Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Mark Geene, CEO of Cloud Elements (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Let’s do a couple of more use cases just to understand the types of activities that are happening on your technology.

Mark Geene: Another use case is in the unified communications space. We’ve got customers like Dialpad and Infuse. Dialpad is a tremendous product. It streamlines communication with customers by bringing cellphone communication as well onto the internet with an easy-to-use platform.

Let’s say you’re a salesperson and you want to be able to write within Dialpad. You want to pull up information from Salesforce.com or from a ticketing system. Dialpad uses us to be able to connect into those CRMs and ticketing systems used by their customers to bring up the information right in their application.

It’s all embedded in Dialpad’s user experience so they’re not sending their customers out to some other integration platform. They’re owning that end-to-end process. Communications is part of solving a problem for a customer.

Now they’re bringing all that together in one place so that end-to-end process can be completed successfully without having to bounce between systems or buy other integration services to do it. 

Sramana Mitra: If we were to go into more use cases, would that provide further insights?

Mark Geene: Maybe I can talk about a workflow use case. IBM has a product called IBM AppConnect. Nintex is a workflow provider to help automate business processes. They all have a similar need where processes are not completed in one application any longer.

Processes extend across multiple applications. Each of them have built tremendous use experiences to be able to create end-user integration and workflow experiences within their products.

We provide the connectivity layer to connect into many applications – cloud storage services, CRM, marketing automation systems, and finance and business planning systems so they can normalize the data from those services and pull it together into a seamless workflow. The customer doesn’t have to worry about how to get that data out of Salesforce underneath the covers. It’s automatically available for them right in those tools.

If I draw a thread together across those case studies, all the application providers see that the responsibility for integration is falling more and more on the shoulders of the application provider versus just the buyer of the application having to figure it out. That’s the common theme we’re helping our customers solve. 

Sramana Mitra: How does your technology or your customer target differ from the other integration platforms like MuleSoft?

Mark Geene: MuleSoft is built as a point-to-point integration. Every integration platform has actually been built as a point-to-point integration platform for companies that bought applications that don’t work together, to make them work together.

You map the account object from Salesforce into the company object in SAP, and then map that into the customer object in Marketo. You keep mapping each of those points together over and over. You end up with this complex web of data mappings across multiple systems to manage that.

This segment is part 2 in the series : Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Mark Geene, CEO of Cloud Elements
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