By Claire Cleverly
The last four to six months have been unusual for any business leader, and this sentiment was reflected in a recent special episode of our CIO Today webcast series, in which four members of our senior leadership team answered Boomi customer questions.
Webcast participants included:
- Michelle Wideman, Chief Customer Success Officer
- Ajit Melarkode, Vice President APJ
- Tania Mushtaq, Head of Marketing APJ
- David Irecki, Director for Solution Consulting APJ
Not surprisingly, customers’ questions were skewed heavily towards adapting to change and maintaining innovation during disruption. This sparked an interesting and insightful discussion.
As Melarkode explained, helping customers adapt to the new normal, whatever that happens to be, relies on innovation and new ideas. Boomi has always been about reducing time to value — and the lens is even more focused on this during challenging times.
Melarkode noted the importance for businesses to get time-to-value on the one hand, and avoid hidden costs and surprises on the other. This is especially important when investing in a new integration platform. Hardware, upgrades, and consultancy expenses that will be incurred further down the line should not be hidden in the small print.
A big catalyst for innovation is change. As we have seen throughout history, technological advancements developed as a result of periods of great disruption, and this is certainly true of innovative use cases for Boomi technology during the age of COVID-19.
According to Wideman, the ways in which customers have used Boomi has “blown our mind” with ingenuity and resourcefulness. One example is the use of Boomi technology to warn parents who are out of town that their kids were having a party.
A Boomi public sector customer that uses IoT sensors to monitor its town’s water devices saw that the usage for a particular household had skyrocketed. Worried there might be a water main break, the customer reached out, only to discover that the house owners were out of town – and their kids were filling up inflatable pools with water.
This same town is really innovating with IoT, in particular with traffic light sensors. If one of the town’s traffic lights goes down, a notification is automatically sent to the police, so they can monitor the traffic at the intersection until someone is sent out to fix it.
Another example of a particularly innovative use case comes from Boomi customer Gloo. Gloo’s application helps churches through digital transformation – taking them onto the cloud so they can monitor the status of church congregation members in advance. The result? A revolution for the whole church system, and proof that the Boomi Platform can support innovation and change across any sector.
Additional examples are the chatbots some higher education institutions have deployed for college admissions. Administration officers can’t be on the call to answer questions 24/7, but high school students are often up at 3am and want to ask their questions then. Chatbots can respond to let them know when their applications are due, and when they’re going to find out if they got in.
With integration across 1500 different applications, the possibilities for Boomi Flow and Boomi API Management are endless, with innovative new use cases surprising our leaders every day.
As we project forward to the future of work – what role might Boomi play for customers? Are people ‘working from home’ or ‘living in the office’? As the boundaries blur, what part does Boomi play?
Melarkode proposes that with the move to the cloud, the future could be boundless and borderless. Where people do their jobs, how governments classify domicile – everything is becoming integrated as one planet. These are positive possibilities, and it’s important to consider these and not just the negatives right now.
There’s a need for organizations to continue to transform, and our four leaders agree that emerging from COVID-19 is not the end to the disruptions. The ability to transform, be adaptable, and innovate at speed will become more critical to organizations as they move into the second half of 2020 and beyond. But from what we’ve seen and heard, so far Boomi customers are doing a great job at all three.
To hear more on customer innovation from Boomi’s leaders, watch the full CIO Today episode.