Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Chris McNabb, CEO of Dell Boomi (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Can you talk a bit about the competitive landscape? You said you’re the market leader. Whom do you see in deals?

Chris McNabb: The competitive landscape is very broad today. There are people who started in the integration PaaS about the same time that we did. You’ll see those kinds of competitors out there. All of the major software firms like Oracle, SAP, and Microsoft have offerings that compete in this market segment. The third general category is the startups or the niche players. They will focus on integration in a partner channel. They’ll focus on integration with EDI. They’ll focus on very specific kinds of integration styles or technologies while we’re much more of a horizontal play and a broad integration scenario play.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s go to broad trends in the integration segment. What are the overriding trends in the space?

Chris McNabb: One is cloud. Cloud adoption is the major driver of integration. When you look back at organizations five to ten years ago, integration was somewhat stable. What makes enterprise integration strategic today is the dramatic increase and the number of things that have to be integrated in the business today. Cloud becomes lots of different endpoints. Lots of demand comes from that.

A lot of demand comes from the need for mobile that we talked about a few minutes ago. A lot of demand also comes from data collection. You may care about, “How many people are tweeting about my business today and what are they saying?” But you need to start collecting all that data to understand what you may want to do and not want to do with that. A lot of demand comes from Internet of Things as well. The number of smart connected devices is growing exponentially.

The sheer demand due to cloud, mobile, and Internet of Things dramatically drives up the amount of integration activities and projects. I think that’s number one. The next major driver that influences our market the most is time to value, business agility, and competitive advantage. If I’m a business in retail and I can figure out a market automation solution faster and get it implemented in six weeks and it takes you a year to do it, I have that entire time where I can personally market to everybody that’s in my total addressable market.

Because people need to go faster, they need to be able to get things into production quicker. They need to have all the results. These drive the demand for things like my platform. As I said earlier, we can do things six times faster than the legacy platforms. If you’re not modernizing your existing integration technologies, then you’re going to be a step behind in terms of your ability to execute, which means you’re going to reduce your competitive advantage and time to market.

This segment is part 3 in the series : Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Chris McNabb, CEO of Dell Boomi
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