Listen to my conversation with Rick Nucci, co-founder and CTO of cloud integration Boomi, in a podcast interview recorded in the week before the vendor’s acquisition by server manufacturer Dell. Previous conversations with Rick were SaaS Integration, Simpler through Sharing, in April 2009 and Why Your Cloud Applications Should Be Multi-tenant last February.
In this podcast, learn how enterprises handle integration in a hybrid environment where they have both on-cloud and on-premise assets and find out why it makes sense to deploy and manage those integrations from the cloud.
Listen to or download the 7:05 minute podcast below:
—Transcript—
PW: Rick, what I wanted to focus on in our conversation today was the issue of hybrid strategies, where people have got cloud and on-premise working together. Because I know that there are exceptions where companies are going 100% to the cloud — and actually quite a big number, a surprisingly big number of companies according to some surveys — but that doesn’t affect the fact that the vast majority of organizations are going to have cloud applications running alongside their existing on-premise IT. And I guess, because Boomi is in the integration business, you have a lot of customers in that position.
RN: For sure. Yeah, in fact, two thirds of our customers are connecting one or more SaaS applications to on-premise IT, absolutely.
So Rick, that’s interesting because I would’ve thought that a lot of enterprises have already got some kind of integration technology in-house. So if they’re connecting on-premise applications to cloud applications, why are they using Boomi’s cloud integration, rather than just extending their in-house middleware to integrate the cloud assets as well?
Yeah, it’s a great question and it’s an important one because you’re exactly right. Certainly mid-market on up are going to have some pre-existing middleware. The key thing to understand is that those middleware technologies by-and-large were built before the cloud era, ’90s or earlier. So the general paradigm that they were thinking about when they were building those applications is connecting applications that were on-premise, within four walls inside the same data center, and so that enabled them to think about the paradigm of application integration differently.
Meanwhile, you have B2B software specialists — where sure, they understand the idea of transmitting data securely outside the firewall, but [they] are not application integration specialists, so do not understand — or did not have to build into their products — things like application connectors, and application integration patterns like content-based routing and decision logic, and things of that nature that you’ll find in application integration.
So you have this middle world so to speak, where you’ve got the need to connect clouds and on-premise — so the need to connect data that’s moving outside your environment — and neither product built with that unique use case in mind.
Oh, so that’s interesting. So what people — in the past — it was really a case of, either you were connecting things B2B in the Web, or in the extranet whatever it was; or you were connecting things internally within the intranet, to use the old words. And you didn’t have integration products that crossed between the two spheres of activity, and that’s why people need to rethink integration when they have this hybrid environment, you’re saying?
