SPEAKER_00: Hey, everyone. Welcome to Episode 39 of This Week in Cloud Computing, where we talk about Dreamforce, SmackDown Talk, and SnapLogic.

SPEAKER_04: Hello, everyone, and welcome to Episode 39 of This Week in Cloud Computing.

SPEAKER_06: I'm your host, Amanda Kulong. And, of course, joining me on Skype, I believe, back in the United States, David Linthicum. How are you?

SPEAKER_08: I'm doing great. Actually, I'm back in the United States in beautiful Scranton, Pennsylvania. So glad to be back in the U.S. in the land of very good bandwidth.

SPEAKER_10: Winter Wonderland?

SPEAKER_11: It snowed in the mountain as I drove over, but it's cold here, but no snow. But it's 20 degrees outside, so I'm glad to be inside.

SPEAKER_06: Now, real quick, David, you were obviously in Rome last week, so do you have any quick takeaways from the Cloud Computing Conference there?

SPEAKER_11: Yes, the Europeans get Cloud Computing, the Italians get Cloud Computing, and it's a huge market there.

SPEAKER_08: They're a lot more meticulous than us in terms of not really paying attention to the hype. So they're just trying to figure out what value this stuff is going to have for their organization. So I was talking to the telecom industry. I was talking to the post offices over there. I was talking to a lot of Italian organizations that really are looking to make Cloud Computing work for them in a very orderly, stepwise way. And it was very nice to see people not paying attention to the hype. They just wanted to know how it works and how to make it happen.

SPEAKER_14: And so it was a great visit in Rome, and I'm looking forward to getting back there sometime soon.

SPEAKER_00: Nice, nice. So I also have on the phone with us at another conference, because there's so many of them going on right now, joining us today is Gaurav Dhillon, the CEO of SnapLogic, who's joining us from Dreamforce. So glad to have you on the show and glad that you could join us from the conference floor, Gaurav.

SPEAKER_16: Pleasure to be here, Amanda.

SPEAKER_00: So wonderful, and we can actually hear you perfectly, so that is excellent. All right. So obviously Dreamforce is happening right now. We'll get into some news discussions around that. But also in terms of event updates, TechWeb has announced the next Cloud Connect conference. So if you are interested in that, it's going to take place March 7th through the 10th at the Santa Clara Convention Center. So we'll have updates on that. They do have a competition for app developers if you're interested in that. So we'll make sure that all of those links get uploaded to the site. So This Week in Cloud Computing is looking for sponsors. So if you would like to sponsor us, send an email to sponsor at thisweekend.com or mo, that's M-O, at thisweekend.com. And if you want to participate with us, which we hope you will, join us here in the chat room. And you can also follow us on Twitter, which is at TweekCloudComp. And use the hashtag TWICC, so if you have any comments, we can find those. We also have a network account, TWINetwork.

SPEAKER_19: So make sure that you are following all the great goodness that's going on here at thisweekend.com. So without further ado, let's get into some news.

SPEAKER_00: So, Gaurav, I'm curious to see what you have to say about this. But let's talk a little bit about the Dreamforce keynote because Salesforce.com CEO Mark Benioff did it again, knocked it out of the park with his comments, this time acting almost like a prophet, saying, Beware of the false cloud! And he even went so far as to call for its death. Really, I think, the death of Oracle, but we'll get into that in a second. And he also employed a heaping dose of showmanship by strutting his stuff to Black Eyed Peas Own It and by asking Will.i.am of the Black Eyed Peas what he thought of the clouds. So, always fun, always fun with Benioff. Lots and lots of, you know, just great statements that come out of him. And his opening speech was clearly directed at Oracle CEO Larry Ellison, who, you know, again, also slammed Salesforce at Oracle Open World, claiming that Salesforce was, oh, just a company with only one or two applications that run on the Internet. So, this is a smackdown between Salesforce, Oracle, and also you've got Benioff saying that the cloud is fast, it's real-time, and it's inexpensive. And then he continued, the cloud is not a box, it just isn't. There are no apps marketplaces if your cloud is in a box. Yes. So, I've got to start with you, Gaurav, on this one, because you're there. What was the atmosphere like when Benioff pulled this stunt at Dreamforce? Do you agree with it? Do you not? What's your take on it?

SPEAKER_23: Well, it was very exciting, of course, you know, with Mark, he's preaching to the converted. The people here obviously buy into the cloud, the true cloud,

SPEAKER_27: and very much are believers in the strategy of having, you know, a solution that they don't have to worry about managing, that they don't have to hire hordes of DBAs for. So, he was playing to the home crowd, no question.

SPEAKER_00: Yeah. All of the converts and the followers in the audience that were following their prophet.

SPEAKER_32: The faithful were here.

SPEAKER_00: Now, I know, I see you chomping at the bit, Dave. Come on, what do you think about this one? Is it all just showmanship and, you know, batting back and forth between Salesforce and Oracle?

SPEAKER_04: Is there some truth to what he's saying?

SPEAKER_11: Well, I actually made the prediction this week in InfoWorld that Oracle is going to buy Salesforce,

SPEAKER_08: and I'm kind of sticking to that. And I think this is kind of the poke in the eye that usually comes before an acquisition, and everybody's kind of scratching their heads. But I think he really took a jab at private cloud, so people who are building software systems that are internal to the enterprise and using software. And if you look at the Salesforce.com logo, it says no software, and everything should exist outside the firewall and some kind of a centralized hosting system. And that's exactly what they're selling. So I understand where he's coming from. He's very much a purist in terms of the whole cloud model. And I think that's a good thing. And I think there's a place in the market for a Salesforce.com. And this kind of rhetoric is just, like I said, just getting everybody rallied around the converted. And actually, Larry Ellison did take the first shot, so Mark just swung back. Exactly. It was only fair. Everybody expected it.

SPEAKER_04: Larry did the sucker punch, and Mark just came back with a one-two. See how well I punch? See that?

SPEAKER_00: You know, it was on the same stage, too, which just cracks me up. And I can't help but feel like Benioff should have chosen a different song other than Own It, because isn't that kind of against the whole notion of clout? Anyway, moving right along, going into the next Salesforce story, because, well, let's face it, there's tons and tons of Salesforce stories out there because of Dreamforce. They also announced that they're buying Heroku for $212 million in cash. So Benioff continued with this one. He said, the next era of cloud computing is social, mobile, and real-time. That's actually one of the parts that I really want to focus on here in terms of where we all think things are going. But so Heroku has a standard computer language. They dub it Ruby. And it's for software developers to use when they're writing code for their apps, and then they host apps on the site, which gets rid of the need to have their own servers and whatnot. And so they write apps for iPhone and other kinds of smartphones and Facebook and whatnot. So Heroku's website, I think, has over 100,000, I think 106,000 apps that currently live on its servers. So what do you think with this one, Dave? I'll start with you. Do you think there's some merit to what Benioff is saying in terms of his assessment of where the cloud is heading, or is it all self-serving?

SPEAKER_14: It's a little self-serving. And I think the acquisition of Heroku, which really is a platform as a service player

SPEAKER_08: that uses Ruby as a language, was a great thing for Salesforce. And I think that Force.com, as we talked about on this podcast before, I think it's had some trouble starting. And really, the core language of Force.com is proprietary in nature, where Ruby really is not. It's an open language. Heroku has made some huge strides into the platform as a service market, into the Ruby development community. And I think Salesforce is basically looking to take advantage of that. So they're going to provide their customers with an open language to extend their existing Salesforce implementations, as well as build new applications in Force.com. So it's brilliant as far as that goes. And I think they've got a huge multiple on this. I mean, $212 million on cash. And what I think they were making is absolutely huge. And it's just going to raise the bar in terms of what the other platform as a service players are going to cost the larger players who buy them. So good move for Salesforce. Great, great congratulations, Heroku.

SPEAKER_00: Yeah. And I mean, for me, I keep hearing all this talk about social mobile real-time, social mobile real-time, local real-time, blah, blah.

SPEAKER_08: It's all servers and code. It's all servers and code. We should get off of that. I mean, we're a ubiquitous network. We're going to access our applications from any kind of device.

SPEAKER_00: There we go. There we go. So, Gaurav, the question I have for you with this one is, why cash? Why $212 million in cash? I don't know. But, Gaurav, what do you think about this one?

SPEAKER_06: Do you think it was a smart move for them to buy Heroku? Where do you think they're going with it?

SPEAKER_27: Oh, absolutely. You know, I can't quite hear what David had said, so I'm going to, you know, just give you my own remarks here. But basically, you know, there's no doubt that there's one thing that is more expensive every year is programming talent, right? With the cloud, with the advent of some of the new dynamic programming languages, be they Ruby or there are people over at Google who like Python a lot and others, you know, there's just more that you can do every day, so tapping into what is the scarcest resource, which is programming talent to build and maintain these things, is a very smart move on the part of Salesforce, and catching Ruby on the upswing is brilliant.

SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I would agree. Definitely. And Ruby's really popular. I can't wait to talk about this next story. I just, I can't help it. I know we talked about WikiLeaks last week, but this part's just cracking me up. So, don't know if you're fans with, you know, the hacker army with 4chan, but the 4chan guys are really kind of funny. And if you want to follow what they're doing, which we're about to talk about, go to at anon underscore operation on Twitter. It's A-N-O-N underscore operation on Twitter. So 4chan is coming to the defense of WikiLeaks and serving up some good old-fashioned denial of service attacks against the likes of, oh, PayPal, Visa, and a few other big companies who have really restricted the whistleblowing site, WikiLeaks. So, it's quite the soap opera. I personally am, you know, getting really entertained by it.

SPEAKER_04: You know, Dave, do you think that this is good or bad? Do you think this is going to continue? I mean, on a serious note, this has really sparked this whole discussion about we're moving

SPEAKER_00: everything into the cloud. And if we put all of ourselves there, our companies there, our applications there, everything there, is someone like an Amazon going to cave to any kind of pressure that they get from

SPEAKER_04: federal organizations or otherwise?

SPEAKER_11: Yeah. And actually, I posted a blog on enterprise efficiency about this. So, you know, I called, hey, get off of my cloud.

SPEAKER_08: And I think that there is a point there. I mean, I understand why they got kicked off of Amazon and what they were doing. And they were just basically a political fireball. And they didn't want to have a hot potato. And so, I think everybody's, it's a polarizing issue. And people are coming down on either to defend WikiLeaks or against WikiLeaks and think it was a good idea. And I think that 4chan is coming down on defending WikiLeaks. And they're going to go after the sites they think they should go after. And they've done this before. And it's going to happen all the time. I don't think it's going to have too much of an impact on whether or not people change their behavior or not. But the larger issue, to your point, which I think is spot on, is that ultimately, if we're going to stick our stuff on these environments, don't we have to go through some kind of a due process before they knock us off? And I think that is the case. And I know the case with WikiLeaks was a very different case. But, you know, they could decide that we violate a terms of service attack, terms of service. They could decide that we violated privacy or we're accused of violating privacy. And if we don't go through a due process, we could end up finding that our applications and our data are out in the cold, costing us millions of dollars, even our companies. And that's the big concern right now that comes out of this, beyond the politics and beyond the silliness with Fortran.

SPEAKER_68: Absolutely.

SPEAKER_06: Absolutely. And, Gaurav, what do you think of this? Have you heard this story? Is there a talk at Dreamforce about what's going on?

SPEAKER_22: No, I haven't heard the story. But, you know, again, I was traveling through my own bit of travel in Asia.

SPEAKER_23: It was sort of hard to miss some of these elements, no matter where you were at every airport. You know, those are the cover pages of the magazines.

SPEAKER_27: But, look, it's basically the fact that cloud cuts both ways, right? Right. The whole, you could rename WikiLeaks as Cloud Leaks, and that would not be an inappropriate name because the very fact that information came up is because of the cloud, because of

SPEAKER_23: the design of the Internet. And the reverse is also true, that we don't really have information that we can, you know, really, truly feel is in our control. And we, you know, sort of more to what we see day to day, you know, even at the Dreamforce conference here, we're finding that people want to be able to bring their cloud information sometimes on premise to do certain kinds of processing with it, which is more, you know, more efficiently done using inexpensive resources rather than, you know, hitting the cloud over

SPEAKER_27: and over again. So, we're finding that. And we're also finding that there's, you know, there's very definitely sort of a cloud bill of rights that people are starting to think about all the way back to the Facebook privacy issue, as well as, you know, I mean, whose data is it if you're buying a cloud application?

SPEAKER_23: Who owns the information? You do. And if you haven't put that into your contract, then shame on you, you know, after all this news.

SPEAKER_78: That's a good point, actually. We haven't really dove into that.

SPEAKER_27: How can you, how can you, in all good faith, engage in commerce with various cloud providers and not have a bill of rights as a customer? And so, look, I'm paying for this. Very good point. It's not a free social networking site. It is my data. Yeah.

SPEAKER_23: And I, or software I buy, or consultants I hire, can freely process information at any time, okay?

SPEAKER_00: That's a really fair point. So, shame on you if you haven't actually put that in writing in your contract. Very fair point. You know, we have to own that responsibility, I suppose. Absolutely. Very good point. Next headline, again, these just lend themselves to some great headlines. This next one, where's the beef? Apparently, the beef is in the cloud. I'm sorry, I had to do it. The USDA has announced plans to move 120,000 messaging users to Microsoft Online Services. So, had to do it, folks. The software as a service deployment is going to consolidate 21 different messaging and collaboration systems into one. And it's the first cabinet-level agency to move messaging apps to the cloud. So, the GSA announced earlier in the month that they were doing an agency-wide deployment, but this is the first cabinet-level agency. What I'm wondering is, does this possibly signal a trend that the federal agencies are finally going to go through with their move to the cloud? And not only that, but given that we know Amazon is trying really hard to target the federal agencies, is this kind of a, you know, from Microsoft to Amazon?

SPEAKER_86: So, Dave, what are your thoughts on this one?

SPEAKER_11: Yeah, actually, Amazon, to your last point, they're suing Microsoft on another deal via

SPEAKER_08: protest because they didn't pick them. And they view the, you know, the government actually rigging the game for Microsoft. So, we'll see if that continues. Now, this is a great deal. I got called by the press today around this a couple of times. And I think they're going to save a ton of money on this, specifically around the licensing costs, around this very expensive technology that they're driving. So, Microsoft is doing a couple of things. Number one, they won a cloud deal, and that's going to be a great deal for them, and it's going to provide them a lot of traction. They just signed up 120,000 users. But the other thing, they're moving away from, I think, lots of bits and pieces of their technology on-premise. So, they're probably net-net, not necessarily making a gain. But they are making a gain in the fact they're modernizing people's technology, and I think that's a step in the right direction. So, it's a good signal for Microsoft that they're basically pushing their existing user base into the cloud. And they understand that there's going to be an impact or revenue to them, but their customers are going to be getting much more efficient and effective technology. It's self-upgrading. It's self-healing. They can collaborate on the internet and link in all kinds of different information sources into these existing systems. It's not closed. It's not proprietary. It is completely secure. And I think it's a very successful implementation that the USD is doing right now. And I think the Obama administration is starting to move in the right direction, finally, after two years.

SPEAKER_57: Yeah. Go CTO. Gaurav, what do you think about this one?

SPEAKER_90: What are you hearing in terms of the federal agencies with the cloud? What kind of takeaway do you have with that?

SPEAKER_27: It's absolutely a step in the right direction. You know, the cloud is USDA prime. There's no question about it.

SPEAKER_92: USDA prime. Good one.

SPEAKER_27: You know, they should be doing more of it. I mean, why does it have to be sort of four or five years into it that the federal government starts to realize that, boy, this is a good thing to do? And I think just furthermore, they can avoid a lot of upgrade cycles of, you know, I mean, if I was looking at the federal budget and I'd be thinking about it and going, gosh, think about adding Windows 7, right, across how many federal employees? Maybe we should think about the cloud right now. That's true. Move from XP to the cloud, you know, and skip this whole Vista thing. And, you know, at the risk of drawing some fire from our friends in Redmond.

SPEAKER_23: But the point is not about Windows alone. The point is, in every place you turn, there's modernization that's required. I mean, if you look at some of the FAA, you know, the air traffic control stuff that is built on many computers that no longer support it, you know, it's just...

SPEAKER_86: It's kind of scary, especially the FAA. Why do you have to bring up the FAA right before I go home for Christmas?

SPEAKER_23: Well, because, you know, maybe flying is not safer than driving. Certainly, you might consider the train.

SPEAKER_27: But I think the point I'm trying to make is that this may be a really good way to skip a whole generation and go right to the cloud. Do not pass code. Do not collect, you know, just go right to the cloud.

SPEAKER_30: Do not collect $200. Go straight to the cloud.

SPEAKER_27: Go straight to the cloud and you've avoided by virtue. So it's almost like turning something that's a negative, slow-moving, not able to respond into positive and say, hey, on the other hand, we skipped like a whole couple of generations of stuff that would have deinstalled anyway. Let's go straight to the cloud. Let's consider those applications, those ways of deploying things. And it gives much more transparency to how we're using various resources.

SPEAKER_00: I want to know, and Dave, maybe you can do some digging for us for next week. I want to know why they chose Microsoft.

SPEAKER_11: Yeah, I think that, you know, they're probably an existing Microsoft shop. And I didn't check into that, but I think that's what I'm seeing a lot of people. That's your homework.

SPEAKER_90: I love that I can give you homework.

SPEAKER_08: Yeah, we'll see if I'm right next week, okay?

SPEAKER_90: Fair enough, fair enough.

SPEAKER_00: Well, moving right along, cloud computing will apparently have the greatest impact on the database industry, according to a new study that came out. So, obviously, we're looking at the end of the year here and, you know, forecasting for the future. So, more than one-third of survey respondents, around 34% of them, selected databases in the cloud as the technology that's destined to wield the greatest impact on the community. So, virtualization ranked second, about 27% of the vote, and then solid-state disks with 15%. So, do these large database players risk the world completely changing around them as more

SPEAKER_09: databases move to the cloud? Back to you, Dave.

SPEAKER_11: Yeah, the light at the end of the tunnel that the database guys are seeing, inclusive of

SPEAKER_08: Oracle, is a train heading right at them. It's called cloud computing. And I think that, you know, the NoSQL movement and Hadoop and all of these various commoditized databases that people are putting in the cloud are very useful. They scale very well. I have a lot of my clients that are very successful with them. And I think at the end of the day, there may not be a reason to renew licensees, which occur at a million dollars, multi-million dollars per year, with some of these large database players out there. And I think a lot of the people in cloud computing are really moving in this direction, I think to the surprise of the cloud community. We thought it was going to be storage. We thought it was going to be compute. We thought it was going to be lots of different kinds of technologies. But the database technologies, things that we've been doing very well for about the last 20 years seem to be the most popular application for the cloud. And that seems to be the area of the most growth. Most of the cloud projects I'm involved with, they have a cloud database. And we're using a cloud database for the scalability, for the reliability, and for our ability ultimately to get information systems up in very economical and efficient states. And the existing databases don't lend themselves well to that. So the cloud databases are coming.

SPEAKER_00: Cloud databases are coming. You know, another piece of homework, we have to make sure that we have our own top 10 list of what's coming. I know, two pieces of homework. What on earth are you going to do? Whatever will you do?

SPEAKER_116: I'll do it.

SPEAKER_00: So, Gaurav, what do you think? What's going to happen to the database players? That's a tongue twister.

SPEAKER_118: So I think I, you know, we sort of had the PA system come on.

SPEAKER_23: There's a keynote here in a minute. But basically, I think I heard Dave talk about no SQL, no SQL. Exactly. And that's what he was saying. I couldn't agree with you more.

SPEAKER_27: In the past 30 years, we've seen just the growth and growth of a certain way in which people deal with structured data. The rows and columns have been managed through relational SQL technology. And now with, you know, some of the NoSQL movement, you know, MongoDB, Couch, which we use, you know, some of the stuff from Google that's coming out. But it's phenomenal in that you can think of processing large bits of information in very different ways. I mean, if you think about it, what is Google but the world's largest database, right? Fair point. And it stands to reason that it doesn't have to be SQL in nature. So I think the bigger thing is more movement away from traditional thinking of orderly rows and columns, sort of a columnar pad turned into a computer, which feels about 30, 40 years old at this point, which it is. And if you look at the web, you look at web 2.0 with all of the industrial design, with the way in which feeds work, blogs, and other kinds of information flows are happening. And in my view, this is a healthy movement. It's a healthy movement towards looking beyond just the relational database as the end-all and be-all of how we do business computing.

SPEAKER_19: Absolutely. Oh, and you mentioned this little company called Google.

SPEAKER_06: On a final note here, I just had to throw this out there. Dave, did you see that Google announced Google Chrome OS after all?

SPEAKER_11: Oh, yeah, I did see that. And so they finally got it out there. We'll see how it does. I think it's going to have a hard time.

SPEAKER_08: I think it may be go the way of Wave because of the interest in the context of the market right now, which is all about pad computing and Android on these mobile platforms. And I don't think it may not have a place at the end of the day. So we'll see how it does. I'm going to definitely download a copy of it and load it up, and I'll report back and

SPEAKER_127: see how it does.

SPEAKER_66: Perfect. That's your third piece of homework.

SPEAKER_90: Look out, Gaurav. I hear you chuckling. I might just give you homework, too.

SPEAKER_130: Well, I've got a company to run here. Oh, yeah.

SPEAKER_00: I forgot about that. This little company called Osnap Logic. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, on that note, I think, you know, there's some storm clouds are rolling.

SPEAKER_134: Shield Maiden.

SPEAKER_133: Yes?

SPEAKER_134: Ragnarok is upon us once again. Who's that? Oh, never mind.

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SPEAKER_141: It can be found at stormondemand.com. At storm on demand. Ragnarok be damned. Storm on demand. If you do not get storm on demand, I will come to your house with my sword and make you look at it.

SPEAKER_06: Sorry. Was that me? Oops. I can't help it. It's my head-banging Liquid Web storm on demand guy.

SPEAKER_00: So, yeah. At storm on demand, folks, they are our hosting company here at thisweekend.com. Could not put all of our wonderful things in the cloud without them. So, make sure you follow them and thank them profusely all over Twitter. So, Gaurav, let's jump into a discussion about SnapLogic. So, for those of you who do not know who Gaurav Dillon is, he started off with founding this tiny little company back in 1992 called Informatica. So, now you've moved on from Informatica and you founded SnapLogic in 2006. Back when we were calling cloud something like, oh, managed services or something along those lines. Right, Gaurav?

SPEAKER_22: Yes. It certainly didn't have the cloud word on it. That's for sure. Yeah. Yeah.

SPEAKER_19: So, what was the impetus to start SnapLogic in 2006?

SPEAKER_00: Because, again, you know, there were different terms for the cloud. You know, we're talking managed services and things at the time. What was the need that you saw on the market and how has that potentially shifted now that we are really in the era of cloud?

SPEAKER_93: Right.

SPEAKER_27: So, you know, the impetus was very clearly that people would be using web-style architecture. It was just very much sort of, for whatever reason, the hunch that we had at the time. And, you know, at the time we used the term business internet to contrast that with the consumer internet, and, you know, I like that term because it very clearly gives you a sense not only of what it is, but the scale and scope of what it is becoming. It's the business internet. It's bigger than the consumer internet. You know, it's just, you know, it's actually not my term. It's Mark Andreessen's term. And with all credit to him, but it's a really good way of thinking about what and how big. And that was the bet behind SnapLogic. The bet behind SnapLogic was that this is the way in which people will be building and if they do that, they're going to require integration that's fundamentally different, integration that understands the web, integration that understands everything is location transparent. It's HTTP colon colon something or the other. It could be here. It could be in Portland, Oregon. It could be in Tokyo. And how do you glue all that together? How do you make cloud applications work together? How do you connect them to on-premise applications, which, you know, in many cases are going to live on and on, you know? Or if they are slowly retired, it takes a decade or more sometimes to end up like these applications. And meanwhile, you have to coexist. So that was the driver behind SnapLogic founding.

SPEAKER_162: Well, apparently that gut feeling that you had turned out to be quite a good one because I

SPEAKER_00: understand that you made a big announcement today in terms of some additional funding.

SPEAKER_93: Yes, we have. Thank you. So we have several announcements today at Dreamforce.

SPEAKER_27: The first one is that with the continued success of the firm, we feel it was time to bring on a round of financing to really expand our sales and marketing efforts. We didn't have a marketing team until Monday. And very pleased to share with you that we closed a $10 million round of financing. Congratulations. Thank you. With Andreessen Horowitz. You know, I had the pleasure of working with Mark and Cross.

SPEAKER_168: Yeah.

SPEAKER_27: Thrilled to have them involved with the firm. Ben Horowitz is actually joining the board and we plan to deploy these resources to go beyond the several dozen engineering folks that we've had building out our product and bringing on, you know, our brand name customers and really expanding out internationally as well as thinking of approaching more areas in the U.S.

SPEAKER_171: So talk about that.

SPEAKER_170: Great.

SPEAKER_162: Well, Dave tells us that the Europeans get the cloud. So, you know, your strategy is dead on to go international.

SPEAKER_93: Well, they've always got open source, right? Much of Linux came from Northern Europe.

SPEAKER_27: And, you know, they get it. And I think there's much more European technology now than 15, 20 years ago when, you know, everything just was Microsoft and Oracle. And there was a few, few European tech companies.

SPEAKER_06: So Ben Horowitz is joining your board. Now, he co-founded LoudCloud. Is that correct?

SPEAKER_27: That's correct. Which was then became Opsware. He's behind it. And also the chief executive.

SPEAKER_93: So, you know, he can think about it and make it happen.

SPEAKER_104: So he knows a little something about cloud computing.

SPEAKER_93: He does. He does. He knows a lot about the cloud.

SPEAKER_00: And does he call it the cloud, though? You know, because we've got Salesforce guys that are telling us it's one thing. We've got Oracle guys telling us it's something else. You know, I'm just curious.

SPEAKER_23: I think we would all agree that the term is the cloud. The question is the definition of the cloud.

SPEAKER_27: But if you go back to, you know, maybe the mid-2000s, you very clearly get Web 2.0, the implications of the consumer internet as people adopt the business internet. So I'm not shooting for a new term, but I think that adds a lot of clarity to what it is.

SPEAKER_00: Sure. Sure. Now, in addition to announcing the 10 million round, now that was your Series B, right? I want to make sure we get that right. Okay, great.

SPEAKER_06: So in addition to that, you've got some new products that you've announced today as well. So talk to us a little bit about SnapServer.

SPEAKER_93: Yep. We're very excited about it. So, you know, we think big data is a big deal because of cloud computing, because of

SPEAKER_27: mobile social. You know, you only have to travel a couple of time zones away from the U.S. to realize how big mobile is. You know, certainly I saw it in Asia in an amazing way over Thanksgiving holidays, just everywhere. And, you know, that's driving much more information of a web nature to come to. We think big data is a big deal. So we announced SnapCenter, which lets you use a cluster, lets you use an array of SnapLogic servers in the cloud to be able to scale up to any scale of integration around data or information flows in your company. And SnapServer now adds a lot of functionality. So as you spin up these instances, they have the capability to be able to do more secure integrations, capability to integrate with your, you know, Active Directory LDAP types of installations and more enterprise accounts. And also, we've added a lot of functionality for commonly encountered problems in cloud integration. For instance, what if the internet's having a bad hair day, what should I do? Should I retry over and over until I get through? Should I try in two seconds, four seconds, eight, 16 seconds? What is my retry strategy? How often should I attempt to connect to a cloud application? So those sorts of error handling, cloud connect functionality that everyone has to write by

SPEAKER_196: hand are now baked into the core SnapServer product.

SPEAKER_181: Excellent, excellent. And also, you have a SnapStore. Talk a little bit about that.

SPEAKER_93: Yes. So, you know, a year ago when I stepped in as CEO of the firm, I think that was perhaps

SPEAKER_27: the most compelling piece of what SnapLogic could become to me. You know, Apple has done a magnificent job of transforming, you know, possibly even disrupting the mobile phone industry with an AppStore strategy on the iPhone. And with all respect to the folks in one infinite loop drive, you know, we're simply deploying

SPEAKER_196: that same concept into integration. Integration at its root is all about the connections you have. And, you know, no company in the world can have connections to all these amazing applications in the cloud.

SPEAKER_27: So the right way to do it is, in fact, to have an AppStore for connectors, an AppStore for integration. And that is what the SnapStore is, where increasingly third-party developers and even the software companies themselves are building snaps or cloud smart connectors to interconnect things to SnapLogic.

SPEAKER_00: I like that. So you are really the first online integration store.

SPEAKER_27: We are. That was really, I think, an innovation that has caught the eye, caught the ear of the industry and has helped us grow the business.

SPEAKER_00: Now, Gaurav, would you say then, you know, you're talking the big business over here, would you say that apps are where it's at?

SPEAKER_205: Sorry?

SPEAKER_206: Would you say then that apps are where it's at?

SPEAKER_205: Yes. I would say apps are where it's at. You know, there's an app for that.

SPEAKER_23: Absolutely. And we have a snap for that. How many other silly phrases can we fit into one show? Indeed. And we have a snap for that, you know.

SPEAKER_151: Oh, but we have a snap for that.

SPEAKER_00: That was a good one.

SPEAKER_23: That's right. That's what we say.

SPEAKER_00: Well, Dave, I'll let you jump in here. What questions do you have for Gaurav?

SPEAKER_08: Hey, Gaurav. Do you guys typically deal with application problem domains that are between clouds or

SPEAKER_58: between clouds and enterprises? What do you see? And where do you see that whole thing growing?

SPEAKER_93: So, you know, I think the center of gravity is shifting to a combination of cloud apps,

SPEAKER_27: connecting to on-premise. We've had a lot more of that at this show. You know, whether it's a small company, small insurance data provider, you know, wanted to know how they would be able to do certain kinds of analytics for large insurance companies, want to know how that would work with their proprietary sort of matching algorithms that they have on-premise. So that's more popular. The other thing is, as the cloud extends to the enterprise, you know, for example, a large investment bank is very worried that their Salesforce installation is being integrated on kind of a little bit of a runaway manner. You know, if you have sort of these very aggressive Wall Street programmer types, so they're just connecting their desktop trading applications to Salesforce willy-nilly, and they're not able to have reuse, or in their case, they're very worried about regulatory compliance. So they want to sort of think about a snap strategy and put those rules, put that reuse component into a snap, and then they have a standardized, canonical manner in how they can connect to Salesforce and other applications that they roll out.

SPEAKER_11: It doesn't seem to be a... There's fewer of you guys around now than there were last year, considering the acquisition of Boomi and the acquisition of Castiron.

SPEAKER_58: How do you see the market changing in 2011 around this kind of diminishing playing field in the integration-as-a-service business?

SPEAKER_196: You know, it's interesting.

SPEAKER_27: There's certainly a great shortage of independent integration providers, and in the cloud, we think we're the only one with a pure play on cloud integration, and we very much want to build out our business. The capital that we brought on board is an example of what we wish to do. But, you know, at its root, though, I think the solution is not adding more sales reps to grow your business. The solution is having a community, having a snap store, and really having an ecosystem that is really an Internet style of building out a business, an Internet style of transacting business.

SPEAKER_08: So, if we're, as we're, the market is progressing, and we're looking at comparing and contrasting the integration on demand, such as you guys provide, and integration that's in traditional software, you know, such as things that I built earlier in my career that are still around, owned by IBM and Oracle, and those sorts of folks, how would you differentiate that to

SPEAKER_58: people who are considering on-premise and off-premise integration solutions?

SPEAKER_93: Yeah, I think it's a very good question, David. So, basically, you know, go back to the roots of those integration products that, you know,

SPEAKER_27: you and I recall from our 20s, right? Those integration products were built before the Internet existed. Quite bluntly, they were built with a view that the world shall be relational in nature, and rows and columns of data shall fly around. And now we're looking at an environment in which you have very much a different mix-up of data types. You have relational and semi-relational JSON feeds and RSS feeds, a fair game. And also, you have different computer and network speeds in how you can combine that information. So, the traditional thinking around, oh, for this, we should use EAI, and for that, we should use ETL. Forgive me for bringing up an old alphabet soup. I think that thinking has gone away. People who graduated college in this millennium are very smart about programming in the large. They're very smart about Ruby on Rails. They're very smart about using servers at Amazon and Rackspace. And for them, we provide the best integration solution in our view.

SPEAKER_11: Yeah, and actually, I'm the guy who wrote the book on EAI and invented the term back in the 90s. But I don't take offense to that. I think that, ultimately, this is morphing and changing in terms of our architectural pattern.

SPEAKER_08: And I think that, ultimately, integration should be an easy thing. And it never was an easy thing as we started to develop this technology. We never built the technology with the internet in mind, to your point. But really, we're talking about making SAP communicate with other systems internally. Now, those big stacks are in the hands of the bigger guys. And now, we're talking about cloud computing. And so, now, technology like this seems like it's going to be a natural evolution. And I think that the integration solutions of the future are going to look more like SnapLogic than they are traditional IBM integration stacks and the ETL things that have been around for years. I don't think those things are going to go away. But I think as we move into this more distributed and highly complex domain, we just need things that are lighter weight and easier to leverage. Would you agree with that?

SPEAKER_196: I would totally agree with that. And, you know, again, we did our – I personally did my share of ETL business.

SPEAKER_93: So, you know, I would totally agree with that because I feel the word we're looking for is resonance, right?

SPEAKER_27: You have a certain computing architecture that's rolling out and a lightweight but very strong, sort of like carbon fiber versus, say, you know, steel. You know, carbon fiber is in many ways lighter and stronger than steel for the same application. Certainly, if you're building a racing bike or a racing car, you want to use carbon fiber today. So I think of the new integration as almost like a new material that is deployed in cloud integration very differently. And I also agree that the existing solutions are not going to go away, but they will be supplanted just in the same way as in 15, 15, 20 years ago when EAI ETL first came around. They were supplanting the mainframe solutions that came before them.

SPEAKER_11: Yeah, and I think that ultimately – I agree with you. And I think ultimately it's going to basically follow the same lines like we discussed with the database technology.

SPEAKER_08: Relational database technology had its day. It's still going to have its purpose. It's still going to have a lot of legacy applications that exist for many, many years. But ultimately in getting into unstructured data and getting to very powerful concepts and getting highly distributed systems where we can get the information we need when we need it, integration technology ultimately needs to follow. And then the other ways in which we do computing models ultimately need to follow. So I see this whole thing progressing in a very interesting and a dynamic way. And I think ultimately it's heading to more efficiently effective states. And the thing is I don't think people need to pay a million dollars for integration stacks. And I think they're doing so these days. So kudos to you guys for bringing this technology out. I appreciate you sharing with us today.

SPEAKER_53: Well, on that note, Gaurav, I think we hear an announcement from Dreamforce behind you. We do.

SPEAKER_228: They have a Bill Clinton keynote. It's hard to ignore that, I guess, at some point.

SPEAKER_00: You know, we'll let you get over to the Bill Clinton keynote.

SPEAKER_04: That's probably a good place for us to wrap things up so that you can scoot off to the keynote. So thank you so much, Gaurav Dillon from SnapLogic joining us today as our on-the-ground Dreamforce reporter.

SPEAKER_232: I really appreciate that.

SPEAKER_22: See, I got my homework assignment ahead of time. How about that? Exactly. Oh, okay, fine. You're off the hook. Thank you for your kind remarks.

SPEAKER_231: Thank you.

SPEAKER_00: Yeah, and congratulations again on your $10 million in funding. That's excellent news. So we'll let you go.

SPEAKER_19: But if you would like to follow SnapLogic on Twitter, it's just at SnapLogic. So make sure that you're checking out what they're doing. And, Gaurav, make sure that you stay in touch with us and let us know any new announcements that are coming up.

SPEAKER_235: We'll do. Thank you very much for the time again. Great. Excellent. Pleasure catching up with you.

SPEAKER_04: Thanks so much. Bye for now. See you later. And, Dave, of course, you've got three pieces of homework. I'm going to see if you will remember them.

SPEAKER_11: I'll send you an email later, Amanda, because I won't.

SPEAKER_00: Oh, fine. I will give you all the show notes and transcripts after we get off air.

SPEAKER_237: All right.

SPEAKER_00: But thank you again for joining me, everyone. Make sure you're following, of course, my wonderful co-host Dave Linthicum on Twitter. And make sure you're reading his InfoWorld stuff, too, of course. And if you would like to sponsor This Week in Cloud Computing, please send a message to sponsor at thisweekend.com. If you have ideas for this show, send them to pitchatthisweekend.com or myself, amandaatthisweekend.com. Any discount codes for events or whatnot, we're happy to promote those for you. So until then, until next time, make sure that you're checking up on This Week in Cloud Computing. Until next week, same cloud time, same cloud channel.

SPEAKER_06: I'm your host, Amanda Coulang, This Week in Cloud Computing. I'm your host, Amanda Coulang. I'm your host, Amanda Coulang, This Week in Cloud Computing.