Daniel Chilcott Podcast Transcript

Daniel Chilcott Podcast Transcript

Daniel Chilcott joins host Brian Thomas on The Digital Executive Podcast.

Brian-Thomas: Welcome to Coruzant Technologies, Home of The Digital Executive podcast.  

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Welcome to The Digital Executive. Today’s guest is Daniel Chilcott. Daniel Chilcott serves as CEO and Co-Founder of Flowgear, a globally recognized integration platform as a service, or IPAS, trusted by businesses of all sizes to streamline data and app-to-app interactions without the complexity of traditional tools. 

As a tech entrepreneur working to solve app integration, he has focused his 15-plus years within the company pursuing the mission of reducing complexity without compromising capability. He leads the team in their ultimate goal of freeing up organizations to focus on their business process rather than technical implementation details. 

Well, good afternoon, Daniel. Welcome to the show.  

Daniel Chilcott: Thanks very much for having me, Brian.  

Brian-Thomas: Absolutely, my friend. I appreciate it, especially today. I don’t always go this far internationally in the podcast, but you’re hailing out of Cape Town, South Africa. I’m in Kansas City, so jumping through time zones and calendars, I am so appreciative of you, my friend, so thank you. 

And Daniel, let’s jump into your first question. You Co-Founded Flowgear back in twenty ten and have spent more than 15 years focused on solving integration challenges. What inspired you to start the company, what core problem you were most determined to solve?  

Daniel Chilcott: Yeah, well, the, the origin story is actually fairly mundane. 

My first sort of real job was working in a business that had a software company spun up within it, and I became the first software engineer. And basically it was just a fight to survive. So, anything that came through the door, we would, we will- would build. So it was custom project, custom project. 

And over time, we realized that we wanted to make some of it reusable, and a lot of the requests that we were getting from customers were around CRM. This is in the late sort of two thousands. And so we realized that we could create something that was much more reusable. And then everything else that was requested, o- you know, order processing or some kind of finance backend, those were shipped as modules on this, this kind of e- ever more expansive CRM that we built. 

And that was great, and we got reusability out of that. But every customer coming to us wanted a way to integrate what we had shipped for them into the other systems that they were already using. And so that, that’s kind of where the, the itch came from around figuring out how do we make integration reusable as well. 

And the difficult thing with it is that- you can sort of build a CRM once, so to speak, and it has to have a certain level of configurability, but after that you can sort of sell it as is. But integration is actually seldom like that. Where there is value, there’s customization needed. 

So the question becomes, how much can you pre-build as a platform versus what needs to be implemented specifically for a customer? So long story short, I left that business to start the company that proceeded Flowgear, and we had a desktop app that was very lightweight by today’s standard integration platform. 

Sold that for a few years, worked on it over two, two, three years, posted a bunch of customers on it, and then one of our customers approached me to do a deal in 2010, and the idea then was to take that concept and deliver that as a cloud service as in, in its own right. And today that sounds obvious, but back then it was actually quite unusual to have an integration platform as a cloud service, and a lot of our early customers didn’t understand why we would wanna do that. 

A lot of the endpoints that they were integrating into back then were actually on premise and needless to say that’s flipped. So that’s where we came from, this idea of creating reusable, a reusable way to, to integrate.  

Brian-Thomas: That’s amazing. And I just love that as you said, your first real job in a company that spun up like a software company, and that’s where you cut your teeth in software development. 

I think that’s pretty cool. That’s where I started cut- cutting my teeth in application development. Yeah … very cool. I liked how you talked about, you know, meeting customers’ needs through this integration, and you said wherever there’s some value, there’s a need for some customization, some integration there. 

And I did, do wanna highlight that you were in the cloud space early on, and I know that’s obvious, as you said but back then it was really bleeding edge. So, thank you for sharing. And Daniel, with your recent launch of new runtime powered by AI Copilot, how is AI transforming the way businesses approach integration and automation? 

Daniel Chilcott: I’m very biased, but from my perspective, everything looks like an integration problem. And to me, one of the most exciting things about AI is its potential to apply it to integration, right? Because it’s the custom glue that sits between the apps. And you can use AI to interact with apps, but actually it’s probably one of its more powerful expressions is figuring out how to glue the systems together that run your business. 

So, it, it’s completely revolutionized it, in short. For us there’s really two ways that it is applied. One is that customers are increasingly building integrations that talk to AI endpoints to make decisions around data or understand intent and- You know, conversations that are being processed through integration, for example, but the other is using AI to actually build integrations from the ground up. 

And so, we started this pretty early on not long after ChatGPT had made it big, so going back about three years now. And we realized that by letting an I- an AI know about the context of the workflow that a user was operating in, it could give all sorts of helpful information, helping them troubleshoot or understand next steps and so on. 

So we, we’ve been through many iterations of it, but in the latest version of our platform, it’s full-blown agentic AI, spin up a workflow from a prompt. And one of the more kind of novel developments around AI is this notion of verifiability, where if you can have a tool that allows it to test its work in some senses it can just carry on until the goal has been reached, and so that’s what we’ve applied in our platform. 

So not only is it able to compose integrations on the fly, but it can actually test the result of those and then kind of course correct if there’s a problem. So I think that’s very powerful because you don’t… as a new user, you don’t need to understand our platform’s way of thinking about integrations, you don’t need to understand even the mechanics of the UI, you don’t need to know what connectors are available. 

You can go from zero to one very quickly by just expressing your requirement in English. And so, to, to kind of circle back to your question, the way that I think this is transforming how businesses approach integration is it makes it much more accessible. You need almost no domain knowledge to be able to create an integration. It’s bridged that gap.  

Brian-Thomas: That’s amazing. It really is, and just to kind of highlight some things I know from your lens you talked about everything as an integration problem, and with the advent of AI here and integration it’s completely revolutionized this process. Today you talked about using AI to build integrations from the ground up, and if AI’s there at the beginning learning everything about the customer business requirements, it provides much more value, which I thought was interesting. 

But also providing integration on the fly with AI, you can al- AI can also do that QA, correct bugs and issues on the fly, as you mentioned. So- Yeah … very powerful. I really like what you’re working on right now, and your insights are amazing, so thank you. And Daniel, Flowgear was recently named IAMCP ISP Partner of the Year. 

What does this recognition say about your growth and momentum, especially in the US and global markets?  

Daniel Chilcott: Well, it’s a, it’s a strong validation of where Flowgear is in its growth journey. IAMCP is deeply connected to the Microsoft partner ecosystem, so being named Partner of the Year- it says that our platform isn’t just technically mature, but it’s commercially relevant and, and partner ready too. 

And I think it also highlights our Microsoft alignment. We are built on Azure, and we designed the platform in .NET, so there’s good alignment in that respect. But I think also more broadly I guess as I alluded to earlier. It’s also clear that integration’s becoming a global priority. 

And in fact, as AI adoption accelerates, probably more than ever, companies need trusted, auditable ways for their systems to talk to each other. So, in, in some senses, AI’s broken down that barrier. You can do it now. The question is, did you do it in a way that is safe? And that’s where Flowgear’s positioned and our objective is to get that ease of automation and integration without trading off on security. 

Brian-Thomas: Thank you so much. I appreciate that. And that’s amazing your recognition with that ISP Partner of the Year award. I think that’s awesome. But as you mentioned, it holds some weight to it, right? Means your platform is truly commercial ready. And as you mentioned, integration is becoming the global priority right now, and I talked to a lot of guests on the podcast about this, is where, especially now, where systems need to be more integrated. 

There’s legacy systems, and there’s just things that it’s just not cost-effective to completely rip out and replace sometimes and integration can be very key in helping a business move to that next step. So thank you. And Daniel, as we look to the future, how do you see the future of integration platforms evolving, particularly with AI automation and composable architectures? 

And what role will Flowgear play in this transformation?  

Daniel Chilcott: Yeah there’s a lot of hype around, you know, this idea of software is dead. A- and I don’t really buy into that in the limit. Something can be trivially replaced to a trivial level, but turns out the real work is, is once it needs to become production ready and, and deal with an enormous number of permutations. 

And, and so software is always gonna have value. There’ll always be vendors building the same software products that we have today, I think. But the composability is the important part. I think there’s huge opportunity to have mini apps that fill gaps in business. So while you might be using your ERP or your CRM or your warehouse management system for 70, 80% of your day-to-day work, there are often cases where there are processes that you need to do that touch those systems and, you don’t wanna have to move between them, and of course, the answer to that is integration. 

And there’s kinda two ways that you can integrate it. One is that you can have these- integrations run on a trigger or a schedule, and certainly we do a lot of that, so these automated backend integrations that you never interact with. But the more exciting thing where we’re seeing a lot of growth is this idea of these lightweight apps that you can build really easily that will become this kind of composed front end, where taking an action in that app can execute multiple actions on multiple underlying systems. 

So just it’s a much more ergonomic way to work based on how your business is set up and the processes that you’re trying to work through. And Flowgear has, I think, a big role to play there. To make that more concrete AI has made it very easy to build front end very quickly, and someone with essentially no technical experience can build that. 

What’s a little harder is figuring out the back end. So I build a, an app that needs to show a list of things I need to do, maybe orders I need to review before approving them or something to that effect, and I need the data for those orders to come from ERP, but perhaps augmented by some data from CRM where there’s certain information that I don’t have there. 

And so Flowgear is a great way to create a back end that can do that safely without compromising on security. But it’s, it’s a very ergonomic way for someone to work because previously they would have had to touch two separate apps to perform that, that process. And so where we’re at today is you can be in an IDE and use an extension like Claude or Codex and ask it to build an app. 

And as it needs to build back end, it actually creates Flowgear workflows on the fly from outside of the Flowgear platform. So, the agent understands that it’s a back end that is a safe way to connect into the customer system and just builds them on the fly. And in many of these cases, these users don’t even need to sign into the platform. 

They’ve obviously got the a login to the platform, that’s how it’s able to compose these workflows, but it’s kind of done for them at a distance. So that’s, that’s kind of one kind of immediate thing that we’re already seeing where suddenly just, business folks are just able to stand up this thing that is a huge time saver. 

It’s kind of an ergonomics play, I guess is a, is a good way to phrase that. But longer term, you have to think about what kind of requests around data or interpretation of data is it hard for someone in a business non-technical role to solve? And it’s typically those that require trawling through a large amount of data, and there’s maybe two approaches they could take. 

One is they could pull, massive downloads from their ERP, perhaps of inventory if they wanna do some analysis around that or the warehouse management system, for example. They could pull this down as Excel and then run pivots and, whatever else. Many steps, lots of failure points, probably slow to work on large amounts of data. 

Or they could try and specify that request, route it through to IT, and then those teams are responsible for doing the same thing. But, they’re doing it by writing a query onto a database and so on. But as soon as you’ve, you’ve done that, now you’ve got multiple parties involved, it’s very hard to iterate. 

And this I think is where there’s a big unlock around integration and, and where we’re, we’re adding support in Flowgear is it, it is the way to get into those data sources without you having any technical knowledge of how to do that at scale. So instead of pulling those data imports, it can just execute the query that needs to run on that system via its API and pull that data and, and reshape it. 

So in the same way that an expert might type a SQL query that’s able to pull data from multiple tables and collate it together precisely, Flowgear is almost like the SQL engine that lets you get to all of the different apps. And so in the same way that today I’ve spoken about how you can build apps that pull data in real time from multiple data sources, and you can, you can kind of just spin up these apps, an extension of that is using Flowgear to build workflows on the fly that can answer a question in, in a similar way to a programmer would have done you know, building a SQL statement to query a database. 

So that’s just kind of broadly is where I think the industry is going. But what this means practically for people is that they will be able to answer more and more sophisticated questions without pulling in a third party. And that of course means that they can specify more precisely, they can course correct quickly, those kind of iteration cycles decrease. 

So, in a business, it means that you’re getting much better insight into what’s going on.  

Brian-Thomas: Thank you. Really appreciate that. Lot to unpack there, Daniel. You mentioned that the recent chatter out there that software is dead and, and I know you largely disagree with that. There’s… As you mentioned, there’s many examples for the need of integration here. 

And you talked about those modular bolt-on apps that are making it easier for folks to really get something done faster, quicker, and, and maybe even course correct as needed. But you, you talked about Flowgear can seamlessly connect multiple apps securely in the background without these folks having to sign into these systems, which I think is really cool. 

And then you talked about that collaboration across various departments and the analogy of using SQL to connect things and connect people to, to get this work done I think is amazing. Great stuff here for sure. And Daniel, it was such a pleasure having you on today, and I look forward to speaking with you real soon. 

 Daniel Chilcott: It was great speaking to you. Thanks, Brian.  

Brian-Thomas: Bye for now. 

Daniel Chilcot Podcast Transcript. Listen to the audio on the guest’s Podcast Page.