Change Agents @ #BoomiWorld

"Things don't happen quickly until they do!"

So spoke Jimmy Malone, a philosopher and friend who trained with the Dalai Lama's right-hand man, many moons ago. (Johnny Cash once bailed Jimmy out of jail! The Man in Black!)

His words reflect the sea change surrounding us today. Is it a tsunami or a hurricane? Or a drought? It's really all those things wrapped up into a massive riddle called AI Transformation.

"I don't know a software company out there that isn't working on some kind of AI agent," said Boomi CEO Steve Lucas at Boomi World in Denver last week.?

Yep.

Here's a quick AI-generated list (via Gemini):

Google AI

Amazon Alexa

Meta AI

Microsoft

IBM Watson

Apple Siri

Salesforce Einstein

OpenAI

DeepMind

H20.ai

DataRobot

C3.ai

SoundHound

Grammarly

Hugging Face

Cohere

Character.AI

Replika

Adept AI

Otter.ai

Descript

Jasper.ai

Regie.ai

You get the idea.

That swarm of action demonstrates widespread awareness–at least among software vendors–that the world has now changed, irrevocably. After all, enterprise software tends to be a leading indicator of where things are going.?

Personally, I think the best analogy for these Foundational Models (not just LLMs) is that they're like the new Operating Systems of business. That's how transformative they are. We are genuinely witnessing the wholesale metamorphosis of Information Technology itself.

Yes, you still need an OS like Linux to run the boxes that churn the code. For sure. But I've long awaited the creation of a brand-new, airtight Operating System, one that's a lean, mean, fighting machine. Here's me guessing that GenAI will help write the kernel of that new OS.

Ch-Ch-Ch-Changes!

Back to our Change Agents: Boomi Chief Product and Technology Officer Ed Macosky asked a cutting question: "Do we even need connectors anymore?" AI agents can figure out what must be done on-demand, right? Rendering the need for old-fashioned connectors obsolete?

He said he asked his top engineer that very question, who maintained that yes, it's still wise to keep the connectors as a sort of foundational layer. These are obviously crucial architectural questions. But wait! Foundational Models can also... model, even on-demand.?

When you can achieve dynamic, intelligent automation at scale, that's some pretty crazy stuff! "I am a little worried about letting it loose in my environment," noted another visionary AI player a few months ago, Lou Simon of Uptima, a strategic consultancy riding the Salesforce wave.

"Salesforce doesn't fit," mused Lucas at Boomi World, while chatting with the amazing "Neon" Deion Sanders on stage. Lucas often targets Marc Benioff's behemoth, which bears its own AI offering, Einstein. Tthe Salesforce Tower is the tallest building in San Francisco, but is commercial property dead?

For a wild, semantically related fact: The AT&T Tower in St. Louis, long vacant, recently sold for $3.5 million. If that sounds low, it is, wildly. The property last sold for $205 million in 2006! That's one heck of a haircut. Remember: This is a tsunami, hurricane and drought all at once.

Centers of Gravity

Just like our solar system revolves around that amazing hot ball called the sun, so do companies, developers and prospects around critical centers of gravity. If you look at the technology landscape today, you'll find many players who've carved out their place:

Google AI – The former king of all software companies, Google made its hay on search, and is now arguably musclebound as there are so many ads served up for every search that it's hard to even use the tool anymore. Their center of gravity is still search, but also office apps like Gmail and the G-Suite.

Amazon Alexa – First focused on books, Amazon quickly pivoted to selling all things via its online store. Alexa is also planted firmly in homes, and thus gathers all kinds of lifestyle info. But we could argue their center of gravity is the purchasing of products online.

Meta AI – Facebook has its center of gravity in social interaction, with their algorithms trained on the rich behavior of billions around the world. This gives them an excellent position for understanding vernacular, human interaction and social issues. Oh, and Llama is open source!

Microsoft – Once again the king of software, Redmond's AI is really OpenAI's ChatGPT, with billions of dollars already invested, and much more to come. Of course, OpenAI's name is now ironic, at least for the time being, as their model is currently a black box!?

IBM Watson – Big Blue got out of the gate early, perhaps too early. The knock on Watson in those early days was that it took six months from deployment before it actually started generating value for clients. That's a long time to wait. Its center of gravity? Old-fashioned IT?

Apple Siri – With Siri, Apple made an early foray into the AI assistant space. As a consumer electronics powerhouse, Apple's center of gravity is the consumer, and his/her daily, tech-oriented existence. They have mountains of data, and a giant pile of cash at $67B!

Salesforce Einstein – Well, here's an easy one! The Salesforce center of gravity is obviously... sales! As the initial poster child of Software-as-a-Service, Salesforce has built an enormous line of business, absorbing major enterprise tech like Slack and Tableau.

Boomi – So, what about Boomi? Well, their center of gravity has always been connectivity, and in particular, cloud connections. Early in their journey, they landed major cloud integration clients, and have now expanded to serving some 20,000 customers worldwide.

The Cloud

With some 200 million integration patterns stored in a data lake that fuels their BoomiGPT, the company is very well positioned to leverage AI Agents for one of the most vast and significant addressable markets in the world: Cloud integration! And then? Boomi doubled down.

In the words of CTO Matt McClarty: "Big news: We’re excited to announce the acquisition of the federated API management business from APIIDA AG. This acquisition introduces APIIDA’s federated API management capabilities to the Boomi Enterprise Platform."?

But wait, there's more! "We’re also bolstering the enterprise-grade scalability and security of the Boomi platform by acquiring API management assets — the former Mashery product — from Cloud Software Group, a new company formed by the combination of TIBCO and Citrix."

McClarty knows a thing or two about APIs and cloud integration in general. Before joining Boomi just over a year ago, he spent four years at their competitor, Mulesoft, heading up API strategy. And before that, we worked at CA for several years doing very similar work.

Boomi's near-term plans now focus on creating an API registry for AI Agents. The idea is that there must be some sort of control plane for managing the activity of these agents, which can be remarkably autonomous, to the point of modifying their own behavior on-demand, as needed.

How big a deal is this whole AI Agent transformation? Well, Boomi's Chief Product and Technology Officer, Ed Macosky, may have summed it up best with a remarkably revealing observation as he spoke to the packed house in Denver for Boomi World.

"You'll notice we don't list product names here," he said during a keynote session. "That's not to say we won't support those products; we certainly will!" But the point was that discrete products are so passe now! The future is composable, and AI Agents will be the foot soldiers.

To be fair, this is not the newest concept under the enterprise sun. With the Service Oriented Architecture, we sought the same thing with fine-grained and coarse-grained services. And then Kubernetes came along to deliver distributed compute.?

But this is different. This time, we're talking about armies of AI Agents galavanting around inside your firewall, talking to each other, grabbing coffee (okay, that's an exaggeration, for now), and otherwise collaborating to get things done for the business.

That's a far cry from the monolithic mainframe, or even the client-server reality that still dominates many enterprise topographies. Oh, and Boomi even has a cool name for where these futuristic Agents of Change will spend their long, summer nights: the Agent Garden!

The competition in this space will remain fierce, and there are forces much greater than Boomi marshaling their resources as I type. But Lucas & Co. have a real shot at this, especially if they heed the advice of one "Neon" Deion Sanders:

"You've got to maximize your moments and focus on the main thing!"?

Boom!