| SaaS – EDI and Beyond |
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| Written by Scott Koegler | |
| Monday, 04 February 2008 | |
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Last week I spoke with Rick Nucci, CTO of Boomi Software
about his company's move toward Software as a Service.
; "Image"){kind=small} Rick, please give me a little information about
Boomi . Nucci: Boomi has been in the application integration market since we went into business in 2000. Our mindset was to make integration available to the masses of smaller companies who needed the service but were not included in the target market of the bigger players. Today we have about 350 customers using our mature product. Your current product is software that is
installed at the customer's facilities, correct?Nucci: Right. The main reason we are now offering our products as SaaS is to be able to further execute on our mission of making integration available to more customers. This minimizes our costs and allows us to provide very aggressive, maybe it could be better characterized as "disruptive," capabilities when compared to software vendors who are steeped in old and large code sets, and the perpetual license and maintenance model. Does this make a difference to your marketing
strategy?Nucci: Yes. Being able to offer SaaS opens the door to interesting uses that were not possible with the software version. One obvious difference is that we can deliver and maintain our applications through a browser, without having to be on site at the customer's location. But possibly more important is the fact that we can establish collaboration between our customers' trading partners, and deliver integration more rapidly. Do you expect to convert your entire base from
software to SaaS?Nucci: We will continue to offer both our traditional software, and our SaaS products. That said, we are already seeing an increased interest among our prospects and new customers for the SaaS version. The old reasons for shying away from outsourced and remote applications have largely gone away. The issues around security and trust are already implicit in the B2B relationships where the reason for communicating is to share this data. How do you differ from some of the EDI providers
that offer SaaS services specifically addressing EDI transactions?Nucci: We are an integration provider. While we do handle EDI data, and plan on concentrating more on that direction in the future, what we offer is the ability to connect applications by transforming and mapping data, and moving it between the applications. And that is what EDI is about.Nucci: Right, but we take a broader view, and make it possible to connect a wide variety of applications that may be involved in EDI, but also may not. For instance, we routinely connect online applications like Salesforce.com with installed software like Oracle Financials. One of the advantages touted by some of the EDI
SaaS providers is what they refer to as the multi-tenant nature of SaaS... the
fact that one set of infrastructure supports many users. How does this affect
your environment?Nucci: That's exactly how we operate. It's one of the key reasons we are able to lower our costs, both to our own operations, and to our customers. Another advantage of SaaS described by EDI
providers is the reuse of EDI maps. For instance, if the mapping for a document
has already been developed, like an 820 for WalMart, that same map can be used
my many other suppliers, saving them time and testing costs. Do you work in the
same way?Nucci: Our customers use our browser based interface to create whatever mapping they need and can then share their creations with others by contributing to the collective repository. The customer has control over the sharing process, and so far the strong preference has been to share and re-use integrations so they can quickly connect applications and trading partners. What do you see as future for Boomi and SaaS?Nucci: We will continue to exploit and apply the advantages of the SaaS model to integration. Our next focus will be around connectors; the components that customers use to connect to applications and trading partners. We have found a way to cost effectively support the long tail of applications and will provide this to our customers later in 2008. |