Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Chris McNabb, CEO of Dell Boomi (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: If you look at the integration space, what do you think are open problems that new entrepreneurs should be looking at solving?

Chris McNabb: The one thing to recognize is integration shouldn’t be an afterthought for all of the reasons I talked earlier about why integration is becoming strategic to an enterprise. Let’s say they’re trying to create a SaaS. Anytime you create SaaS, integration is going to be a part of that. As an entrepreneur, you can decide, “Let me connect my system to the other system.” You have to appreciate the scale that your business is going to get to. >>>

Capital Efficient Entrepreneurship from Utah: Ben Dilts, Founder and CTO of Lucid Software (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: What did he figure out in terms of how you acquire customers? What is the business model? What is the pricing model for your product?

Ben Dilts: One piece of real concrete skill that Dave brought to the table was that he had a history in SEO. He had a good handle on how it worked and how to win. He did a tremendous job on making our website attractive to search engines and the self-serve funnel to flow well. That was a great decision early on because we didn’t have the manpower or the money to hire the manpower to hit the pavement and find customers for this.

We really needed people to come in and pay us. We needed a lot of those. We focused hard on the fundamentals of a self-serve business. The conversion rate >>>

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.

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Capital Efficient Entrepreneurship from Utah: Ben Dilts, Founder and CTO of Lucid Software (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Where was Karl based?

Ben Dilts: He’s based here in Utah. As I mentioned, he moved here with his family. He was living here. He had left Google at that time and was looking around and seeing what he wanted to get involved with locally. He had spent most of his time at Mountain View.

Sramana Mitra: He had relationships with Google and the Silicon Valley ecosystem. He had worked before joining Google doing startups as a lawyer working on startup rounds and M&A. That was a great bootstrap to get us started there.

Ben Dilts: Yes

Sramana Mitra: When does this all come together timeline-wise? >>>

Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Chris McNabb, CEO of Dell Boomi (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Let’s do a few use cases that give us a flavor of this, that, and other kind of integration going on in your large clients. Then we can even do one from your smaller downmarket clients.

Chris McNabb: The first use case is one that I’ve already given. If somebody were to buy a cloud SaaS software like Salesforce and they need to integrate it back into many of their on-premise systems, we provide solutions in order for them to do that quickly. Some others do, what we refer to as lift and shift. I’m going to take my SAP system and run it on Amazon. >>>

Capital Efficient Entrepreneurship from Utah: Ben Dilts, Founder and CTO of Lucid Software (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: We’re now in mid-2009?

Ben Dilts: That’s right. At this point, it was still very much a one-man show. I may have collected a grand total of a few hundred dollars in revenue from some users. It was a product but it was in no way a company at that point. When I came down to return to school, I immediately sought out the entrepreneurial clubs to try to get in contact with people who could help build this up into a real company. I started meeting a lot of people in the local community here in Utah in an effort to gather a team.

Pretty soon, I ran into Karl Sun. He was a longtime Googler. He joined Google when there was a few hundred people there. He was their first patent attorney. >>>

Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Chris McNabb, CEO of Dell Boomi (Part 1)

We’ve covered the cloud integration space before. Dell Boomi is Dell’s cloud integration arm with over 150 Fortune 500 customers.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s being by introducing our audience to Dell Boomi as well as yourself.

Chris McNabb: I’m the CEO for a company called Dell Boomi. It’s a wholly-owned subsidiary of Dell. We provide the world’s leading integration Platform-as-a-Service. That is to say that we provide organizations of all sizes with solutions to enterprise integration and enterprise integration problems, all offered up as a service from our cloud. >>>

Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Dani Golan, CEO of Kaminario (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Is it worth while for us to do more use cases or do you think you’ve covered everything that you want to explain in your use case? Is there any nuance that you would be able to highlight with additional use cases?

Dan Golan: We can absolutely highlight some more use cases.

Sramana Mitra: Okay. Pick another one.

Dan Golan: Let me take up ZeroChaos. ZeroChaos is a global SaaS provider for workforce management solution. This is a cloud provider that truly needs scalability and consistent performance in any mixed workload. For them, it was all about customer experience. Customers complain that they do get inconsistent experience and they wanted to make sure that they absolutely give very consistent behavior in any parameters. >>>