Boomi Founder and CTO Rick Nucci explains to IT Business Edge's Loraine Lawson how competition, APIs and more involvement from IT departments are changing the cloud integration market.
Lawson: When we talked in 2008, your CEO, Bob Mule, said Boomi was betting on integration being packaged by SaaS providers, rather than sought out by individual clients. Has that changed?
Nucci: It absolutely still is packaged. What has evolved is we’ve gotten more knowledgeable about what ISVs (independent software vendors) are really good at and what they aren’t. Absolutely, the number-one driver is ISVs want to be able to just say, “Here’s a pre-built integration to this application and here’s what it does.” They know that their sales cycle will get shorter, their implementation will be shorter, and the renewal rate will be higher because their app will be integrated.
I’ll give a couple of examples. Taleo uses Boomi to sell a packaged ADP integration. They use Boomi to sell a packaged Workday integration. They use Boomi to sell a package NetSuite Talio integration. Our Marketo partnership is to sell a packaged NetSuite integration, much like what they built for Salesforce.
But we do see more IT involved. Not driving the procurement - the procuring of SaaS is absolutely still line of business - but IT is starting to become more involved and participatory in the procurement of the app. When IT gets involved, they ask a level of technical questions that our account executives and sales executives are better equipped to answer. We work very closely with the account execs and sales teams of the ISVs so that when they come across things that are not their packaged integrations, we’re right there and we can help them be successful.
That’s the model we’ve got. We’ve been refining since we launched this in 2008 and it’s really now gone very, very well. Salesforce kind of partners with anybody, but once you get beyond that and you look at the other SaaS ISVs, they really are leveraging Boomi as their go-to partner. In a lot of cases, we're their only partner for integration. So I think we have the model right.
Lawson: I was reading Mike Vizard’s CTO Edge post about your recent update of Atomsphere. He seemed to be suggesting individual companies look at your solution. Is that something that would happen? Do you deal with individual non-ISVs?
Nucci: We will engage directly with that customer. We will sell the Boomi subscription to them and we will support them. They're buying their ADP widget - the Boomi prebuilt integration - from Taleo, because that’s the OEM and part of Taleo’s offering, but for the rest of the integration (e.g., a home-grown HRIS system), they’ll work with Boomi.
The other example that happens a lot - I’ll give you a recent win that we announced. MindJet is a Marketo customer and bought them for Marketo to NetSuite integration. We’ve built now a direct relationship with MindJet, because MindJet has integration needs across all of their other departments. They have support needs, they have CRM integration needs and they have finance integration needs. So they're now a direct Boomi customer.
Lawson: Also, when I last spoke with you, you didn’t have so many competitors.
Nucci: Funny how that happens.
For original article by Loraine Lawson click here
