Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: George Gallegos, CEO of Jitterbit (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: What are the key trends in your space?

George Gallegos: There’s an explosion of cloud applications. About 150,000 SaaS apps are on the market today. There’s big transformation as companies are embracing these best-of-breed solutions to transform their business. This may be the customer engagement side of their business.

They have all these legacy products. Much of it might be on premise. They’ve got to connect these two worlds together – this new wave of innovative cloud technologies with the legacy products. That is what’s usually driving these projects. They are enabling these digital processes that tie the new world of apps together with the legacy apps existing in their enterprise.

The need is not just to tie them all together and make sure that data is flowing but also to automatically create these custom microservices that you can give people who are outside your company even when they’re sitting outside your firewall. To be able to do that easily and through a non-technical experience is the key driver of these transformation projects.

Sramana Mitra: How much adoption do you see of this kind of technology – not just your technology but yours and your competitors’ technology? Where are we in the adoption cycle?

George Gallegos: I think it’s early in the adoption cycle, but it is a very fast-growing space. Depending on who you ask, it’s growing in the order of 50% to 60% year-over-year growth. That’s high growth for a large category. It is the largest category of all integration category. If a big company calls up Gartner and says, “How am I going to deal with this integration challenge of the future?” They will tell you that you’ve got to get yourself an iPaaS. It is a very hot space that is even validated by Salesforce with its $6 billion acquisition of MuleSoft.

Sramana Mitra: Frankly, given that there are so many cloud service providers out there, if you want things to be efficient, you do want all of this stuff to flow together and be able to cross-reference data. There’s no question that it’s a very valuable category and it’s no surprise that it’s growing that fast. Where are the open problems? When you look at this category, where would you advise a new entrepreneur to look?

George Gallegos: There are certainly new challenges within this category. A tremendous amount of money is being poured into AI and even Blockchain. In with just AI alone, 4,300 companies have emerged and are on the market today. I would say it is a new version of these digital processes.

As companies streamline their businesses and roll out these digital processes connecting all of these digital assets together, it’s injecting and infusing AI capabilities into those processes or infusing Blockchain capabilities to ensure trust in these processes. I would say these are new frontiers. We’re investing in those areas today. I don’t think it will be a new category per se in the integration space. It will be a challenge for all integration players to quickly innovate and be able to support these new initiatives such as AI and Blockchain and be able to take data from IoT devices.

Imagine a shipping company that wants to put IoT devices on the trucks and understand what’s going on. Does the temperature change in the truck? How do I infuse trust into that process? If a trucking company is bringing fish from the northern part of the United States down to the southern part of the United States, that’s leveraging IoT into that process and is able to ensure that you’re going to pay for a product that hasn’t been spoiled. I would say these are new frontiers. We’re innovating in support of these new frontiers.

Sramana Mitra: Very good. Thank you for your time.

This segment is part 2 in the series : Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: George Gallegos, CEO of Jitterbit
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