It’s getting difficult to argue unequivocally that the cloud “simplifies” infrastructure. When Amazon.com Inc. announced 1,000 new tweaks and updates to AWS at its re:Invent conference last week, some customers wondered if the cloud had become as complex as their old data centers. Nevertheless, due to cost savings and market demand for the innovation cloud enables, they are unlikely to turn back. Will the integration Platform as a Service be the assist that makes cloud simple after all?

Dell Boomi Chief Executive Chris McNabb said the proliferation of Software as a Service applications on top of the core cloud adds even greater complexity. “While I think many vendors, including us to some degree, want to sit there and say, ‘Buy everything from us,’ that’s not how enterprises operate,” he told Stu Miniman (@stu), host of theCUBE, from the SiliconANGLE Media team.

Enterprises, he said, absolutely need best-in-breed software to get the competitive advantage in their markets. Bridging that software together, however, remains a challenge at the enterprise level. With a new release out this week, Dell Boomi looks to bring iPaaS to the enterprise for faster application integration and improved data governance.

As the sole survivor of Dell’s software business liquidation, Boomi plays an integral role in navigating the customer’s journey to cloud-first IT management. Its latest release addresses enterprise demand for cloud integration across business applications with more pre-built connectors for Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure, to name a few, along with a bevvy of governance upgrades for managing quarantined records and more accessible log data for viewing historic file activity.

Boomi’s winter release updates are aimed squarely at boosting developer productivity, according to McNabb. “It’s critical for our customers that they complete integration activities in the shortest amount of time,” he explained, going on to note the importance of APIs toward this goal.

“People can now create and publish different APIs and we have a management layer that allows people to mediate changes to multiple APIs behind the scenes, which is very big for developers today to help simplify a complicated environment,” McNabb furthered.

iPaaS breaks through the clouds

As a leading cloud integrator with a compounded annual growth rate higher than the market average, Boomi is in a unique position to observe enterprise cloud trends. When asked for his opinion on the cloud’s early promise to simplify infrastructure in light of recent complexities like the Internet of Things boom, McNabb pointed to the necessity of iPaaS in today’s reality.

“They actually have gotten much more complicated, but it’s the integration Platform as a Service vendors that are helping simplify that,” McNabb said.  “We are the glue that ties together all of the cloud applications that enterprises are having, all of their legacy back-end systems that the people have, that they want to share data amongst and so on, so forth.”

He went on to add: “There’s a complete DevOps capability in our platform. If you create an integrations process, we version that, we upgrade that. Our customers never go through software upgrades for versions of our software.” How does Boomi keep up with that promise, particularly as vendors like AWS and Azure regularly roll out new versions?

Citing the many connectors newly available with Boomi’s latest release, McNabb admitted that maintaining integrators for vendor updates is a “constant source of activity” for the company. Taking cues from customers, Boomi prioritizes its integrators accordingly. “We build connectors, we create them, we keep them upgraded,” McNabb explained. “We have a service level agreement that says, ‘If vendors come to the market with changes to their API and our connector, we try and get that update out within 90 days.'”

Watch the entire interview with McNabb:

Kristen Nicole contributed to this article.

Photo by SiliconANGLE