By Ed Macosky
During our recent Boomi World Tour roadshows around the globe, CEO Steve Lucas made it a point to focus on the relentless change in technology everyone is navigating and the challenge of just trying to make sense of it.
“A universal truth I think we can all accept is that change is accelerating,” he said at our Silicon Valley event. “I wake up on a Tuesday, and it’s like, ‘I swear, if one more generative AI model comes out today, I’m going to lose my mind.’”
It does seem like everyone jumped on the AI bandwagon in the wake of OpenAI’s earth-shaking unveiling of ChatGPT in late 2022. And it’s no different in the integration and automation category.
We know it can be challenging to make sense of the different integration platform as a service (iPaaS) vendors because everyone makes similar claims about their capabilities. Now, AI only adds to that confusion. But all platforms are not the same. There’s a reason why Boomi AI stands alone and is a true market game-changer.
Why Boomi Is Different
During the world tour, we announced the release of our new conversational experience for quickly turning natural language requests into integrations and automations, Boomi GPT – the first offering in the Boomi AI suite. It’s not just a rushed attempt to spot-weld a simplistic “co-pilot experience” onto a third-party large language model and proclaim it AI-powered.
As Steve told our worldwide audiences, “We’ve been building machine-learning natively into the product for years.”
Here’s what he means.
- When Boomi pioneered the first software as a service, multi-tenant integration platform for the cloud in 2005, we began storing anonymized metadata from all the integration patterns created by our growing customer base.
- In 2010, we added the Boomi Suggest wizard to our platform, which uses machine learning to tap into those integration mapping patterns from the Boomi community and guide customers on how best to connect their systems.
- Over nearly two decades, we’ve responsibly harnessed the collective intelligence from more than 200 million integrations (70 terabytes of metadata!) built by our ~20,000 global customers as they’ve connected to 300,000 different endpoints.
Today, that unmatched integration and automation intelligence fuels the Boomi AI engine, helping businesses move faster and achieve their greatest aspirations. It’s not just hype. It’s real. And you can use it today.
Hear more from Steve in this short video:
Here’s how we reached this point in our AI journey, why we’re uniquely positioned to help businesses, and where we’re heading.
The Happy Accident
After the first few years of Boomi’s existence, our founders had a prescient vision of integration development. They saw the future wouldn’t be about hand-coding every integration from scratch, but rather a low-code, cloud-native platform model. As Employee No. 8, it was thrilling to be part of building something completely revolutionary. In some ways, we were so far ahead of our time that the business world had to catch up to where we had gone.
When businesses began recognizing the potential of SaaS, they needed a way to connect their exploding number of applications, whether those systems resided on-premises or in the cloud. The category we created? iPaaS.
Gartner defines integration platform as a service (iPaaS) as a vendor-managed cloud service that enables end users to implement integrations between a variety of applications, services and data sources. And we have been positioned as a Leader for 9 consecutive times in the Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Integration Platform as a Service, Worldwide, from 2014 to 20231.
We also made another fateful decision back in 2005. With customers’ permission, we began anonymizing and securely storing the metadata for every integration they built. We instinctively knew that information would be important someday, even if we didn’t know how it would be valuable.
Our customers saw the benefits a few years later when we released Boomi Suggest. It acts as a GPS to help guide your integration data mapping decisions by crowdsourcing the intelligence of all the developers who came before you. Another recent example of leveraging that information to move faster and see better outcomes is the Quick Start feature that launches integration and automation projects simply by answering a few basic questions.
At the same time, we could see that the day was quickly approaching when we could unlock even more value from that growing data store to infuse intelligence into the platform. After all, we had been collecting integration patterns on literally everything as Boomi connected critical systems like SAP and Workday, edge devices such as security cameras, and even heart defibrillators. No one else had that wealth and breadth of relevant mapping intelligence.
Then, ChatGPT hit the mainstream.
The Path To Practical AI
We said, “Holy cow! Look at what’s possible now!” We recognized that the data moat we had built around our platform meant no one could compete with us when applying AI capabilities to integration and automation. It was a happy accident that we had been collecting all of this. Maybe it was like a hoarder’s dream. At some point, you question whether you’re just a hoarder or if you’ll ever use this stuff. But the time came.
Technology authority Matt McLarty joined us early this year as our Chief Technology Officer and Vice President of the Boomi Innovation Group. He has spent his career helping organizations better understand how applications interact and get the most from data. He now leads our “practical AI” initiative as his team shows customers that success with artificial intelligence starts with accessible, quality data.
Matt was attracted to Boomi because we can assist businesses to take full advantage of AI by first solving common problems around integration and automation. He also saw the potential of that vast data foundation to infuse AI functionality into our own platform.
He has an elegant way of describing it: The problems of today for some customers were problems of the past for other customers. Using AI to leverage that data provides confidence that they’re always following best practices to solve their challenges – faster.
“You can’t go back in time,” Matt added. “The fact that Boomi recognized early on all the value inherent in that collected metadata now benefits our customers. It’s not just a case of Boomi saying, ‘Let’s go find a generative model, plug it into our platform, and create a co-pilot experience. Boomi AI is built on this valuable, relevant, protected corpus of data that we’re using responsibly.”
Hear more from Matt in this short video:
The Sky Is the Limit
The challenge for everyone in business today is figuring out how to make the best use of AI within their organizations while ensuring they’re not falling behind competitors. While AI is a remarkable technology, it’s still a means to an end. Steve Lucas stressed that on our Boomi World Tour.
“It’s very easy to get enamored with technology,” he said. “But the No. 1 question should always be, ‘Is this going to help us achieve our objective? Technology must serve a purpose, which is accelerating business outcomes, improving the business, and making lives easier. And Boomi AI makes your life a heck of a lot easier.”
We’re also just getting started. We’ll be watching how customers use Boomi GPT. Our platform will continuously evolve and improve in the coming days, weeks, and months based on their feedback. And whenever someone solves a common problem in a new, innovative way, that knowledge will further train our AI model.
It will only get better with more capabilities so everyone can move faster. The sky is the limit with how we can help customers dream with AI – and make them heroes.
Hear more from Ed in this short video:
Learn more about Boomi AI and find out where you are on the journey to AI-readiness at boomi.ai
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1. Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Integration Platform as a Service, Worldwide, 24 January 2023, Keith Guttridge, Andrew Comes, Saikat Ray
Boomi was recognized as Dell Boomi in 2014-2019. The report was previously titled as Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Integration Platform as a Service from 2017-2021 and in 2014. The report was titled as Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Integration Platform as a Service, Worldwide in 2015 & 2016 and as Magic Quadrant for Integration Platform as a Service, Worldwide in 2023.
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