Boomi World 2025 | Ed Macosky, Boomi & Prashant Gaonkar & Pattabi Kannappah, Cognizant

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Ed Macosky

Chief Product & Technology Officer

Boomi

Prashant Gaonkar

SVP, Integration & Process Organization

Cognizant

Pattabi Kannappah

Automotive Client Partner

Cognizant

play_circle_outline Boomi World 2025 event in Dallas, Texas

play_circle_outline Panel discussion on automotive supply chain challenges

play_circle_outline Future partnership goals between Boomi and Cognizant

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Ed Macosky, Boomi & Prashant Gaonkar & Pattabi Kannappah, Cognizant

Ed Macosky

Chief Product & Technology Officer Boomi

Prashant Gaonkar

SVP, Integration & Process Organization Cognizant

Pattabi Kannappah

Automotive Client Partner Cognizant

At Boomi World 2025, Savannah Peterson of theCUBE Research sits down with Ed Macosky, chief product and technology officer of Boomi; Prashant Gaonkar, VP of enterprise platform services at Cognizant; and Pattabi Kannappah, AVP of client engagements at Cognizant, to unpack the future of digital supply chains. The conversation zeroes in on the automotive industry, where complexity and disruption demand agile, scalable integration solutions built for rapid innovation.

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What are some of the highlights and key takeaways from Boomi World 2025 for the panel members? add

What are some challenges in supply chain and manufacturing, specifically in the automotive industry? add

What do you hope to be able to say about the partnership with Cognizant next year that you can't yet say today? add

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Ed Macosky, Boomi & Prashant Gaonkar & Pattabi Kannappah, Cognizant

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Savannah Peterson

>> Good afternoon, Boomi fans and welcome back to Dallas, Texas. We're here on day two of Boomi World 2025. My name's Savannah Peterson. Delighted to be joined by this power-packed panel. I mean, we've got Ed coming back on the show for the second time today, and you're over here with me in the host seat. You're a total VIP Pro.

Ed Macosky

>> Good to be here. - I know. It's great to be here.

Savannah Peterson

>> I'm hosting today. - Yeah, I know. I love getting to hang

Ed Macosky

>> out.

Savannah Peterson

>> And you brought some friends from Cognizant, Pattabi, and Prashant. Thank you so much for coming to join us today.

Pattabi Kannappah

>> Thank you. Absolutely. - Glad to be here.

Prashant Gaonkar

>> So talk to me a little bit about how the show's been

Savannah Peterson

>> for you all and what brings you into this Boomi community that we were just talking about. Prashant, I'll start with you.

>> I think the theme is unlimited

Prashant Gaonkar

>> and it keeps going on. So there's so many things to learn from what Ed spoke to us today and the sessions from yesterday. So opportunities are endless. We just have to grab it now for our customers.

Savannah Peterson

>> I love that. And so we're going to be talking a bit about automotive today. Pattabi, talk to me about what you're working on, the challenges in supply chain and manufacturing right now. It's an interesting time for you all a bit.

Pattabi Kannappah

>> Yeah, you can say that again. Yeah, absolutely. Right. Everything impacts supply chain today. There are wars, war wars that's impacting, trade wars that are impacting, policy changes that are impacting, pandemics that are impacting, everything is impacting the supply chain today. And the reality is for OEMs, the margins are thin to start with. Did you know a smartphone manufacturer has a better margin than a car manufacturer?

Savannah Peterson

>> I just learned that right now sitting here on the news desk. That's wild.

Pattabi Kannappah

>> They make probably in the range of 40%. These guys are less than 7%.

Savannah Peterson

>> Oh my goodness. So any disruption to that, any increase in costs has a really dramatic -

>> Makes it worse.

Pattabi Kannappah

>> Just makes it worse. So that's really where automotive is today. And supply chain is power. It used to be knowledge is power. Supply chain is power, control over that is power.

Savannah Peterson

>> I like that line. I actually hadn't heard somebody sum it up quite so well, but you're absolutely right. I mean, we talk about it with silicon diversity. We talk about it with a lot of different things across the board in different industries. So how are you leveraging Boomi to help these customers maintain that 7% or grow that 7% margin? Pattabi, I'll stick with you.

Pattabi Kannappah

>> So I'll build upon the previous comment I made. Everybody talks about control tower. Right now I actually think they have to go beyond that and have a crystal ball to divine what are the possibilities, what are the channels that are open to us? I want to say you need a Doctor Strange to divine the million possibilities and give you that one option that gives you the best margin without getting you a political backlash. And for that, you need a low-code integration partner platform like Boomi. And the reason that low-code is important is because this is not about, I have first application, second application, third database, integrate. People on the ground need to be able to come up with these. You need to be able to build a network and that will become pervasive. And for that, traditional methods are not sufficient. You need something like a Boomi.

Savannah Peterson

>> How long have you been using Boomi? Prashant, I'll ask you.

Prashant Gaonkar

>> Cognizant has been a partner for more than 12 years now.

Savannah Peterson

>> Oh my goodness, that's awesome.

Prashant Gaonkar

>> We both collectively went through multiple waves of technology change. Now we are in the Agentic space, but much of the problems are the old ones. I'll give an example building on what he said. In Los Angeles and Long Beach port, the amount of ships have come down by 35%.

Savannah Peterson

>> Really? - Yeah. So each time, each day, each week,

Prashant Gaonkar

>> they call about 15 port calls. Now you can imagine now each ship has about on an average 12,000 containers. Now if you take half of that, that many are truckers you need, 6,000 truckers per ship.

Savannah Peterson

>> That's a lot. - Now, if that many ships have come down,

Prashant Gaonkar

>> you can impact the labor force, the planning, the visibility, where I will go those six. Because if they know that there is no more going to be containers, they may not drive from Tennessee to Long Beach. So you have to time it. So supply chain, as you said, you need to have a crystal ball and then you have to route them properly. So again, this is the next wave of Agentic control tower, those things where you are all evolving with Boomi, because Boomi being a solid platform of technology features, we have to collectively take that to verticalize solutions and then give that feedback back to Ed's team so that they can incorporate those ideas and lessons into the product and encode them inside the product.

Savannah Peterson

>> So let's talk about that, Ed. What's the feedback loop with Cognizant and how does this collaboration impact your product roadmap and what you're building?

Ed Macosky

>> Yeah, so in fact, we almost have zero depth and knowledge like these gentlemen have been speaking about in terms of supply chain, automotive, et cetera. We take a lot of pride. We talked about it earlier, about building a horizontal platform to enable low code development delivery and allow teams like Cognizant to be agile. But we do know that partners like Cognizant understand these areas and we lean on them like Prashant said, to bring us feedback. And our partner teams work very closely. Our product and engineering teams work very closely in this feedback loop where we'll go to market together on an automotive-based solutions or supply chain-based solutions that they build on top of our platform. And if they hit any roadblocks or there's new technologies they need from us, from a general perspective, they come to us, they log that, we work together, and then we deliver on our platform to help them drive solutions in the market. So we take a lot of pride in allowing partners like this to drive these fully robust solutions and be agile in the market to meet customers where they need it.

Savannah Peterson

>> Yeah, absolutely. And I mean 12 years, you're obviously great collaborators and built in working together and you're dealing with some serious complexity. I mean, you're talking about getting those 6,000 truckers, for example, to unload those, every minute counts. Every minute in those moments is money, quite frankly. So how is AgTech going to reinvent some of these processes for you guys? Prashant, I'll start with you.

>> So you have a laptop, most likely you have Excel.

Prashant Gaonkar

>> And you would be amazed that in these days many of the customers still use Excel to do the planning, Excel to do the inventory management. That is not going to help the crystal ball that he spoke about. So that's why you need platform which can aggregate and slice and dice the data platforms like Boomi. Because there is a data integration, there is a process integration, there is external information and evidence integration. If you want to see whether the ship is going to reach the port, for example, you have to go back to a national oceanographic association and get the data from GIS, then it's going to be on time. So although it have to be done in a fraction of a second plan to do that, so that's how you bring the complexity to simplicity and that will require platforms to seamlessly connect and disseminate information while keeping the entity and other constraints and regulations in mind. So one other example I can give you is the product from certain countries need to reach you, but you cannot be selling that in a certain area. I'm talking about global situations. So they have to be re-routed again. You can imagine the amount of touchpoints and nodals that create for onboarding, off- boarding, all those things. So we need a system or a control tower. It's literally like you're Manhattan, the underground trains and you have all the trains, you think about 10 times more complexity to that.

Pattabi Kannappah

>> Yeah, I'm going to add to that, right?

>> Please do, Pattabi. - A car is about 30,000

Pattabi Kannappah

>> parts, north of 15,

Prashant Gaonkar

>> 000 suppliers added to that complexity. That's just the background. And when you've planned everything out, an accident happens just like the Suez Canal. Everything goes out the window, all your planning goes out the window, but you can't stay on it. Every day is billions of dollars lost. You have to cannot reconstruct integrations and go from there to development. You need a fast platform. You need a ready platform like Boomi. Otherwise, you can't sustain this business.

Savannah Peterson

>> Yeah, I mean, I'm just thinking about each one of these little pieces and the timing of everything. I mean, it's magical that we even have cars to drive because we're having this dialogue.

Pattabi Kannappah

>> It's a miracle. Yeah. - Yeah. No, it totally is.

Savannah Peterson

>> I'm actually really curious now, what is the adoption of this new technological revolution? Some of us super excited, zealous early adopters, some legacy industries are stretching to get excited about this and others are a little nervous because we're letting in agents can expose data. There can be a lot of things that can happen there. How are you talking with your community about what's going to happen next and easing those, any anxiety people might have?

Prashant Gaonkar

>> Yeah, I think one thing that Ed's team who are super smart in product development and our teams who understand the business, it's beyond technology. It's people. We have to make people learn about this. For example, you can create a big planning agent with everything, but you are the approver and you have tendency to override what that planning agent says. You create the whole idea. First you have to be able to adapt it, accept it, learn through it, and then that's the change management that is happening as you speak, to incorporate this agentic AI into any work stream, not just supply chain, not just planning, across the board. So that is a human endeavor, I would say will take another six to 12 months for people to understand and empathize with and coexist.

Savannah Peterson

>> Yeah, absolutely. Ed, what about you and your conversations? How are you dealing with that?

Ed Macosky

>> I think the most important thing is to talk about it. Steve and I talked about this a lot yesterday with our customers and our partners. The most important thing is to talk about human in the loop and augmenting and supercharging humans, giving humans superpowers and not putting this in the context of replacing humans. And that's how we're facilitating the change. And by doing that, we had some initial solutions where we were thinking about, hey, we're going to go to market, we're going to replace humans, we're going to reduce costs, et cetera. And you almost in enterprise get this violent reaction in a culture and you set things incorrectly. But the moment you show an individual in their role how they can accelerate the mundane tasks in their jobs and provide more value and showcase themselves in an organization, now you've got them and then you see that spread like wildfire in an organization from an adoption perspective. In my keynote this morning I covered a number of different use cases for us internally that our internal employees are using Boomi's agents that we've developed ourselves to supercharge. They're seeing 70%, 80% more productivity gains in what they're doing every day to help our customers deliver. So as long as you strike that cord with folks, the change management process becomes pretty easy.

Savannah Peterson

>> It's that light bulb moment. - Yes.

Savannah Peterson

>> I can imagine you've gotten to see some magic moments

Ed Macosky

>> as you're showing people what's possible.

Pattabi Kannappah

>> These are the solutions and our job is to take solutions to our clients' problems. So we're in the business of that marriage. That's what we're trying to make happen.

Savannah Peterson

>> Once no one you like working with Boomi so much. I'm not surprised about that. Okay guys, I have one final question for you all, and I'm going to change it a little bit for you, ed, because I know you were already on the news desk today. But when we're hanging out next time at Boomi World 2026, what do you hope to be able to say then that you can't say today? Pattabi, I'm going to start with you.

Pattabi Kannappah

>> I want to sit there with one of my clients and be able to say, "Cognizant, Boomi saved our day. " his happened. We didn't have it in the wildest of our dreams, but they saved our day. Thank God we have them. I want that to happen.

Savannah Peterson

>> I love that. We look forward to telling that story. What about you, Prashant?

Prashant Gaonkar

>> Yeah. On a lighter note, I want to have Ed walk with a robot which does his speech and then he becomes the helper. That's where the role changes. Yes.

Ed Macosky

>> I didn't get a robot this year. Steve got the robot. I'm a little disappointed, but yes, the team says they're getting me a robot next year.

Savannah Peterson

>> We look forward to seeing it. So my final question for you, ed, just to spice it up a little bit, what do you hope to be able to say about the partnership with Cognizant next year that you can't yet say Today?

Ed Macosky

>> I'm going to play off what you said. I'm looking forward to telling that story with you on how Boomi helped deliver and save the day. As an integrator, I've been a Boomi employee for a long time. Nothing gets me more excited honestly than seeing partners and customers implement our technology and change lives. Whatever that means, if for the positive obviously. But just see that impact in real life, whether it's an individual telling a story for themselves and their career or the company and what we helped do together. I'm super stoked to tell that story with you guys next year.

Savannah Peterson

>> Well, we're super stoked to tell it with you as well.

Ed Macosky

>> Thank you. - Congratulations on the long-

Savannah Peterson

>> lasting partnership and thank you for taking time.

Pattabi Kannappah

>> Thank you Ed too. - Such a busy week. This was great.

Savannah Peterson

>> Really appreciate it gentlemen, and thank all of you for tuning in to our two days of coverage here at Boomi World 2025 in Dallas, Texas. My name's Savannah Peterson. You're watching theCUBE, the leading source for enterprise tech news.