Day one of Boomi’s largest annual user conference, Boomi World 2024, opens with announcements about potential impact that generative AI can bring in just years, instead of decades.

Boomi™, the intelligent integration and automation leader, unveiled its vision for the company’s future, along with strategic acquisitions and key product announcements at Boomi World 2024. With more than 20,000 global customers and a network of approximately 800 partners worldwide, Boomi is leading the industry towards the future with a focus on integration and automation, API management, and data management, all made more important and powerful than ever with the emergence of the AI economy.

Steve Lucas, Boomi CEO, during day one keynote of Boomi World 2024

In his keynote, Boomi CEO Steve Lucas emphasized the transformative impact of integration platform as a service (iPaaS), spotlighting its pivotal role in enhancing speed, agility, and effectiveness across business operations. Lucas explained how Boomi’s iPaaS streamlines connectivity — seamlessly linking people, systems, devices, and applications — for building stronger relationships and enabling swift, informed decision-making through real-time data access.

But Boomi recognizes the opportunity to take connectivity even further, and to bring connectivity solutions to more companies in more areas of business and IT.

“Connectivity,” Lucas pointed out, “remains a critical challenge for almost every organization. The chief culprit is digital fragmentation, a byproduct of digital shifts that, paradoxically, lead to digital silos and disjointed technical architectures that leave the average enterprise now juggling over 364 applications and numerous API gateways.”

The emergence of the AI economy has further highlighted the challenges of digital fragmentation. “AI thrives on reliable, secure, and current data, yet too often, this data is fragmented, difficult to govern, and not securely managed,” Lucas noted. “What companies urgently need is a unified, enterprise-scale platform that not only bridges APIs, applications, data, and AI models, but also accelerates digital transformation.”

To address these pressing challenges, Boomi unveiled key announcements at Boomi World, including:

New Boomi Enterprise Platform Vision

Boomi has expanded and deepened the capabilities of the Boomi Enterprise Platform with:

• Next-generation API management for the AI economy
• An AI agent framework that provides out-of-the-box AI agents, pluggability for 3rd party AI agents, as well as the ability to automate AI orchestration workflows
• Enhanced data management to support data quality, data lineage, and metadata management

Next-Generation API Management for the AI Economy

Joining Lucas onstage, Matt McLarty, CTO at Boomi, explained that “companies today suffer from API sprawl: API gateways are everywhere, and there’s no effective global view or management dashboard for discovering, governing, and securing them, let alone rationalizing API investments and promoting best-in-class APIs for adoption.

Matt McLarty, Boomi CTO

The AI economy requires next-generation API management (APIM) that accounts for a fragmented APIM landscape and can handle the demands of enterprise-grade scalability and security that AI workloads place on APIM solutions.”

“What companies urgently need is a unified, enterprise-scale platform that not only bridges APIs, applications, data, and AI models, but also accelerates digital transformation.”

To solve this problem, Boomi announced the acquisitions of APIIDA’s federated API management business and API management assets from Cloud Software Group. Both acquisitions accelerate Boomi’s roadmap for providing solutions to the most pressing API management challenges that companies face today, allowing enterprises to rapidly and securely deliver business value through API products in one end-to-end enterprise platform.

Boomi AI Agent Framework

To accelerate innovation in the AI economy, Boomi introduced the Boomi AI agent framework, a set of integration and no-code development capabilities that enable business and IT users to run AI agents built by Boomi or Boomi partners, and to build and run their own AI agents to solve pressing integration and automation requirements.

Boomi introduced four new agents built into the platform that make use of the new AI agent framework, including:

• Boomi Answers: Agent for providing prescriptive help
• Boomi DataDetective: Agent for classifying data fields, protecting sensitive data like personally identifiable information (PII), and tracking where data is being moved
• Boomi DesignGen: Agent for autonomously building integrations
• Boomi Scribe: Agent for automatically documenting existing and built-by-AI integrations

In addition, the Boomi AI agent framework is open to third parties, and supports pluggable AI agents, allowing customers to integrate third-party AI agents into the platform via APIs or Boomi GPT.

In his Boomi World keynote, Lucas announced a strategic OEM agreement with Vianai Systems, a leading provider of conversational AI solutions for finance, and demonstrated one of the first third-party AI agents, Boomi FinTalk powered by Vianai. Customers can seamlessly connect to Boomi FinTalk powered by Vianai via Boomi GPT, leveraging Boomi’s AI agent framework. Using Boomi, the agent connects to sources of financial data in ERP systems, databases, documents, customers’ data lakes, and other data, and enables users to ask questions of their data through a natural language interface to discover and analyze financial data and trends in real time, for immediate actionable insights.

“Technology and business leaders have struggled to leverage the power of generative AI in their enterprises due to the very real issues of accuracy and security, relevance to business users with domain-specific requirements, and the inability to query both structured and unstructured data and systems in natural language,” said Dr. Vishal Sikka, Founder and CEO, Vianai Systems. “With Boomi FinTalk powered by Vianai, we are solving these issues with Boomi’s vast integration capabilities and Vianai’s conversational AI application for CFOs and finance users, enabling real-time, accurate, and actionable insights to drive business transformation.”

Trusted Data Management

Boomi also announced Boomi DataHub, a trusted data foundation for operational, analytical, and AI workloads. A high velocity, high quality data access layer, Boomi DataHub provides master data management, integration pipelines, and a framework that will expand over time to provide other data management capabilities, including enterprise scale movement and standardization of data for AI and analytics initiatives.

“Centralizing data has proved to be a dead end for companies,” said Lucas. “A better approach is to build connectivity, governance, and automation into the IT resources companies already have, taking advantage of AI to make this work faster and easier than ever before. With the Boomi Enterprise Platform, we’re giving customers the foundation they need for connecting and managing all their data, and for accelerating AI and API development. Using Boomi, customers can say goodbye to the digital fragmentation that’s been undermining their digital transformation efforts, and finally get the comprehensive visibility, control, and automation they need.”

(This writeup is adapted from a press release)