A Sonic Boomi? Cloud Integration Veteran Hits Mach 2
Boom... Chicka-boom! Boom... Chicka-boom! Rocka-chicka, Rocka-chicka, Rocka-chicka... Boomi!
Hey, Ho! That's your beatbox intro for a recap article about business-is-booming Boomi, the cloud integration vendor with decades of API metadata! Not many companies have the receipts on 200 million integration patterns. Rare is the firm with 2 petabytes of it in a data lakehouse.
But that's Boomi, several years successfully spun out from Dell, now sporting a new-and-experienced CEO who brings a remarkable ebullience to the enterprise table: None other than 3-time Chief Executive, Steven Lucas, formerly of SAP, Marketo, Adobe and iCIMS.
Lucas took the helm last December, and that's when the hit parade began. Numerous hires made clear his intention to move quickly and forcefully. How many hires? Here's a partial list:?
That's called bringing the team! It's a recipe Lucas learned years ago, and it makes complete sense. When taking over as the leader of an established firm, it helps to have trusted advisors by your side. After all, executive management is all about inspiring the team, and relying on others to execute your vision.?
And then there are all the recent product and service announcements, a litany of advances across the enterprise integration landscape. To wit, here's a list of five recent announcements:
1. Boomi Launches New Low-Code/No-Code App Development Platform -- September 19, 2023
Boomi announced the launch of its new low-code/no-code app development platform, which makes it easy for anyone to build and deploy enterprise-grade applications, regardless of their coding skills. The platform includes a drag-and-drop interface, pre-built components, and templates, as well as a library of over 1,000 pre-built connectors to popular cloud and on-premises applications.
2. Boomi Releases New Integration Tools for Salesforce Commerce Cloud -- August 4, 2023
Boomi released new integration capabilities for Salesforce Commerce Cloud, which make it easier for businesses to connect their e-commerce platforms to other systems, such as ERP, CRM, and analytics systems. The new capabilities include pre-built connectors, templates, and recipes, as well as a new low-code/no-code integration builder.
3. Boomi Announces New Managed Services Offering -- July 19, 2023
Boomi announced a new managed services offering, which provides businesses with the expertise and resources they need to manage their Boomi integrations. The offering includes services such as integration design, development, deployment, and support.
4. Boomi Releases New Integration Capabilities for SAP S/4HANA -- June 23, 2023
Boomi released new integration capabilities for SAP S/4HANA, which make it easier for businesses to connect their SAP S/4HANA systems to other systems, such as ERP, CRM, and analytics systems. The new capabilities include pre-built connectors, templates, and recipes, as well as a new low-code/no-code integration builder.
5. Boomi Launches New Partner Program -- May 18, 2023
Boomi launched a new partner program, which is designed to help partners grow their businesses and provide their customers with the best possible Boomi experience. The program includes benefits such as training, certification, and marketing support.
Don't Forget Event Processing!
Now, how much would you pay? But wait, there's more!?
Earlier this year, Boomi announced new support for Event Streams. This announcement was a major milestone for Boomi, as it allows businesses to build and deploy highly resilient, high scale real-time event-driven applications on the Boomi platform.
Event Streams are being used in many important ways in the enterprise, from real-time data pipelines, to microservice architectures, to Complex Event Processing (CEP). CEP is a technology that allows businesses to analyze real-time data from multiple sources and identify patterns and trends. This information can then be used to trigger actions, such as sending alerts, updating systems, or launching new processes.
Boomi provides a number of pre-built connectors and templates, as well as a low-code/no-code automation workflow builder. Combined with the new Event Streams capability, this allows businesses to get started with CEP, even if they don't have any prior experience with the technology. This makes it easy for businesses to build and deploy real-time event-driven applications without having to invest in and manage their own CEP infrastructure.
Here are some examples of how Boomi customers are implementing CEP utilizing the platform’s capabilities:
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Boomi's solutions in this space allow businesses to build and deploy real-time event-driven applications without having to invest in and manage their own CEP infrastructure. This can help businesses to improve their efficiency, reduce costs, and improve their customer experience.
Boomi World Tour
To tout these recent advances, and engage with customers around the world directly, the company just launched a series of in-person events called the #BoomiWorldTour! Stop one? Silicon Valley! And yours truly was in the house!
An especially exuberant Lucas took the stage for the opening keynote and wasted no time getting to the crux: AI is the future! And the present. And it's getting woven into every aspect of business. And yes, GenAI is now infused into the company's portfolio via BoomiGPT.
"I'm a big believer in Universal Truths," exclaimed Lucas. And the UT in this situation? "The rate of change is accelerating," he said. "I wake up, it's Tuesday, and if one more generative model comes out, I'm going to lose my mind." The man has a sense of humor!
But his point is well taken. Change is always hard, especially in larger organizations. And these days, the change is everywhere: New sources of data, new systems to integrate, new business models to stand up, new roles to master, new challenges to overcome. The list is long.
This makes systems integration really important. In days of old, just connecting one system to another took significant effort. But now, thanks to that data lake of 200 million integration patterns, augmented by Boomi Ask, Boomi Suggest, and now BoomiGPT, well... wow!
A demo shown onstage revealed out quickly and easily a user can now connect systems via the Boomi platform. Talk about automation! For data grunts like myself, this sort of thing has been a long time coming. And it will not only save tremendous amounts of time; it will significantly reduce errors. All of that will combine to raise the most important quotient of all: morale!
Several other execs took the stage in succession, offering their view of what's now, and what's in the roadmap. "We can connect everything to everything!" exclaimed Matt McLarty, CTO.?
"We have 220,000 users in our environment!" noted Ed Macosky, CPO. Macosky was employee #8 at the company way back when, stayed for years, then took a quick sojourn to Oracle, before coming come to his old haunt as part of the C-Suite.
The Big Break
"The real big breakthrough is this attention thing." YES! That's exactly correct, Tom Davenport! You are 'dead-on balls accurate' to paraphrase My Cousin Vinny's Marisa Tomei! This attention thing is absolutely huge, because now a very powerful foundational model can change its mind in the middle of a major compute! That's amazing.
Okay, technically, it's not really changing its mind, as industry visionary Damian Black noted on a recent episode of #theConnection. Rather, the transformer models opened up a new door in how these algorithms can work, essentially enabling a much richer, more complex system of weightings that help determine which word is chosen next.?
Because of the transformers, these LLMs can now see several tokens in either direction, which is a far cry from where they were when they could only see one or two tokens. (Think of a token as roughly half a word.) What's more, there are now buffer zones that include the weighted suggestions of multiple threads at the same time, kind of like a peanut gallery of agents who each make their own suggestion. In the end, the model will choose one and move on.?
The Big Picture
I've been tracking Boomi since early 2011 when they had already scored significant success in optimizing the connections between major cloud services, called ASPs back then, for Application Service Providers. What's the difference between ASPs and today's Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) model? To quote a DM Radio guest years ago: "SaaS works!"
And Boomi is definitely working! According to Google, the Chesterbrook, PA based concern had roughly $500MM in revenue last year, compared its nearest competitor, MuleSoft, which clocked in at ~$300MM. Workato meanwhile is still trying to crack the $100MM mark.?
Of course, there's also Google, which this analyst views as the greatest competitive threat. In a special analyst session late in the day, Lucas offered a concise response to my comment about big G's vectorization layer, which now reportedly sits beneath both Gmail and Google Drive, thus enabling fluid connectivity to Large Language Models.
"It's not lost on me," he said.?
He knows.
For his part, Lucas says he wants to hit a billion within the next few years. He has the team, the tech, the vision, the data and the attitude. Here's me guessing they hit that mark ahead of schedule. Boom... Chicka-Boomi!