@benkepes How long do you do CPR Ben?

— Jo Maitland (@JoMaitlandSF) May 6, 2013

That’s a pretty harsh comment and needs to be seen in the light of a couple of interesting pieces of news for one of those companies, Dell, in the past couple of days.

Yesterday came the news that Dell was acquiring Enstratius, the cloud orchestration vendor that has been seen for years as the home of the most innovation, the highest degree of thought leadership and the epitome of what a modern and progressive vendor needs to do to stay relevant. Now some might characterize the acquisition as simply a last ditch effort, but it needs to be seen in light of all the other similar software-based moves Dell has made in recent times. As my friend Alex Williams pointed out:

The acquisition gives Dell another way to provide end-to-end-cloud solutions. Offering enterprise solutions is part of Dell’s larger plans to transition from its dependence on personal computer sales and move deeper into the myriad opportunities that are coming as companies recalibrate their data centers to more automated, elastic infrastructures

The Enstratius deal filled up the tweet stream of most of the cloud insiders. art of this is, of course, because Enstratius has, over the past year or two, sucked up much of the cloud talent – big hitters like James Urquhart, Bernard Golden, John Willis et all have joined the company and created something of a dream team. But it’s not all inside baseball causing the excitement – Enstratius have built a truly compelling offering. At an NDA analyst session at the OpenStack summit a couple of weeks ago, one huge profile company was there to talk about it’s use of OpenStack but spent more time talking about how great Enstratius fits what they’re doing. This is a theme that is repeated elsewhere. As Gartner’s Lydia Leong said:

When I discuss AWS deployment for large user base with a customer, I almost always recommend they look at Enstratius for mgmt, governance.

— Lydia Leong (@cloudpundit) May 6, 2013

So, yes, partly the Enstratius deal is exciting because it means some of the Clouderati get a good exit, but it’s also a genuinely smart move on Dell’s part and the way they’re talking about the company, and the benefits it brings to Dell, indicates a real understanding of what their future needs to look like:

As enterprises increase their use of public, private and hybrid clouds, the need for controls, security, governance and automation becomes more critical. Dell, together with Enstratius, is uniquely positioned to deliver differentiated, complete cloud-management solutions to enterprise customers, large and small, empowering them with the efficiency and flexibility in the allocation and use of resources.

Yes, that’s marketing talk. But it’s not talk that even remotely related to a legacy hardware business. Dell has done a lot of work moving to a software world – Project Sputnik, Crowbar, the acquisitions of Quest and Gale – all point to Dell strongly realizing where its future really lies. And today we see that story told again with the release of the latest version of the Boomi integration platform that Dell acquired a year or two ago. Already a strong provider of integration services, Boomi is now moving into the API management space that is white hot at the moment – in the past couple of weeks alone we’ve seen massive action in this space with Mashery being acquired by Intel, Layer7 by CA and a big funding round for 3Scale, and now Boomi moves further into the space as it recognizes that application integration is only part of the integration solution moving forwards and that a broader API management layer is going to be increasingly important.

As one would expect of an API management layer – the API aspects of Dell Boomi allow customers to monitor, measure, secure, throttle and scale their enterprise APIs – essentially it allows enterprises to control the plumbing behind application integrations to both protect against denial-of-service attacks but also to shape the way their API load is borne. It allows them to shape quality of service behind the actual integrations that Boomi enables.

Of course the API management space is busy, and there have been cases of vendors rolling out solutions that for whatever reason haven’t really succeeded in the marketplace ( most notably Alcatel Lucent) – Dell Boomi and its API play may not prove successful – but in the context of Maitland’s assertion that Dell is dead, it counters that view and shows a company that understands that it needs to provide a holistic offering totally apart from its traditional hardware business. It’s not all going to be plain sailing for Dell – but I’d be reluctant to write them off just yet. Final word to Simon Wardley, an individual who spends his time looking at innovation in the context of organizations and their lifecycles:

Dell is a company who if they did nothing would die because the market is fundamentally changing. We all suffer from inertia to change but many companies are disrupted not by random and unpredictable market changes but instead highly predictable ones which can be planned for and inertia resolved. Dell, had all the hallmarks of a company which was going to be disrupted by predictable changes. It acted in a way (as many do) that the changes around cloud were somehow unexpected. It’s inertia was compounded by a lack of preparation.  In recent times they have seemed to act in a manner which suggests a greater realisation of the war that is occurring. Whether they will survive this depends upon the ability to act, how courageously they act, how willing they are to deal with inertia in a short period of time, their situational awareness of the environments and most importantly their strategic game play.

As they say, watch this space.

The briefing I had was about the news that Dell was launching its “next-generation” Dell Boomi MDM offering Essentially the new product is aimed at mid sized companies and allows them to take advantage of MDM functionality – something that previously was outside of their skill set or budget. As Philip Russom said in the TDWI Best Practices Report focusing on next generation master data management:

Given their complexity and cost, most master data management solutions are simply out of reach for midmarket customer

Anyway, the Dell Boomi MDM offering focuses on four core steps:

• Define – model master data entities through a visual experience with no coding necessary
• Deploy – deploy models into the MDM repository and identify which source systems will interact with them
• Synchronize – orchestrate data synchronization and design process flows that ensure data quality
• Govern – govern data as it flows into the MDM system to resolve duplicates, fix data entry issues as well as identify and correct erroneous data

MyPOV

I’ve been guilty of writing off any offering that doesn’t look at data integration as a single step between applications, but the reality is that data management is, to coin a phrase, “a thing”. Despite how much we’d like data to simply move between applications with no massaging, the reality is that data manipulation is something that happens every day in the real world. Data formats change, particular systems have requirements for particular ways of expressing data and one piece of data (say a phone number for instance) might have to be delivered in multiple formats to different third party solutions.

Which is where Master Data Management comes in. In my call with Chris McNabb, director of product management for Dell Boomi, he rightly pointed out that most existing MDM solutions, apart from being expensive, entered the orbit of an integration player by acquisition – as such they tend to have different architectural paradigms and different ways of interacting with data – I kind of buy the Boomi spin that a single solution from a single vendor, with a single pedigree is a compelling proposition. A consistent look and feel, centralized user management and single sign on all make it easier to adopt and use a broad integration platform.

In the integration space there seem to be two distinct approaches – the real-time API-driven approach that most often is seen at the smaller end of town (products like SnapLogic for example) and the larger (and generally slow) approaches around building data warehouses. Dell Boomi’s perspective is that there is a third way – one that sucks data out of the source system, lightly manipulates it in the MDM product and then delivers the cleansed data out to one or many different third party solutions.

I suspect that, over time, the requirement for this intermediate step will reduce as solutions find ways to reconcile the differences in the ways that data is presented and parsed. In the meantime however, no matter how much we hate to admit it, MDM has a place. And Dell Boomi, with MDM tied closely to integration, is providing a compelling tool to the mid market.

Boomi is announcing a couple of things:

One million integration processes running per day – this number relates to individual integration processes (ie not discrete data packets) and should be seen in light of both its own historical figures and those of the competition. Boomi is claiming a 263% increase in integrations year on year, following up from a similar increase last year. Perhaps more importantly Dell is claiming that this is three times the number of integration processes than their nearest competitor can claim.

Wipro partnership – More interestingly, Boomi has announced a partnership with well known systems integrator, technology consultant and outsourcing house Wipro. I spent time talking with Boomi founder Rick Nucci about this partnership, and the role for cloud integration platforms generally. Traditional consulting firms have been a little slow to partner with the integration platforms, in part because it is a challenging partnership to articulate externally. These consulting houses make their not-insignificant revenue from, in part, providing deep product integration services. Partnering with a platform which essentially says “integrations can be easy” challenges their own position. I put this to Nucci and he conceded that it is a sensitive point. Surprisingly he is dubious about the claims that many make about one-click integrations and the like – his perspective is that an integration platform simply reduces the time to integration and hence the time to value. As such he feels there is a logical fit with the consulting houses who can use the partnership as a way to abstract the more mechanical aspects of an integration off to a specialist, while focusing heavily on the implementation and customization part of what they do. I kind of buy that, but also expect to see the traditional consulting firms remain somewhat muted when it comes to integration services – while integrations may be simple plumbing, if a Deloitte, an Infosys or a Wipro can wrap it up in paper, put a bow on it and call it consulting, they’re able to monetize it richly. That said, the partnership makes sense and should help to avoid lots of duplication and, most importantly, reduce the time that these deep integration projects can take.

I spent some time talking with Nucci about the fact that many integration vendors are talking up the “one-click” story. Perhaps as a sign of respect to Boomi’s new found consulting buddies, he suggested that the truth of the matter is somewhat more complex and that integration vendors need to be careful to navigate a path that sees them articulate the real value that integrations can bring to a organization, while not understating just how much manual work an integration will actually take – it’s a fine line and a situation where the marketing spin sometimes delivers more than the actual product can.

Both these announcements, coming off the back of the Dell privatization deal, give a real insight into where the opportunities for traditional IT vendors lie. Marc Andreeson famously proclaimed that software is eating the world – integration is an important part in that process and Boomi is well placed to capitalize on that.

Launched last year at salesforce’ DreamForce event, the unit packages up software solutions (from salesforce, echosign and others) and ties them together with integrations from Dell-owned integration vendor Boomi. They’re aiming for organizations in the 50-1000 employee bracket, a large customer base but one that is traditionally difficult to service because of their relatively complex requirements and small budgets. By leveraging their own integration solutions, and the leverage they have with third party vendors, Dell aims to deliver compelling and economically viable packaged solutions to businesses that, importantly for this demographic, is all delivered form one central billing relationship.

Recently Dell announced that is was partnering with Pardot to roll out an end to end marketing automation solution. Included in the offering are pre-built integrations into CRM systems and social media applications. The idea is to bring demand generation initiatives, generally the domain of larger organizations, down to small and mid size businesses and to ease the implementation of the solution by providing pre-configured integrations into commonly used solutions. To ease in this time-to-implement drive,the offering includes services for setting up email campaigns, developing web site forms, and integrating Google AdWords and CRM systems.

The solution, strikingly called Dell Marketing Automation is price  from $1,000 per month for unlimited users. All editions come with basic Dell Implementation services and to speak to Dell’s new services thrust, Dell is offering pricing for additional fixed-fee, fixed-scope implementation services starting at $2,500.

Interestingly Dell hasn’t yet tried to use their clout to answer the very real issue (at least for SMB users) of inconsistencies around user interface and experience. I’d really love Dell to leverage their Boomi integration smarts to come up with something to address these deeper problems – as an interim measure however, an integrated suite of SMB offerings, all billed from one vendor is a compelling proposition for customers. And one which helps Dell wean itself from the ever-decreasing returns of a hardware vendor’s traditional models.

In the case of NextAxiom – they come to the problem with the notion of being flow-centred. So what does this mean, and how does it work? NextAxiom has created what it calls hyperServices, or in their parlance, “flow-centric programming building blocks”.

hyperServices either virtualize or reuse existing application functionality or combine pieces of functionality to create modules that can be connected together and augmented with extra business logic. It’s a similar approach to that taken by SnapLogic, with the addition of an overlay of business logic into the fold. So what characteristics has NextAxiom built into its platform in order to unlock the flow of data across formerly siloed applications? NextAxiom believes that the key to success lies in some specific traits, their building blocks should be;

• Universal: a universal building block that can represent any application or system function, regardless of the underlying architecture
• Location-transparent: transparently distributed across cores, servers and datacenters whether on-premise or in the cloud
• Automatic SOA: should be able to be consumed as a standards-based Web Service operation by external applications
• Metadata-driven: described as XML metadata at design-time and are interpreted by the Virtual Machine at runtime
• Automatically Multi-tasked Across Multi-cores
• Fully Managed: automatically secured, traced, logged, monitored, metered, provisioned and governed
• Semantic and Visual: developed in a visual and graphical environment with semantic programming constructs

If I think about where previous mass integration plays have failed, it  has been because of an over the top focus on the integration piece of the play, and a lack of focus on the requirement for enterprises to build business logic in to those integrations. The NextAxiom notion of hyperServices, atomic level blocks of application functionality that can be combined with other blocks and in doing so create new functional offerings, resonates with me. The fact that business logic can be built on top of that resonates even more. Application integration is a massive opportunity that has yet to be really unlocked – NextAxion

The tools SnapLogic is rolling out include;

• Real-Time Data Flow Analysis: A new view shows comprehensive performance metrics, including CPU utilization, wait time, records in and out, throughput and more. Users simply mouse over any part of an integration workflow to identify bottlenecks impeding the flow or processing of data.
• Enhanced Debugging: Users can now follow data flowing through an integration workflow. For example, individual records of data are now viewable before and after they pass through filters and joins, allowing immediate debugging.
• Auto Suggest for Salesforce Object Query Language (SOQL): SnapLogic’s Smart Query Builder for SOQL introspects Salesforce schemas and instantly provides suggestions on schema objects as users type in SOQL queries

In explaining the move, Ash Jhaveri, Vice President of Product Management at SnapLogic said that;

The modern enterprise has data everywhere. It lives in legacy ESBs, custom applications, on-premise packaged apps, cloud services and Hadoop. SnapLogic’s customers understand that to remain competitive their applications need to share data. The challenge created by myriad apps sharing data in diverse formats is gaining an understanding of where data is flowing in real-time within the system. With an understanding of data flow, customers can quickly identify and remove bottlenecks.

MyPOV

I like the approach of both providing an integration play and giving enterprises insights into how that data stream is working – it is a reflection of the fact that moving forwards organizations need to move discrete parts of application lifecycle out of the silos they currently live in. I’ve always liked integration plays and spend a lot of time thinking about what they would look like bought down the food chain to small and mid sized businesses. In terms of adding monitoring to integration, the jury is still out on exactly which integrations will sit most comfortably together in some kind of quasi-suite – and until we all know that there will continue to be a lot of frothiness with M&A activity and vendors rolling out extra services that sit aside their core offerings.

Possibly in answer to these sorts of concerns, Coupa is rolling out a new version of the product that has been designed to allow employees to spend less time within the application itself. Some specific things to aid in this include a to do notification page and inline editing on the checkout page. However what piqued my interest more was the new ability for Coupa users to review, approve, reject and comment on requisitions and invoices directly through email. It also includes mobile functionality.

This new version also adds to the benefits driven by the relationship that Coupa have with Boomi, this relationship sees Coupa integrated with a bunch of ERP solutions including Microsoft, Oracle, SAP and NetSuite.

More information about the new UI can be seen in the video below.

The thrust of what Coupa is doing it to consolidate procurement and expense management into a single solution for management and control. Again I’d like to really get a handle on where the value points are here – and have a feel for how deeply Coupa is integrated with ERP systems using the Boomi tools.

In terms of proof points about value, Coupa is introducing a novel scheme whereby they are guaranteeing a minimum 1% reduction in OpEx within six months or the service comes free. These schemes tend to be little more than marketing campaigns but it’s interesting to note that Coupa is actually offering to set down with customer’s financial teams to work on an OpEx reduction plan – a nice service backing to their product offering. Coupa is also calling out some customer success stories including;

• A Cloud CRM Leader who saw a 2.86% reduction in OpEx
• The Largest Rent-to-Own Retailer who reduced OpEx by 1.17%
• The Fastest Growing Regional Bank who enjoyed a 4.54% reduction
• etc etc

Again this is little more than bluster without seeing real metrics and methodologies. While I absolutely buy into the theory that expense and procurement management solutions can have a beneficial impact on organizations – in the same way that we saw some hard metrics at NetSuite’s Hairball wards to back up their claims of improvements, so too would I like to see Coupa come out with some customer success stories.

But more than that it’s an indication of something I’ve been noticing at the lower end of the Cloud Computing stack. Notwithstanding the outlier acquisitions which are examples of large, traditional vendors trying to jump on the Cloud bandwagon, it seems to me that we are seeing an acceleration in mergers between infrasturcture offerings that provide merely a point solution. I see this as part of a wider trend which is the reducing value of core technologies as everything low in the stack becomes commoditized. Looking forwards it is worth thinking what this means for other companies at a similar level in the ecosystem.

I’ve long proclaimed the huge number of companies doing private/hybrid cloud automation services - enStratus, Netuitive, enomaly, AdaptiveComputing – how much opportunity is there really for all these individual players at what is (as I keep repeating) a highly commoditized level in the stack.

It’s important to stand back and think about what this means for the broader industry, over the next few years there is going to be a significant acceleration in two different things;

• Acquisitions by large players of these sorts of technologies (CastIron with IBM, Heroku with Salesforce, Boomi with Dell)
• More mergers by smaller players wanting to attain some level of scale and realizing they can’t do it alone

Of course all of this is fuelled by voracious VCs and angels who, realizing the opportunity is now, want to make a quick return while they still can. To do so they need to look at building scale and, more importantly, maintaining relevance. Mergers are a good way to do that. We reflected on this during a focus.com roundtable I moderated last week (see below or if the embed doesn’t work click here). During the roundtable, John Taschek from salesforce.com particularly called out this aspect when he talked about a marketplace full of;

products that are little more than features

Which is interesting since his own company, salesforce, has been snapping up many of those feature/products. So I’m seeing this trend accelerating going forwards, because of this it’s even more important that startups think seriously if they’re really creating a product or merely a feature – especially so if they play at the infrastructure end of the stack.

Focus.com Roundtable

How wrong were we? Dell announced this morning the acquisition of Boomi a company we’ve covered previously. Boomi is  company that is all about easing the integration between different applications, be they on-premise or cloud. Their aim is to finally break down data silos and to do so in a way that doesn’t require the integrator to have any knowledge about how to deal with the complex APIs involved in the process.

I’ve always been a fan of integration, and like the fact that Boomi enables it more readily than with an API driven approach.

Boomi already works with a number of different applications and platforms – salesforce, QuickBoks, Zuora, Taleo and NetSuite for example. This move looks set to allow Dell to move rapidly up the stack, providing it’s customers with vertical specific, hardware nad software solutions that are all integrated.

I have to say it’s an acquisition a little out of left field and I truly hope Boomi doesn’t become orphaned within it’s new owner. Their offering is really to good to be left to die in a corner somewhere – I’m hoping that Dell will take this seriously despite the low dollars reported to have been involved in the deal.