How Boomi is pioneering data integration solutions

AI

It took a leap of faith to believe that a small software company founded over a Conshohocken, Pennsylvania, pizza shop in 2000 would one day be acquired by one of the world’s tech giants and become a central player in data integration. Yet this is exactly how the narrative has played out for Boomi Inc.

Having surpassed $500 million in revenue for its most recent fiscal quarter, the automation software company has navigated a journey that included acquisition by Dell Technologies Inc. in 2010 and its sale to investment and private equity firms 11 years later for $4 billion.

More recently, Boomi has acquired a new chief executive officer, released a conversational copilot to build application program interfaces and set its sights on 20% annual growth going forward. The company is seeking to capitalize on a database of 300 million anonymized integration patterns collected from its customer base as the enterprise world shifts its focus to artificial intelligence.

“The future is three A’s: AI, APIs and automation,” said Steve Lucas, Boomi’s CEO, in a recent interview with SiliconANGLE. “The vision is integration on one side of the coin and automation on the other.”

This feature is part of SiliconANGLE Media’s exploration of Boomi’s market impact in enterprise AI ahead of theCUBE’s analyst-led, on-site coverage of Boomi World 2024 from May 8-9.*

Boomi draws from past experience in AI

To realize this vision, Boomi will look to capture its share of business inside an expanding ecosystem for data integration. The market for data integration solutions and tools providers is expected to reach $29.21 billion by 2030, based on a need to extract vast amounts of AI-driven data from source systems and load this into cloud or enterprise data warehouse networks.

Boomi is not a new participant in the AI arena. The company began storing anonymized metadata from customer integration patterns as early as 2005, when it released its first software-as-a-service platform. Five years later, Boomi Suggest was added to its platform, utilizing machine learning to access mapping patterns from the Boomi community and support customers in cross-system connections. Enhancements to the Boomi portfolio over the years highlighted how data integration has evolved from the “extract, transform and load,” or ETL, framework to incorporate a more robust set of needs.

“The data integration market is changing,” said David Menninger, executive director at ISG’s Ventana Research, in an interview for this story. “It’s no longer just about integrating data at rest via ETL or ELT processes. It’s also about integrating applications, streams and events, as well as automation. You could say the Boomi was ahead of the market or that multiple markets have merged over time.”

The company’s latest release, Boomi GPT, is the first offering for what has been branded as the Boomi AI suite. By leveraging millions of integrations, Boomi GPT’s natural language prompts enable customers to build APIs or data models.

“You’re collecting all this metadata about your business, processes, business rules and outcomes,” Lucas told SiliconANGLE. “Large language models are really good at understanding what a human wants to do, so why can’t humans have a conversation with their business about itself?”

Use cases demonstrate need for data integration

This conversation is leading to some intriguing use cases within Boomi’s customer base. At the sweets manufacturer Tony’s Chocolonely, the Netherlands’ largest chocolate brand, Boomi’s integration platform is connecting backend data and business feeds. Tony’s Chocolonely relies heavily on partnerships with farmer cooperatives to source its fully traceable cocoa. Boomi’s role is to provide a mechanism for pulling and pushing sourcing data accurately and securely to manage the complicated integration process.

At St. Laurence’s College in Australia, Boomi is connecting the school’s on-premises and cloud-based applications in a centralized database to ensure consistency in information sharing. The college is also looking to adopt Boomi Flow, a workflow automation tool that St. Lawrence’s wants to deploy for handling onboarding and exit paperwork.

Boomi’s solutions have drawn the interest of educational institutions as data requirements have changed significantly in the post-pandemic era. In a previous interview with SiliconANGLE, Boomi executives described how the company worked with one university customer to implement COVID-19 contact tracing requirements by providing a connected campus experience that incorporated health needs. What was once a technology for purely enterprise customers is rapidly being adopted for real-world needs.

The endurance of Boomi’s data integration model over more than two decades offers insight into the key tech trends that are driving its business. During the company’s “world tour” in 2023, executives outlined several core beliefs that have guided enterprise interest in what Boomi has to offer.

One of these is that digital fragmentation is everywhere as evidenced by “SaaS sprawl,” where organizations use 371 SaaS applications on average. Getting this many applications to talk to each other is a challenge, and Boomi has geared much of its portfolio to address this problem.

Another is that AI agents are poised to take over responsibility for handling data integration tasks. Boomi has been actively pursuing a strategy to capitalize on this, with the recent approval of two new AI patents. One allows customers to build integrations based on Boomi’s suggestions, and the other facilitates the creation of hybrid chat bots combining rules-based connectivity, natural language processing and Boomi logic.

There is also a clear conviction within the company that most software decisions made by humans today will ultimately become automated. This embraces the promise of generative AI, which has already demonstrated a capability to significantly accelerate software development and delivery.

“All types of applications, including data-related applications, are incorporating AI-based capabilities,” said Ventana Research’s Menninger. “It is becoming a competitive necessity. Data integration and preparation have been the most time-consuming parts of data and analytics processes. Hopefully, AI will help change that.”

Boomi’s model positioned to support hybrid infrastructure

Boomi sprang from a need to solve database and systems integration headaches associated with e-commerce sites in the early 2000s. According to the company’s user community forum, the name originated from interest on the part of one of the founders in Bhumi, the Hindu goddess representing Mother Earth who was a nourisher and unifier. The name has fostered a separate lexicon that has become part of the company culture. The vast community of users is the “Boomiverse.” An employee who leaves the company and then returns is a “Boomi-rang.”

In an example of how the tech world continually evolves and intersects over time, one of Boomi’s earliest customers was Half.com, a seller of used books and movie CDs that was ultimately sold to eBay Inc. Half.com’s co-founder was Josh Kopelman, who went on to pioneer a seed-stage venture group that funded a then-new transit model for ride sharing called Uber.

After two and half decades in business, Boomi sits at the center of a hybrid infrastructure that demands cross-platform connectivity as generative AI and other key applications span on-premises, cloud and edge.

“The cloud world finally caught up to where we always were,” said Ed Macosky, chief innovation officer at Boomi, in a retrospective blog post. “Look at the rise of multicloud and public clouds battling it out for your business today. We connect all of it. That’s why Boomi is more relevant today than ever.”

(* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for Boomi World. Neither Boomi LP, the sponsor of theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Image: Andranik Hakobyan from Getty Images