When Rick Nucci says he runs an internet company based in Philadelphia, people in Silicon Valley look at him funny. "We would come out here to meet with VCs," he remembers, with a bit of a smile. "They would say: 'Philly? Do you guys have internet there? Are you working in some sort of Amish commune?'" He ended up partnering with a venture capital firm in New York.
But Nucci's real surprise is that he runs an internet company that was bought by Dell.
Dell is a computer seller. Famously, it began when Michael Dell started building PCs at the University of Texas at Austin in the mid-1980s, and it has long offered everything from servers to networking and storage hardware. But over the last decade, it has also evolved into a services company, helping the world set up and run all that gear. And now, much like fellow tech giants HP and IBM, it's evolving again, turning itself into an internet company -- at least in part.
A first step was its 2010 purchase of Boomi, the, yes, Philadelphia-based internet company co-founded by Rick Nucci. Boomi offers an online service it calls AtomSphere. Billed as an "integration cloud," it lets businesses connect the various and sundry software applications that underpin their operations, including financial software, HR applications, and CRM (customer relationship management) applications. These applications might run in a company's own data center or, like Boomi, they might run in the proverbial cloud.
"Our cloud service allows you to connect any combination of cloud or on-premise apps, and the connections are to enable a business process of some sort," Nucci explained when we met him for lunch not long after his company was swallowed by Dell. "So, if you got a lead that originates in a marketing automation application, the data can move into CRM system, and when the deal is closed, we can move the information into a finance system, and it might go from there into a support system to manage relationships with customers.
"You may be running two applications or dozens. But Boomi sits in between these apps and orchestrates the movement of all that data as it happens."
Boomi offers various "connectors" that plug its system into big-name business applications, including old school software such as PeopleSoft's HR applications, but also new-age online services such as Salesforce.com, a CRM tool. Plus, Nucci and company give you a software development kit, or SDK, for building your own connectors.
This sort of integration is nothing new. Application such as Cast Iron, now owned by IBM, have done it for years. But Boomi was at the forefront of an effort to move the process onto the net. The trick, however, is that only part of Boomi runs on the net. There's also Boomi software, known as an Atom, that you can install in your data center to help move data between applications and into what everyone now calls the cloud.
Like Dell itself, Boomi is straddling the line between old-school software and the new. And it does this out of necessity. Yes, the world is moving to the proverbial heavens. But the fact remains that so many applications are still running down here on the earth -- and that will be the case for years to come.
Rick Nucci and the Flux Capacitor
Nucci co-founded Boomi in 2000. Originally, it offered an integration tool that ran locally, in your own data center. But six years later, he had his "Flux Capacitor moment" at a software developer conference, and he realized how he should move the company onto the net. In Philadelphia, they not only have the internet, they've seen Back To The Future.
The conference was JavaOne, the annual get-together dedicated to the Java programming language, and Nucci was listening to a presentation about a "portable database" that could be used by applications sitting on laptop PCs. The database ran on the laptop itself and collected information when the app wasn't connected to the net. But then, when a connection was made, it could sync up with another version of the database running on a server far away. "I realized that was the way to do cloud integration," Nucci says, discussing his company during recent sit-down in the Wired Gadget Lab. "You have to be able to move the integration engine to the places where they're needed."
He didn't build a Flux Capacitor. He built the Boomi Atom. This is the engine at the heart of the company's online service that can also run inside the customer's data center. Scientific Learning –- an Oakland, California, company that sells educational software for schools -- uses Boomi to connect accounting and CRM applications running in its own data center, but also applications that run on Salesforce.com and Salesforce's sister site for custom-built tools, Force.com, and it uses local "Atoms" to facilitate the movement of data between the various hubs.
Aravo Solutions, a company based in San Francisco, offers two separate online services that let businesses oversee their suppliers, and it uses Boomi to integrate both of these services with its customers' back-end applications. According to Eric Hensley -- who oversees Aravo's technology -- the company switched to Boomi in part because it let them deploy those integration engines wherever they were needed. The company could run the engine in its own data center or in the customer's data center. "You can put them on almost any available computer system," he says. "Enterprises have a lot of rules about where they can and can't have their data. With Boomi, we could go to the customer and tell them we could put these runtimes wherever they liked. It just gave us a lot more flexibility."
At the same time, Boomi does operate as a web service. As Hensley points out, you can manage its operation from any location. "What it means is that customers can easily serve themselves," he says.
The Boomi setup is complicated. But so is the modern IT world. Nucci's company is the ideal metaphor for where Dell is going -- not to mention HP and IBM. Dell sells hardware that you use in your own data centers. But it's also a services company that provides help not only with hardware but software too. And then there's the bigger picture: As companies move out of their own data centers in favor of things like Amazon Web Services -- cloud services that offer virtual computing infrastructure over the net -- Dell must adapt. It not only bought Boomi. It's developing its own Amazon-battling cloud services based on the open-source OpenStack project and similar but proprietary software from VMware.
Like HP and IBM, Dell must move into the new while keeping one foot firmly planted in the old. And that's what Boomi helps businesses do. In fact, Boomi is moving Dell itself to the AtomSphere service, and this includes integration with Salesforce.com, already a big part of the giant's internal operation. "We could keep ourselves plenty busy just by serving all the companies Dell has acquired," Nucci says.
Yes, Dell is a hardware company based in Texas. But its future is an internet company in Philadelphia.
Full disclosure: Cade Metz's wife works for Aravo Solutions.
