeah, that's a lot. But yeah, I'll see if I can list it. Well, so probably actually for us, it's like obviously getting data out. It feels like if you're going to transform your business, you kind of would need to know what data you have. That feels like a fairly normal thing. But also, and I'll give you a teaser, we can't say more about it, but one of the things that's been interesting about the data on our platform, our metadata, which is anonymized, we have more customers for the longest time running on our cloud service, which is a multi-tenant service, which means we see how the 9,000 plus customers work with other systems, and we have the metadata of how they architect that connectivity across the board, all the way out to people, all the way down to their infrastructure. We can see what's going on. So we've been doing a lot of research and actually showing you more about what your business is doing, and we have some really cool announcements coming up of Boomi World. So the truth is in the data. I'm imagining machine learning, but you get to see the patterns. We get to see the patterns. Emerging the signals, their signals to you. Yes, we're seeing the patterns, not only in what's being built and the structure of what's being built, but how it's operating, how it's being deployed, what's most successful, how those things work. So we have a really interesting sense. So when you're going through a digital transformation, we think we can show you things that you'll not have seen before. So what are you showing and to whom? Are you showing it? Well, so it'll be Boomi World on the 1st of October in Washington. I can't say more than that, but we're going to show them some things that our platform can extract for you that we don't think any other vendors have before. And today, how do you visualize that? Well, today actually, we don't do that much to visualize that actually. That was actually, so we've been on a real machine learning train for the past couple of years. And as we got really good at understanding the metadata that we have and we've got the data scientists involved, they started showing us more of what the art of the possible. So for that, I'd say we've been probably remiss in not helping customers more, exposing more of those insights. Obviously from a transformation perspective, we unlock your data, but we think we can do a lot more. So is the Dell relationship largely a go-to-market one? Same question for VMware? Well, I'd say like, if you think about, Dell is like the, I guess, the unofficial, so the hardware part of the triangle, VMware being the sub-structure. Don't tell them that. Yeah, sorry. But it's true. Yeah, I didn't really say that, sorry, Michael. But it's the hardware side. Then VMware, you've got the kind of infrastructure, DevOps, operational side, and then Boomi brings you the data. And we think that that kind of triangle is kind of what you need to go through a digital transformation. Certainly if your title is... And Michael Dell's bullish on you guys. He was at your last event we broadcasted. He sees you guys as modern SaaS interface for companies for certainly from transformational standpoint. Yeah. As the interface in for integration. Yeah, for sure. I mean, I guess our performance speaks to that. I mean, we've been a very, very high-performing. I don't want to say we're the number one performing technology in this portfolio, but it's certainly, it's highly... Oh, you're up to the right. What? Quadrant thing. Why are customers... What's the winning formula? Why are you winning these deals? Why are you winning customers? Why are you keeping customers? What's the real value that they're getting out of Boomi? So our CMO would want me to say business outcomes accelerated, which is, I hope we get a title there. Got that done. Gold star for you. Go. Now the truth. Get down the truth. No, it's actually, but it is like time to value. I mean, our customers, that's the... Because we've sold the challenges, sure. Other vendors could say we've sold the challenges too, but we've sold it in a low-code way and customers see the value very, very quickly. So when we go head-to-head with a competitor on a deal, you know, like a bake-off, if you like, we win pretty much every time. Take a minute to explain what low-code is to the folks that are debating what low-code is. There's been a lot of Twitter wars on this, but explain what low-code is. I will give my explanation to show that. So low-code fundamentally is the idea that, I'd say like the first phase almost of cloud was like, hey, you're not going to code anything. The new paradigm is it's all point-and-click and Salesforce, which actually I used to be at Salesforce. I sold my last company to Salesforce. It was all about kind of like the no-code approach. But I think reality is there's different ways in which you can be productive. Sometimes point-and-click is by far the most productive, but it is not always the most productive way to solve a problem. Sometimes code is by far the most productive way to solve a problem. So when you provide a low-code platform, what you're really thinking about is productivity for everybody, not just the point-and-click, drag-and-drop ease of use, but also productivity for the developer. So when they engage and they're working together to deliver a solution, it's highly productive. For instance, wiring up APIs is a great example where managing containers might be a great use case of low-code, no-code would be just more automation behind the simple stuff. But low-code is really more stitching stuff together. Yeah, and sometimes people do associate it more with the application creation side, but I often think about it as like a role thing. It's like, if you think about your company, one solution to solve the kind of app gap or the gap in all the stuff in your backlog that needs to be done is to hire more IT people. The other way to solve the problem is to empower everybody you have to do more with technology. So I often think about it as like, software eating the world, a lot of people are on the wrong side of that equation. Well, if you talk to people who are a cloud native or born in the cloud, their IT is the developer. I mean, they're the ones managing the configurations and it's all either scripted away and or written code for, what was IT's job? What do you say? There's a lot of people on the wrong side of that equation. You mean customers. No, I mean, people inside the business are often like, they've got a whole bunch of stuff they want to do with technology, but there's a gatekeeper and that gatekeeper is the developer. And it's not that they want to be a gatekeeper. It's that you need tools to be able to do it. They want to be sure the architecture's right. So low code platforms are all about kind of bringing more people into the conversation. So I often think about it as like, take the business and so say, your ideas don't now get translated through a whole bunch of series of weird things. You can now be very engaged in the creation process. So it's domain expertise meets coding capabilities. It reminds me of the old 4GL days back in the 80s. You had interpreters, scripting languages, kind of higher level of abstractions. But the underlying language is hardcore, compiler, object code, you know, all that stuff under the covers has to be there, right? That's, you're putting that abstraction on top, making it easy to code. Yeah, absolutely. It's because I mean like what you deploy has to be credible. So sometimes what the low code vendors are after is something where an architect would go, love that. That thing is great. I love the way it's put together. It's well architected, well put together. And I can code around it to finish those last mile issues and kind of, you know, add my shine to it. Because they know what they're dealing with. Yeah. Under the covers at least. But yeah, but a lot of like, you know, the sort of no code vendors kind of went for architecturally slightly curious routes and didn't necessarily think about the whole picture. So you guys are all about dealing with all this complexity, helping people manage that at least a part. How about some of these new innovations that are coming out? I mean the world's crazy about ML, AI, blockchain, you know, all kinds of new automations. Where do you guys fit into that? Is that an opportunity for you? Yeah, I mean, well, so machine learning, we're all, oops, sorry, I tried to spill on water. We're all crazy about machine learning as well. So we're using it a lot, as I mentioned on our metadata. But also we see a lot of our customers using our technology to get the data out in order to surface new insights. So for example, we've got like, actually Jack in the box would be an interesting example of kind of emerging technology. One is that they're using our technology to get data out at the point of sale. So they have to use our technology is running at the point of sale. They have 2,200 plus locations, which means we have to be able to run out there on the edge and process it right at the point of sale. But they're trying to do things like, you know, when you drive up and your license plate is scanned, they know who you are, and they go, hey, do you want that same meal again? So that they can predict what you want. They can help make suggestions for you. So that's a fantastic example. So yeah, great edge use cases. I mean, that's awesome. And which is one of the, but there's also machine learning for us where we're tied with machine learning. And we are exploring the idea of actually providing machine learning as a service to our customers. That's something we're just, we're sort of eyeing that app as we've been doing more and more internally. But blockchain is the same and we see customers playing with blockchain all the time. And actually, I guess our pitch to customers who are looking at emerging technology is we have a group that is looking specifically at emerging technology. And because of our time to value and because often emerging technology is like, so what does blockchain mean to, I don't know, well, you guys, Q. Supply chain, yeah. Like how would you use it? You might want to experiment with it. So we have a cube coin. You have a cube coin. And we have a reputation protocol. We'd have a community software layer that would track the supply chain. I already built it. You built it, okay. It's in tech preview right now. Hopefully it's on Buoy. No, it's not. That would have been like the success or maybe failure of Q coin. I don't want to call it, but you know. It's not a utility token. We're going, maybe you should not. Right. I bet like, but a lot of customers want to build to experiment. So time to value is really important. And so we've, we're solving those problems in those emerging technology spaces. Yeah, rapid application development in DevOps using containers, APIs, very friendly. Try it out and see like, this makes sense. All right, so you've got the event coming up, October 1st to the 3rd in Washington, DC. Get a plug for that. I'm not gonna mention that yet. The cube will be there. You're holding back on some of the good stuff. Yeah. The good items will wait for then. Yeah, yeah. Otherwise, yeah. Wait for the keynote, then you'll see it. Yes. They all want to know now. Come on. They're all like, I'll say anything. All right, we'll leak it out on Twitter later if I find out. No, no. Steve, thanks for coming on and sharing the insight. We're looking forward to chatting more at Boomi World in Washington, DC. I'm John Furrier, Dave Vellante. More live coverage here in San Francisco for VMworld 2012 after this short break.