By John Bennett
Boomi World 2019 Day Two focused on the future, and how Boomi is committed to making an innovation-driven, customer-focused future a reality.
Boomi chief product officer Steve Wood and chief technology officer Michael Morton revealed new features and functionality and gave hints of future product innovations. Chief marketing officer Mandy Dhaliwal conducted a fascinating interview with Boomi customer Candy.com and partner NetSuite. And renowned tech journalist Kara Swisher discussed the current and future states of innovation and digital transformation.
Engage Everywhere — We Mean It!
Boomi’s vision is to help customers connect to data and run data processes wherever they’re needed, through every channel and medium.
Wood explained that when Boomi says it intends to help customers engage everywhere, the company really means it. “Everywhere” is broader than just in the cloud or on premise. It means on the edge and in devices that take input through voice and touch — the traditional limits of enterprise IT no longer apply.
Wood unveiled new features and capabilities of the Boomi Platform, demonstrating some of the many ways Boomi is delivering on that promise.
- Real-time Listener
- The Boomi Connector SDK now supports a real-time Listener that will work with popular stream-processing software platforms and message brokers. This extends Boomi’s support for real-time integration patterns.
- OpenAPI Support
- Customers will soon be able to add OpenAPI-compliant APIs without writing any code or write their own APIs, thanks to Boomi’s new OpenAPI Technology connector.
- Full Lifecycle API Management
- Boomi API Management now supports full lifecycle API management with three key functionalities: API Proxy, API Gateway and API Developer Portal.
- Greater Interoperability With Event-Driven Systems
- EDA Powered by Boomi is a new customer-focused program that enables organizations to experiment, develop and adopt event-driven architectures (EDAs). Boomi is committed to building a strong partner ecosystem with market leaders for message brokers, event meshes, streaming and pub/sub technology.
- Boomi Atoms on Pivotal
- Ian Andrews, Pivotal’s SVP products and marketing, talked about the two Dell Technologies businesses working more closely together and supporting the deployment of Boomi Atoms on Pivotal Platform. Non-technical Boomi users can now publish APIs on Pivotal, and senior developers can read those APIs and combine them with other services in the Pivotal Marketplace, creating a new solution that draws on the work of both non-technical and highly technical users.
- The Atom Fabric
- Data is distributed everywhere: on-premise, on the edge and in multi-cloud environments. Workloads are distributed across on-premise systems and the cloud. A future Atom Fabric will allow customers to create a fabric of connectivity and a fabric of data across complex networks and multi-cloud environments, so they can call on data in any location.
- Enterprise-grade Offerings with Dell, Deloitte, SAP and Intel
- Boomi is partnering with Deloitte, SAP and Intel to help enterprise customers integrate SAP S4/HANA and SAP Leonardo with both SAP and non-SAP applications, and deploy the SAP solutions they need in the cloud.
For more news from Boomi World ’19, read our Day One recap .
Boomi’s New Frontier: Insights
Boomi CTO Michael Morton made a bold proclamation: Boomi is going to offer business insights. These insights will help customers make more informed business and technology decisions — and the more a customer integrates with Boomi, the richer the insights will become.
Say a company builds connections between applications and data stores. Those connections involve data mappings that ensure that field FN in one application is correctly mapped to field FIRST_NAME in another application. Then the company runs Boomi processes, and data travels from application to application and from data store to data store, maybe spanning different regions or continents.
Here’s where the insights come in.
Most data moving through the Boomi Platform includes some personally identifiable information (PII), such as customer records with names, addresses and other contact information.
New data privacy regulations such as the EU GDPR mandate that companies track the PII of EU residents. But most companies have great difficulty knowing what personal data they have, which applications are using it and where it’s being used. Boomi insights can answer those questions.
Data mappings reveal exactly which applications are sending what data where. Through Boomi, compliance officers get the information they need to report on data collection practices, avoiding potential costly fines for non-compliance.
Candy.com Experiences the Sweet Success of Rapid Growth
Candy.com began as a small startup thrilled to be getting online orders from consumers, and is now a fast-growing, 100-person company serving 24 business partners that sell white-label products to grocery chains.
Dhaliwal interviewed Gary Cifatte, chief technology officer of Candy.com, and Jason Maynard, NetSuite’s senior vice president of global field operations, about Candy.com’s dramatic transformation.
Initially Candy.com used spreadsheets to track orders, but quickly realized it needed EDI to support its business growth. Boomi B2B Management was the right answer: easy to use, scalable, reliable and affordable. Using Boomi, Candy.com can build new integrations in as little as 36 hours, and has scaled to processing 120,000 orders per day.
For more details of how Candy.com increased the speed of order entry, improved accuracy and saved on costs with Boomi B2B Management, read our case study.
Anything That Can Be Digitized, Will Be
The Day Two guest keynote speaker was widely lauded tech journalist Kara Swisher, the co-founder and editor-at-large of Recode.
Swisher delivered a lively and pointed review of the state of innovation, the privacy that consumers have abandoned in the name of convenient services such as Amazon Prime, and the opportunity that AI offers for either good (diagnosing cancer more quickly) or bad (reinforcing unjust social policies). “Anything that can be digitized, will be,” she said. “As a result, jobs, social roles, education and technology will all change dramatically.”
We’re at inflection points with several critical technologies, and according to Swisher, it’s important to recognize how these technologies fit together in a systemic way — for example, how robotics and automation will lead to the elimination of certain jobs, requiring workers to equip themselves to find new, creative roles in the changing economy. She advised the audience to look at all these technologies together and decide what kind of world they want to create and live in.
Boomi is already looking towards the future and we think it’s a bright one. Our mission is to find new and innovative ways to help our customers connect everything, run anywhere and engage everywhere — and we’re ready for liftoff.