An Interview With Dell Boomi’s CTO Rick Nucci

“Dell Boomi is the glue between data on legacy systems and integrating to the cloud,” said John von Voros, senior product development manager for Dell’s Public Cloud Services, at the Cloud Computing Expo in New York.

It’s that capability that led Boomi’s acquisition in November 2010. Six months later, Boomi is a key building block in Dell’s focus on helping organizations of all sizes transition to cloud-based IT. The ease with which the two companies have come together is due as much to Boomi’s technology—its integration platform was used to successfully combine the different Salesforce customer relationship management (CRM) applications used by the Boomi and Dell sales groups—as it is to what company executives have described as Dell’s measured and methodical approach to acquisitions.

For all of the changes that Boomi has undergone after becoming part of a global organization, left intact has been its unique culture of a company founded in 2000 in Berwyn, Pennsylvania, a leafy, upscale suburb west of Philadelphia, clearly out of the midst of Silicon Valley.

Like many companies that take a more revolutionary than evolutionary path to solving legacy problems, Boomi’s road to success had its fair share of bumps, not the least of which was a shaky economy. Perhaps more impressive than Boomi surviving not one but two bursts of economic bubbles, though, was Boomi’s steady growth during the most recent recession, before it was acquired by Dell as part of its global cloud strategy.

Dell Boomi’s most recent success can be traced back to 2007 when it reinvented the integration business with Atomsphere, which uses an intuitive drag and drop editor and a library of connectors to visually walk the user through the configuration, deployment, and management of the entire integration process.

Atomsphere is built using pure SaaS (Software-as-a-Service) technology, meaning the software and all of its underlying data is hosted and delivered via the Web. As a result, Dell-Boomi says the Atomsphere platform can integrate SaaS, cloud and on-premise applications without the need for IT staff to install or maintain integration software or appliances.

To learn more about Boomi’s ascension and its transition within Dell’s corporate umbrella, the Epoch Times (ET) reached out to Dell Boomi’s CTO Rick Nucci (RN) for a phone interview.

Interview with Dell Boomi’s CTO Rick Nucci

ET: What opportunities did you see back in 2000?

RN: When we started Boomi, we set out to create a much simpler and affordable way for companies to integrate their applications. At the time, I was working for a supply chain software company and I realized that every time we implemented the system the customer would spend two or three times the cost of the system to integrate it with other systems. We were also writing the same integration code over and over again, which brought us to the idea of configuration-based integration. Basically, we wanted to give the user a system where all they needed to do was configure some pre-built integration steps and not have to write any code.

Fundamentally, this is what we’re still focused on today: removing the friction points in the connectivity between applications, regardless of where they reside.

We expanded on configuration-based integration by developing visual integration technology, which gave our customers the ability to simply click, drag, and drop to create integration processes.

Atomsphere takes that one step further. All of the apps vendors are building CRM’s, human resources, finance, and other apps in the cloud so why not put the entire integration platform in the cloud?

It made perfect sense to us. But there is no other company out there doing what we do the way we do it.

ET: How did the economic downturn in 2008 impact Boomi?

RN: We introduced the beta version of Atomsphere—at the time, we called it Boomi On-Demand because “on-demand” was all the rage—at Dreamforce in the summer of 2007. In January 2008, we went into production.

This really was a “bet the company” move. We’d diverted our scarce resources into building a cloud integration platform from the ground up. We had a short window to scale and gain momentum.

When the economy crashed later in 2008, we had to make some tough decisions. Venture capital dried up, so we hade to conserve resources. We stayed focused and signed 100 customers in the first year and twice that the second year.

It was a great lesson in staying the course. We came out of 2009 on a roll when everyone in the IT industry was working on cloud strategy and integration.

Next…Customers come to seek out Boomi in an effort to contain costs

ET: Did any customers come to seek out Boomi in an effort to contain costs and streamline legacy data?

RN: Absolutely. There was this mindset of “we have to do the integration, because we can’t run in a silo, but there’s too much data.”

That made our model very attractive for our clients from an OpX (operational expenditure) perspective. For one, our customers didn’t have to worry about installing and maintaining integration software, which in itself really redefined the economies of integration.

Beyond delivering the solution in the cloud, though, companies can pay by connection and not for the entire integration software suite, while subscriptions are priced by connections per month. Our clients can purchase as many as a few integration connections as they need, so we really do provide a solution that can be used by any size company.

ET: Speaking of integration, how has the integration with Dell buying out Boomi six months ago transitioned?

RN: It’s been very positive. One of the data points that resonates with me is that we have continued to exceed our sales plan. We’re managing the transition very methodically, with an eye on ensuring we don’t slow the momentum we have in the market for the sake of changing our address.

Boomi is unique. We created a tech culture that’s not pervasive to the Philadelphia area, which is populated with biotech firms and pharmaceutical companies. So from a recruiting perspective it has been great. We have a low attrition rate with our employees, who average more than five years for a company that’s little over a decade old.

We’ll continue to see the push to a fuller integration, as we move downstream. But the Dell approach thus far has been a stabilizing factor. We are on track to double our employees this year. We have the same motivation, focus, and culture as we did before the Dell acquisition.

ET: What are the benefits of companies and entire industries using Cloud Computing and migrating their legacy data through the “glue” that is Dell Boomi?

RN: What’s driving the cloud is the 80/20 paradox. Companies who are predominantly operating on on-premise systems are spending 20 percent of their IT resource on innovation and 80 percent on maintenance. They can’t continue on at that rate. If I’m a company operating on that model, chances are that I’m not getting what I want from IT. I have maintenance, but I can’t upgrade and innovate.

On-premise systems have a domain within four walls. Cloud Computing changes that paradigm.

Third party datacenters allow you to scale, to be vendor managers. If you scale on decentralization, there’s a lot of information integration. Then the spotlight falls on a cloud integration that has to be auditable, monitorable, and secure. We build our integration products with those three keys in mind.

In closing, enterprise isn’t alone in its march toward the cloud. Companies large and small are increasingly adopting a long-term cloud vision, and that means more migrations from on-premise legacy systems to the cloud are on the horizon. As companies seek to cut and contain their IT budgets to improve efficiency and profitability, CTO Rick Nucci and Dell Boomi are on a growth trajectory that could match the virtual bridge they are building up to the clouds.