Analyst Perspectives

I recently articulated some of the reasons why IT teams can fail to deliver on the business requirements for data and analytics projects. This is an age-old and multifaceted problem that is not easily solved. Organizations have a role to play in alleviating the issue by ensuring that their business processes and project planning support a collaborative approach in which business and IT professionals work together. Data and analytics product vendors can also help by delivering products that are designed to enable IT users to not just fulfill the technical aspects of their roles, but also facilitate communication and collaboration with business users and demonstrate the business value of technology initiatives. In the data intelligence sector in particular, vendors such as Boomi are increasingly conscious of the need to help users be more responsive to technology modernization and business transformation initiatives. 

Boomi was founded in 2000 and was one of several vendors that emerged around that time offering cloud-based integration Platform-as-a-Service (iPaaS) as a more flexible, low-code approach to application and data integration than more traditional on-premises tools. The company was acquired by Dell in 2010 but became independent again in May 2021, backed by investment firms Francisco Partners and TPG Capital in a deal valued at $4 billion. Boomi is now led by CEO Steve Lucas and boasts more than 20,000 customers across the world for Boomi Platform.  

Boomi Platform provides a cloud-based managed service for the development, deployment and management of integrations, providing a combination of services addressing data and application integration, event stream integration, master data management, API management, EDI management and workflow automation. The product’s distributed runtime architecture supports execution in the cloud as well as on-premises, providing users with a choice of deployment options. The runtime can be hosted by Boomi in the public cloud or hosted by the customer in their preferred cloud provider, their own data center or on their edge infrastructure.  

Boomi is best-known for its iPaaS capabilities with the company offering a suite of pre-built connectors as well as recipes to accelerate and automate integration of applications and data. Integration is just one of several platform services offered by Boomi Platform, however. Event Streams was added in June, providing a hosted and managed message queuing and streaming service for creating event-driven integration. The suite of cloud services also includes Master Data Hub for master data management, API Management for deploying and managing application programming interfaces, B2B/EDI Management for integration with trading partners using Electronic Data Interchange and Flow for the low-code development of applications with workflow automation. 

In May, Boomi announced the launch of Boomi AI, bringing together existing machine learning-based capabilities with new services driven by generative AI to make it easier to design, optimize and orchestrate integrations. Boomi AI is part of the company’s overall mission to accelerate integration processes, enabling technology modernization and business transformation by reducing manual processes for both integration experts and business users. I assert that by 2026, more than three-quarters of organizations’ data management processes will be enhanced with AI and machine learning to increase automation, accuracy, agility and speed.  

Boomi AI includes the company’s Quick Start wizard functionality for guided and automated integration configuration as well as Boomi Suggest, which provides guidance for building integrations and data transformations. Boomi GPT was added in October to automate the development of integrations, APIs and master data models based on a combination of natural language prompts, generative AI models and the company’s knowledge base developed from more than 200 million customer integration projects. Boomi sees multiple roles for generative AI in the integration space, including natural language-driven integration design, the automated optimization of integrations in responses to technical and business changes and the automated orchestration of processes to meet desired business outcomes. I recently explained how generative AI can be used to automatically generate data integrations in response to declared business requirements in support of outcome-led initiatives, overcoming the tendency of technical staff to focus on technical capabilities and the production of data rather than its consumption and business goals. 

More than two-thirds (69%) of participants in Ventana Research’s Analytics and Data Benchmark Research spend most of their analytic time preparing data for analysis, compared to only 27% who spend most of their time determining how changes impact the business. Services such as Boomi AI have the potential to change that, automating technical tasks and enabling integration professionals to spend more time focused on business outcomes.  

It should be noted that Boomi GPT is a very new offering and has arguably only just scratched the surface of what will be possible with generative AI. It is, however, an important addition to Boomi Platform that will facilitate the use of its capabilities for integration, master data management, API management, message queuing and streaming and workflow automation. I recommend that organizations exploring approaches to updating, accelerating and simplifying integration include Boomi in their evaluations. 

Regards,

Matt Aslett