It is just as important to understand what a Boomi Widget is not as well.  A Boomi Widget is not a sample process, it is not a guide or quick start; it is a fully functioning application purpose built to integrate 2 or more specific applications.  The Widget user does not log into the AtomSphere platform and see process models and have to look at Data Maps, this work is already done.  They simply extend these base process for their buinsess needs, and deploy it; either onto a desktop/server of their own, or into Boomi's cloud.

I've been following the development of the Inter-Cloud concept with interest over the past many months.  Popularized by Cisco (the network is the cloud), Inter-Cloud is described variously as a “federation of clouds based on open standards,”  an “elastic mesh of on demand processing power deployed across multiple data centers” (in this post by Greg Ness) or simply a “cloud of clouds.”

The posts I have read on the topic deal with issues such as standards for network protocols, virtual machine representation, and identity/security.  The vision, once these details have been worked out, is a completely ubiquitous computing environment that seamlessly blends all forms of clouds and their physical instantiations into what seems to me to be a single, massively parallel cloud computing environment.

But as awesome as that vision is, it won’t solve the pesky interoperability challenge of the business applications that run on these linked clouds.  And assuming we want to do something more interesting than host websites, email and excess storage, existing and new apps need to migrate to the cloud.  In the virtual layer cake in the sky, we talk about Infrastructure as a Service, Platform as a Service and Software as a Service.  But too many cloud "taxonomy" and “ecosystem” charts leave out the critical element of application integration.  It’s time for integration to take its rightful place on the layer cake!

What Inter-Cloud does for cloud computing (compute as a utility), integration does for SaaS (applications as a utility).  Inter-Cloud may make cloud computing environments interoperable but it is SaaS integration platforms (think "cloud middleware") that make SaaS (and on prem) applications interoperable.

I blog in another post about "the case for cloud middleware."  We have the opportunity with the SaaS industry to not repeat the mistakes we made in the enterprise era with hardcoded, brittle, essentially dead integration.  We have the opportunity with cloud middleware to implement living, breathing, scalable interfaces that will enable and drive the growth of SaaS and cloud computing.  After all, if business apps don’t make the transition to the cloud, the future of SaaS will certainly be in peril and the full potential of cloud computing will not be realized.

In Jason Corsello's most recent post entitled Is Your Vendor Really Operating "In the Cloud"? The 3 Most Important Questions to Understand About SaaS he does a great job discussing pass/fail tests to give to a provider claiming to be SaaS.  We are very passionate about the benefits of multi-tenancy, which Bob covers very well here and here.  And the product update aspect is critical too; remember that many customers move to SaaS to unlock the chains preventing them from upgrading their on-premise software, mainly due to extensive customizations and custom coded integrations.  A multi-tenant architecture forces the vendor to implement processes that can be performed "once per instance" vs. "once per customer".  This means that while the customer must take the upgrade, the vendor must upgrade them seamlessly and not break their setup.  The customer gets the benefit of access to the latest innovations released by the vendor, and does no work to get them.

I had a chance to sit in on Marc Benioff’s keynote address entitled “The Real-Time Cloud” during the GigaOm’s Structure ’09 conference yesterday (Boomi was an exhibitor).  It was an interesting session with Om Malik asking Benioff a wide range of questions about origins, maturity and future of cloud computing. 

Benioff spent a lot of time talking about cloud integration. He noted systems like Twitter, and the benefit if integrating with it which is basically that you get access to information as it happens in real time, and can act on it.  In legacy enterprise applications this is not possible because when these applications were built Twitter did not exist.  It’s a great and important point.  Cloud and particularly SaaS applications make possible for the first time a new level of real time, app to app integration that was not possible with enterprise applications.  Obviously at Boomi this is the core to how we operate, but it was refreshing to hear other people in the SaaS space highlight the critical role integration plays in the evolution of cloud computing.

And of course because it’s Benioff, you know you’re going to get some good advice and even better quotes.  He even took the time to tweak Oracle chief Larry Ellison.  Here’s a sample of some of my favorite call-outs from the address:

On recent comments Ellison made about cloud computing:

“Only 6 months ago Larry made caustic remarks about cloud.  Then, on a recent investor call he says, ‘the key to on demand is on premise, and the key to on premise is on demand.’ It is very Zen.  If you can understand that, then you will understand why the cloud is what it is."

On why Oracle and others are rushing to embrace the cloud:

"They don’t have a choice. Their overall enterprise apps revenue has declined, what else will they do?"

On what SaaS start-ups should do if they are trying to convince large enterprises to turn to the cloud:

“I think the number one thing is you have to get your customers selling for you.  Customers don't listen to the vendors anymore.  If you can get the gravitas around customers recommending you and referring you, you are golden.  If you can't you are in trouble.” 

When Om asked how he defines the cloud, Marc went through what he calls the 4 generations of the cloud:

1. Acknowledged Diane Greene for starting VMware, predicated on the problem of underutilized servers burning way more energy then they needed, and inventing the concept of virtualization to dramatically increase this efficiency. 
2. Acknoledged Amazon for taking this to the next level and offering a public version of this virtualized environment, allowing you to transfer LAMP stacks into their compute environment and pay for only what you need.
3. Acknowledged Microsoft launching "aZUNE" (Azure) where you can move .Net applications onto their servers. 
4. He then refers to Force.com a pure play environment, or "4th generation".  He says this is not just salesforce.com doing this, but also Google with App Engine.  In his opinion, these pure plays offer a much greater base of efficiencies.  As an example he cites salesforce.com's own SFA application, stating that SFA has approx. 60k customers and 2 million users.  In their primary data center they deliver four 9's of availability, and have only 500 servers in it powering all these customers.  He concludes by stating this is possible because you are operating within their managed environment: you get much greater efficiency vs. in amazon where you can run anything regardless of how efficient that application may or may not be. 

I’d be interested to hear what else jumped out at folks, or if they heard any interesting conversations in the hall or at the other presentations.  I thought it was a great show with a great group of people, and look forward to participating in future events.

Boomi recently attended and presented at the first Gluecon event in Denver, CO.  It was a great event, and Eric Norlin did a great job putting it together.  As the name implies, the focus is on integration in the web/cloud paradigm, everything from data portability, identity mgmt, cloud integration, etc.

I had a session, embedded below, that really represents the culmination of the types of conversations Boomi has with both customers of SaaS as well as the providers of the SaaS applications themselves.  Please check it out and let us know what you think!

Please leave us your comments below.