As we get ready to launch Boomi’s Out of This World Episode 3, I caught up with Ed Macosky, senior vice president of product and Rajesh Raheja, senior vice president of engineering, to get their perspectives on Integrated Experiences and OOTW Episode 3.
In his Sept. 29 keynote address, [Boomi CEO] Chris McNabb introduced the concept of “Integrated Experiences.” Based on your interactions with companies large and small, how would you describe Integrated Experiences, and its importance, especially in the business environment?
Ed Macosky: Integrated Experiences is a way of solving combined human workflow and application integration challenges across systems. Rather than offering disjointed application experiences between ERP, HCM [human capital management], and other applications, mobile vs. web and so on, customers can build integrated experiences based on specific customer journeys to streamline activities and lead users to the outcome they desire in the most efficient way. Nowadays, everyone expects answers to be available instantly — focusing on integrated experience is the right way to deliver.
Rajesh Raheja: Elaborating on what Ed said, Integrated Experiences is tying together technologies to achieve a business goal that our customers want to meet. For many of our customers who have embarked on digital transformation initiatives, it’s not just about one specific problem, but rather about achieving a specific business outcome.
As an example, it’s not just about integrating one CRM system of record of customer information to be synced with another backend ERP system, and then synchronizing product-related information, and then designing an API, and then building an application workflow etc. It’s about solving a whole bunch of various different data discovery, application integration, and API enablement problems, so they can provide the customer the service needed to delight them. Instead of thinking about these technical activities, Integrated Experiences allows our customers to focus on business outcomes.
How does Boomi uniquely deliver Integrated Experiences?
Ed Macosky: Boomi enables users to build and deliver Integrated Experiences in a low-code manner, which accelerates time to value. Developers can quickly build and release experiences and subsequent updates in an iterative manner. They can then enable their stakeholders to achieve their business outcomes in the most efficient way possible And importantly, the Boomi Platform provides all the services — the pieces of the puzzle if you will — that work together to make this possible.
Rajesh Raheja: It is about providing the right technologies that are used in the right manner. Boomi provides the core building block technologies related to the data asset that needs to be identified, categorized, synchronized, or integrated with other applications. These integrations can then be exposed as standard APIs that can then be composed into customer workflows and user experiences which can be integrated into business value chains using a low-code application framework. So, Boomi provides the platform with tools for data readiness, pervasive integration, and user experience that together enable Integrated Experiences for our customers.
We often talk about the Boomi Platform as being cohesive, open, and adaptive. What does that mean and why is it important?
Ed Macosky: Being cohesive, open, and adaptive is critical for our low-code developers to learn our tools very quickly as well as quickly design and implement integrated experiences for their end users. It is also very important to be open as a platform so these developers are not bound by the capabilities that we offer from a product perspective, and can extend the platform as they deem necessary.
Rajesh Raheja: We are in a period of unprecedented nexus of new technology trends that have transformed the way software is built — whether it is containerization, orchestration technologies like K8S, service mesh, DevOps, and SRE concepts like GitOps, immutable infrastructures, canary deployments, rapid deployments, API management, or low-code development.
With such a pace of technology transformation, it is impractical for any one specific company to think it can own the future technology or business trends. This is one of the reasons we strongly believe in being open and adaptive using standards based technologies — APIs, SDKs — but still continue to provide value with a cohesive platform that allows our customers to have the agility and productivity they need. We believe “low-code” does not necessarily mean “low control” if it’s done in the right way!
What else would you highlight uniquely about the Boomi Platform architecture?
Ed Macosky: Our platform helps users solve data management problems from a data-centric user all the way through to an app-centric user in a low-code, quick time to value manner. Our SaaS, multi-tenant approach ensures that users are always able to take advantage of our latest available features without waiting for some upgrade or patch from IT.
Rajesh Raheja: We are a truly multi-tenant, hybrid cloud offering from the ground up. This has given Boomi a huge advantage in being able to solve business challenges and provide technical advancements and innovations for all our customers, accelerating the overall business value and productivity with every release. Concepts such as autonomous, hybrid execution and containerization (even before Docker) are still relevant in the architecture and provide for a user experience that delivers ease of use and quick time to value.
Also, Boomi pioneered a game-changing crowd-sourced intelligent recommendation engine for the integration mapping problem domain that is the most time consuming aspect of building enterprise integrations — that too almost a decade ago. The beauty of this architecture that still holds the test of time and continues to allow for extensible innovation is what I consider to be unique; and I’ve looked at a LOT of what the industry has to offer in this space!
Out of This World provides a wealth of information and opportunities. What is your advice to viewers on how best to gain from it?
Ed Macosky: I am also excited about OOTW and I encourage our users to expand their viewpoint and knowledge of the services, features, and functions available in our entire platform. I encourage folks to experiment beyond the day-to-day features to solve broader use cases for their organizations. And whether you are new to Boomi, or have only some of the Boomi services, we offer a quick and easy way for you to experience the power of the platform for yourself.
Rajesh Raheja: I’m excited about the way we are planning to deliver OOTW this year — direct to our audience. I would encourage viewers to explore the keynotes — don’t miss the one with Ed and I to get a perspective on what’s new, and then definitely view the deep dive sessions in the areas of interest. Then meet the Boomi experts on Boomiverse for a live Q&A for every breakout session. I’m looking forward to getting everyone’s feedback as well — it’s what helps us improve our platform and what motivates us to do better every day!