Boomi World 2024 | Dan McAllister | Boomi & Nicole Bradley | AWS

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Dan McAllister

Senior Vice President of Global Alliances & Channels

Boomi

Nicole Bradley

AWS Principle Account Executive

AWS

Unlocking enterprise data potential: Streamlining SAP Datasphere migration through Boomi and AWS Partnership

Based on the application sprawl happening across enterprises, getting the best out of data has become a daunting task. This is where a business data fabric architecture called SAP Datasphere comes in handy. To enhance the connectivity of SAP Datasphere with legacy mainframes and private data stores, Boomi LP and Amazon Web Services Inc. have partnered to make this migration seamless and agile, according to Dan McAllister (pictured, right), senior vice president of global alliances and channels at Boomi. “What’s unique about the SAP partnership is SAP has added an extreme amount of value in their Datasphere platform,” he said

play_circle_outline Boomi's relationship with AWS and the value they offer to customers

play_circle_outline The SAP partnership and the value of integrating data into SAP

play_circle_outline Cost savings and efficiencies for SAP customers using Boomi and AWS

play_circle_outline Exploring the Path Ahead: Unveiling the Boomi-Amazon Partnership's Customer-Centric Innovation through Generative AI

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Dan McAllister | Boomi & Nicole Bradley | AWS

Dan McAllister

Senior Vice President of Global Alliances & Channels Boomi

Nicole Bradley

AWS Principle Account Executive AWS

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>> Welcome back everyone to theCUBE's live performance here in Denver for Boomi World. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE. We're getting down to wrapping up day three of our live coverage. Lot of great guests. The needle's moving big time in the cloud, next generation, modern infrastructure, generative AI and Boomi's driving a big transformation across the cloud. And of course their customer, basically got two great guests. Dan McAllister, senior vice president of Alliance and Channels at Boomi, and Nicole Bradley, principal at AWS Amazon Web Services. Good to see you back.

Dan McAllister

>> Yeah, thank you.

Nicole Bradley

>> Thank you. And nice to meet you.

Dan McAllister

>> Excited.

>> So, Boomi and Amazon have a great relationship, so put that out there. We kind of covered that earlier in the show. The agility that you guys get for being in the cloud and also with the software has caused a lot of great partnerships. So Dan, take to explain the relationship with AWS and some of the value you guys are offering through the solution with AWS.

Dan McAllister

>> Yeah, sure. Well, first of all, just to congratulate AWS again for being our cloud service provider of the year, we completely go to market with AWS and they are our preferred provider in all respects in that. And they give us tremendous agility, not only in the breadth and reach of how we get to our customers, but the strategic relationship we have in the conversations of how we're going to deliver value to those customers is amazing. We have great account executive relationships, we have great executive relationships, and we're finding new and new markets in different ways to go together, which I'm sure we'll talk about in a few minutes. So, full complete partnership and world-class leading, so it's amazing.

>> Good synergies. And you're bringing a lot of value. It's a great better together story, so Amazon has great value, you're a good customer and you provide good value to your customers through you and all that good stuff. And some of these are solutions that kind of pop out. The one that we're going to talk about here is SAP. So, talk about that specific thing. This is an interesting use case and I think it's one that illustrates some of the value that happens in the innovation in the cloud, and it's not always that obvious when you look at it, well, that's obvious. Explain what's going on.

Dan McAllister

>> Yeah, sure. First of all, we'll get to SAP in a second, but most of our clients at the enterprise level who are also SAP clients, have about a thousand other applications out there that they're trying to make sense of. So, application sprawl has happened across all organizations and they're trying to make sense of that. Most of those applications, about 30% are integrated, so they have a massive opportunity to bring that data together to deliver it into SAP and other interfaces ultimately get the value they want. What's unique about the SAP partnership is SAP has added extreme amount of value in their Datasphere platform. So, to get customers from where they are now to that is actually going to be a forced migration over the next few years. And so this is a massive opportunity, not only upgrade that platform, upgrade the way the data flows through that application, but also capture the rest of the market, the rest of the enterprise data and bring that together. And that's the unique value of Boomi because if it was just SAP, you could stay within the SAP environment, it'd be fine. But if you want to capture the other thousand applications, the data inside and outside of your organization and deliver that, that's what we're talking about is Boomi providing the most value. And I'll let Nicole comment on the unique value that AWS provides in that equation, but it's enormous. So, I'm very excited.

>> Nicole, what's the collaboration?

Nicole Bradley

>> Oh, it's excellent. We have an SAP practice, very large, one of our largest at AWS. And what's really exciting about that is our customers running on Boomi, which are also some of our largest, have a lot of other data, as he mentioned, other applications. So, they can bring their own private data stores with the bring your own data, and they're able to do this in a seamless way without having to go out and get additional licenses or technologies or products to help with that migration. They're already using two trusted partners of theirs. They're using it collaboratively. And really we talk about the better together story, but this is the best together because it's us, Boomi and our mutual partner. So, it's really the Nirvana.

>> How is the money being saved? What's some of the ? Can you share some of the cost saves involved for SAP customers in this scenario?

Nicole Bradley

>> Absolutely. As I mentioned, they don't have to go out and find another product, but Boomi in partnership with AWS, but primarily Boomi, it's really doing all the hard work up front. We just actually came out with a big press release about it and we've been collaborating for a long time, but they're going to do the heavy lifting, so the customer now doesn't have to think about that. They can focus on what their business is and not behind the scenes, and we can manage that for them through the work that they're doing on AWS.

>> Yeah. What's it mean for the customers? I mean, this is one of those things where there's efficiencies, but it's also tech scale to this. Why is this resonating with customers? Why is this solution working?

Dan McAllister

>> Well, because like I said, it's a unique opportunity for customers to not only migrate to a greater solution that SAP is providing, but also get all of their data into the cloud as well, which provides massive efficiency and AWS owns that space and is our preferred player. And what the efficiency is for them is now while I'm doing that for let's say 10, 20, 30% of our enterprise, why wouldn't I do that for the rest at the same time? And it gives them an opportunity to consolidate the number of tools they have. And that's one thing from a license perspective, what about all the services that goes into that? What about all the maintenance of those products and the integration they have? What about all the skills that are required to develop on those tools to bring that data together? And so they're saving from multiple different angles and we're seeing not only great savings and value from us, but the systems integrator community are also getting on board and joining this party and making it a three or four way type partnership for us.

>> Nicole, I've interviewed some Amazonians, Amazon Web Services folks, Amazonians technically.

Nicole Bradley

>> Definitely.

>> In New York at the New York Summit last year.

Nicole Bradley

>> Oh, yeah.

>> From the industry group, which is, SAP's part of.

Nicole Bradley

>> Exactly.

>> One of the things that came out of that, I want to get your reaction to this, and Dan, if you don't mind sharing your perspective too, is that agility was the number one thing they wanted out of it. They had the SAP, they were moving to Amazon. I won't say shadow IT, it's not IT, it's technically an application, but they're moving it into the cloud so they can add higher level services or do demos or do things that were experiments and/or new development. So, this agility was a theme. Is that one of the drivers behind this or is it cost? Is it performance? Is it the higher level services?

Nicole Bradley

>> Yeah.

>> What's the drivers?

Nicole Bradley

>> I think it is agility. That's just table stakes at some level though. But it's also innovation, and that's really where we're focused on because if you're running inefficient processes, inefficient applications or architecture, then you can't focus on the innovation. And with gen AI and with what we saw with the Garden that they're developing, if you're not able to move quickly and you're not also able to move efficiently, then you're going to have either something too expensive to do or you're just not going to be able to develop and build the product that your customers need.

>> Dan, what's your reaction?

Dan McAllister

>> I would actually broaden it a little bit. First of all, agility is absolutely critical. And that's what we provide organizations with the solution, the ability to get them down to a place where they can make use of all that data and get ready for all the things that are coming with AI. But today, a lot of what's driving the decision is actually cost, right? Because over the last several years, the software and investment model has not just been about growth, but it's been about fiscal responsibility. And so we've ratcheted projects down to minutia and minutia smaller and smaller amounts so that we can measure the actual results. And what that's done is it's actually led to the applications. Well, it's led to these smaller projects that aren't connected, that aren't together. So, we have to meet that need, we have to check that box, but what we really are doing, the big value that we do is get them ready for what's coming in AI tomorrow.

>> Nicole, Dan was on earlier, so I'm kind of cheating by saying this because I know some of his rap. He mentions earlier in the interview that he thinks about from the end user perspective, about what's their experience? And I want to bring that into the next question. Also, I'll add a little commentary that I've been following Amazon for over 14 years with theCUBE. I've been a customer since day one and Boomi for six. You both have a similar culture. You see a lot of workloads and you both work backwards from the customer. So, this is a classic concept you guys know well about. So, okay, so the question is work backwards from the customer here. What is the SAP customer feeling? Why is this product serving their needs? What is it that's resonating with the solution if you work back from the customers? I know that's the way you guys work.

Nicole Bradley

>> Yeah, absolutely.

>> You got there, so it's kind of a test.

Nicole Bradley

>> And so I'll add it from the AWS perspective and then would love for Dan to add the Boomi and the combined perspective. But I think working back from the customer, talking about cost optimization, talking about overworked resources in the environment, wanting to focus on innovation but not wanting to deal with the mechanics underneath. So, really what we hear from our customers is, "Manage our mess and just give us product that allows us to innovate." And that's where Datasphere and all the work that's happening there is going to provide them. It's going to give them a platform that's going to grow, expand, and innovate, and they want to quickly get there. They don't want it to be a long-drawn-out process.

>> Dan, and you guys work back from the customer too. I know that from talking to the Boomi folks. What's your perspective from the customer angle there?

Dan McAllister

>> Sure. Well, if I take our customer, not necessarily the end user experience, but which I talked about before, but our customer is often the CIO, and the CIO is inundated with massive shadow IT. I think AI is the new shadow IT, and it is very risky because now somebody can cut and paste corporate documents and just throw it into ChatGPT or some other AI tool just to see what they get back. Well, where does that information go? It's not even restricting email and content like that anymore with an NDA on it, that's out in the universe. And so now all of your confidential information can be put out there. And so it's really, really important for the CIO and the think about security. So, for what they're looking for from us is simplicity. And AWS provides massive simplicity. They have CIO relationships across the full stack of technology that they're looking at, not only from all of the new cloud things that they're buying and easy to onboard. And this is part of the fallacy of SAP, bringing all things in SAP. We have customers still using legacy mainframes. We have partners now that develop connectivity to legacy mainframes. We want to be able to take that data, put it in a place where we can all work with it, and commonly data lake or something like that. And AWS helps us do that, but we still have to have that connectivity all the way down that. But the ultimate experience we have to provide is simplicity to the CIO and the rest of the organization.

Nicole Bradley

>> And I'll just add to that, the CISO is who I find myself talking to more and more over the last two years. And the CISO is the one in the background going, "I can't say no. I have to be a team player, but I also have to protect my company." And so what this offering and what they're doing in the gen AI space is really giving a safe space where the customer can come in and experiment, build their own gen AI platforms or agents, also use the Boomi ones that they're creating, so again, they can get quick ease to use, but then they can also use whatever model they want. They can go to Hugging Face or Cohere or one of our favorite, Anthropic. So, it's really exciting.

>> That's interesting, Nicole, you mentioned that because RSA is going on. We have a CUBE up in San Francisco right now, and we just did some proprietary research with our CUBE research team, and we thought that this would be a consolidation of tools in say cyber for instance, as an example. And what's actually happening, and it was survey is it's expanding. They're keeping their existing tools, adding more, mainly because there are more threats. Again, back to the sprawl. So, this is an evolutionary feature, it's not a bug.

Dan McAllister

>> Sure.

>> So, sprawl's happening. There's two ways to do that, kill the sprawl or rein it in.

Dan McAllister

>> Right.

Nicole Bradley

>> Right.

>> Put an abstraction layer around it, build an innovation opportunity. I think your point is interesting because now you're saying, "Okay, I still got to keep my stuff. How do I innovate?" And that's net new. I think that's going to be where the proof is going to be in the pudding. Where's the agility? Where's that translated to innovation? Does product come out? Is there an outcome?

Dan McAllister

>> That's really the challenge I think Nicole was talking about between the CISO and the CIO, they have to have control. You have to have a safe place for everyone to play, but you've got to let them play an experiment. So, if you can have a federated layer across the top that's flexible enough to allow your community inside your organization to innovate, right? Because you actually do want them to do that. Experimentation that happens with things like AI and other application is going to be the future. Models will be disrupted for sure over the next several years, and we need to give them that ability to do that, but also in a safe place. And so that's why we're excited about how we can deliver that value proposition.

>> All right, so as we get ready to wrap up soon, I want to get into how customers can get involved. How do they take advantage of the solution? What's it look like? What's the consumption side of it look like? I'm an SAP customer. I got kind of a mess in the sense that I got to get in this game, I got to innovate. I want to move fast. I want to have a new higher level services in say, the cloud. I want a simple platform to leverage the future of agents, the agent card, I want all that goodness. What do I do?

Dan McAllister

>> Yeah, give us a call. It's actually amazingly easy.

>> Is there an agent ?

Dan McAllister

>> Yeah, there actually is. And so I think anyone going through this transformation in their organization, thinking about migrating to SAP, again, you're going to be forced to over the next several years anyway. Be thoughtful about how are you going to use this opportunity and this crisis that you're in to get ready for all things in the future. Modernize once as opposed to step along the way and just give us a call. The solution can be deployed immediately. We have a great relationship between Amazon and Boomi. Call either one of us and we're happy to engage -

>> Nicole, what's the Amazon side?

Nicole Bradley

>> I would say it's two things. We just actually came out with a press release today about our collaboration and our partnership in this space around SAP. But it could be anything, right? It could be any application that you're using, but reach out to your account managers at AWS or at Boomi. We have, Marketplace is a great place that you can go and understand what they have and then ultimately at the end of the day, work with your solution architects, work with your technical teams, and we can talk through whatever works best for them.

>> It's interesting, Nicole, I've been studying some of these power dynamics of the cloud for over a decade. SAP has been on Amazon for a long time.

Nicole Bradley

>> Huge .

>> The shadow, a shadow IT cloud with SAP, I remember I taught this to an Amazonian and they're like, "We have more SAP. What's the use case?" Actually, it's the pre-sales motion that the initial... So, everything from getting something stood up quickly, time savings becomes huge. So, the value can be quantified. Again, back to our last conversation, we're in a world now where the consequences of either not acting or not innovating can be measured. You can quantify it.

Nicole Bradley

>> Yeah. And what's great too is you don't have to be an expert in databases and all this other stuff, with managed services and all the collaboration that's happening between the biggest players in this field. Our goal is to make it so that you don't have to worry about that. The value of the cloud is let us handle that with you. And then at that point you go out and be experts in your business and we'll give you the tools so that you can do it quickly.

>>

Dan McAllister

>> Sorry, I would just remind everybody that one of the biggest reasons why large package implementations fail, right? Migrations fail, is integration. So, be thoughtful about that, think in advance as opposed to trying to attach that on at the end. Be thoughtful about it upfront and your backend, the rest of your migration is going to go a lot smoother.

>> And also on the integration side, being mindful of the data modeling going in. Are you going to operationally get the data that you need from the multiple systems that are now connected-

Dan McAllister

>> What are my future needs? Exactly....

>> to the layers of the connection?

Nicole Bradley

>> Absolutely.

Dan McAllister

>> A hundred percent.

>> All right. Final up question to wrap up. As you guys have a great partnership, and I know you guys have a good relationship as Amazon and Boomi, what's next for the partnership? Where do you guys go from here? I can see this evolving into a much more multi-system architecture. What's next?

Nicole Bradley

>> Yeah, thank you for asking that. I would say what's really next is going to be driven back from the customer. What are they going to want to see? As we're getting into this space and the generative AI, I don't think anybody really knows what's next, but what's great is we're going to have the framework in place so that we can be responsive, fast. And between Boomi and AWS and partnering it together, in the case of SAP, it's a migration, but it could be the Garden, which I just sitting in there, I just love that. I can build my own, but I may not have time. I don't need to be an HR expert, let Boomi build the HR assistant agent, and then I just add my data and my flavor to the data. So, I think it's just really going to be what's to see, but we're going to give you the framework to do it together. And I think the three, the customer and the two of us together are going to be best together.

Dan McAllister

>> Yeah, I think what I'm most excited about is exactly what Nicole said. What I'm hearing from the systems integrator community, which is the rest of my job outside of working with the fabulous partner, AWS, is we want the ability to experiment with value propositions, big and small. Some solutions which save you maybe 1% of productivity every day or deliver amazing outcomes. And what we're planning to do from Boomi and AWS is allow systems integrators to innovate with their customers in a place that will allow them to ultimately achieve that value. So, very excited.

>> Dan, Nicole, thank you so much for coming on the CUBE.

Nicole Bradley

>> Thank you.

>> Congratulations on your relationship again. I kind of get what's going on here. Two great companies, very complimentary, customers of each other partners.

Dan McAllister

>> Awesome.

>> Congratulations.

Nicole Bradley

>> Yeah, thank you very much.

Dan McAllister

>> Thanks so much. I appreciate the time.

>> You're watching theCUBE. I'm John Furrier, your host. Thanks for watching Boomi World 2024.

Dan McAllister | Boomi & Nicole Bradley | AWS

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>> Welcome back everyone to theCUBE's live performance here in Denver for Boomi World. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE. We're getting down to wrapping up day three of our live coverage. Lot of great guests. The needle's moving big time in the cloud, next generation, modern infrastructure, generative AI and Boomi's driving a big transformation across the cloud. And of course their customer, basically got two great guests. Dan McAllister, senior vice president of Alliance and Channels at Boomi, and Nicole Bradley, principal at AWS Amazon Web Services. Good to see you back.

Dan McAllister

>> Yeah, thank you.

Nicole Bradley

>> Thank you. And nice to meet you.

Dan McAllister

>> Excited.

>> So, Boomi and Amazon have a great relationship, so put that out there. We kind of covered that earlier in the show. The agility that you guys get for being in the cloud and also with the software has caused a lot of great partnerships. So Dan, take to explain the relationship with AWS and some of the value you guys are offering through the solution with AWS.

Dan McAllister

>> Yeah, sure. Well, first of all, just to congratulate AWS again for being our cloud service provider of the year, we completely go to market with AWS and they are our preferred provider in all respects in that. And they give us tremendous agility, not only in the breadth and reach of how we get to our customers, but the strategic relationship we have in the conversations of how we're going to deliver value to those customers is amazing. We have great account executive relationships, we have great executive relationships, and we're finding new and new markets in different ways to go together, which I'm sure we'll talk about in a few minutes. So, full complete partnership and world-class leading, so it's amazing.

>> Good synergies. And you're bringing a lot of value. It's a great better together story, so Amazon has great value, you're a good customer and you provide good value to your customers through you and all that good stuff. And some of these are solutions that kind of pop out. The one that we're going to talk about here is SAP. So, talk about that specific thing. This is an interesting use case and I think it's one that illustrates some of the value that happens in the innovation in the cloud, and it's not always that obvious when you look at it, well, that's obvious. Explain what's going on.

Dan McAllister

>> Yeah, sure. First of all, we'll get to SAP in a second, but most of our clients at the enterprise level who are also SAP clients, have about a thousand other applications out there that they're trying to make sense of. So, application sprawl has happened across all organizations and they're trying to make sense of that. Most of those applications, about 30% are integrated, so they have a massive opportunity to bring that data together to deliver it into SAP and other interfaces ultimately get the value they want. What's unique about the SAP partnership is SAP has added extreme amount of value in their Datasphere platform. So, to get customers from where they are now to that is actually going to be a forced migration over the next few years. And so this is a massive opportunity, not only upgrade that platform, upgrade the way the data flows through that application, but also capture the rest of the market, the rest of the enterprise data and bring that together. And that's the unique value of Boomi because if it was just SAP, you could stay within the SAP environment, it'd be fine. But if you want to capture the other thousand applications, the data inside and outside of your organization and deliver that, that's what we're talking about is Boomi providing the most value. And I'll let Nicole comment on the unique value that AWS provides in that equation, but it's enormous. So, I'm very excited.

>> Nicole, what's the collaboration?

Nicole Bradley

>> Oh, it's excellent. We have an SAP practice, very large, one of our largest at AWS. And what's really exciting about that is our customers running on Boomi, which are also some of our largest, have a lot of other data, as he mentioned, other applications. So, they can bring their own private data stores with the bring your own data, and they're able to do this in a seamless way without having to go out and get additional licenses or technologies or products to help with that migration. They're already using two trusted partners of theirs. They're using it collaboratively. And really we talk about the better together story, but this is the best together because it's us, Boomi and our mutual partner. So, it's really the Nirvana.

>> How is the money being saved? What's some of the ? Can you share some of the cost saves involved for SAP customers in this scenario?

Nicole Bradley

>> Absolutely. As I mentioned, they don't have to go out and find another product, but Boomi in partnership with AWS, but primarily Boomi, it's really doing all the hard work up front. We just actually came out with a big press release about it and we've been collaborating for a long time, but they're going to do the heavy lifting, so the customer now doesn't have to think about that. They can focus on what their business is and not behind the scenes, and we can manage that for them through the work that they're doing on AWS.

>> Yeah. What's it mean for the customers? I mean, this is one of those things where there's efficiencies, but it's also tech scale to this. Why is this resonating with customers? Why is this solution working?

Dan McAllister

>> Well, because like I said, it's a unique opportunity for customers to not only migrate to a greater solution that SAP is providing, but also get all of their data into the cloud as well, which provides massive efficiency and AWS owns that space and is our preferred player. And what the efficiency is for them is now while I'm doing that for let's say 10, 20, 30% of our enterprise, why wouldn't I do that for the rest at the same time? And it gives them an opportunity to consolidate the number of tools they have. And that's one thing from a license perspective, what about all the services that goes into that? What about all the maintenance of those products and the integration they have? What about all the skills that are required to develop on those tools to bring that data together? And so they're saving from multiple different angles and we're seeing not only great savings and value from us, but the systems integrator community are also getting on board and joining this party and making it a three or four way type partnership for us.

>> Nicole, I've interviewed some Amazonians, Amazon Web Services folks, Amazonians technically.

Nicole Bradley

>> Definitely.

>> In New York at the New York Summit last year.

Nicole Bradley

>> Oh, yeah.

>> From the industry group, which is, SAP's part of.

Nicole Bradley

>> Exactly.

>> One of the things that came out of that, I want to get your reaction to this, and Dan, if you don't mind sharing your perspective too, is that agility was the number one thing they wanted out of it. They had the SAP, they were moving to Amazon. I won't say shadow IT, it's not IT, it's technically an application, but they're moving it into the cloud so they can add higher level services or do demos or do things that were experiments and/or new development. So, this agility was a theme. Is that one of the drivers behind this or is it cost? Is it performance? Is it the higher level services?

Nicole Bradley

>> Yeah.

>> What's the drivers?

Nicole Bradley

>> I think it is agility. That's just table stakes at some level though. But it's also innovation, and that's really where we're focused on because if you're running inefficient processes, inefficient applications or architecture, then you can't focus on the innovation. And with gen AI and with what we saw with the Garden that they're developing, if you're not able to move quickly and you're not also able to move efficiently, then you're going to have either something too expensive to do or you're just not going to be able to develop and build the product that your customers need.

>> Dan, what's your reaction?

Dan McAllister

>> I would actually broaden it a little bit. First of all, agility is absolutely critical. And that's what we provide organizations with the solution, the ability to get them down to a place where they can make use of all that data and get ready for all the things that are coming with AI. But today, a lot of what's driving the decision is actually cost, right? Because over the last several years, the software and investment model has not just been about growth, but it's been about fiscal responsibility. And so we've ratcheted projects down to minutia and minutia smaller and smaller amounts so that we can measure the actual results. And what that's done is it's actually led to the applications. Well, it's led to these smaller projects that aren't connected, that aren't together. So, we have to meet that need, we have to check that box, but what we really are doing, the big value that we do is get them ready for what's coming in AI tomorrow.

>> Nicole, Dan was on earlier, so I'm kind of cheating by saying this because I know some of his rap. He mentions earlier in the interview that he thinks about from the end user perspective, about what's their experience? And I want to bring that into the next question. Also, I'll add a little commentary that I've been following Amazon for over 14 years with theCUBE. I've been a customer since day one and Boomi for six. You both have a similar culture. You see a lot of workloads and you both work backwards from the customer. So, this is a classic concept you guys know well about. So, okay, so the question is work backwards from the customer here. What is the SAP customer feeling? Why is this product serving their needs? What is it that's resonating with the solution if you work back from the customers? I know that's the way you guys work.

Nicole Bradley

>> Yeah, absolutely.

>> You got there, so it's kind of a test.

Nicole Bradley

>> And so I'll add it from the AWS perspective and then would love for Dan to add the Boomi and the combined perspective. But I think working back from the customer, talking about cost optimization, talking about overworked resources in the environment, wanting to focus on innovation but not wanting to deal with the mechanics underneath. So, really what we hear from our customers is, "Manage our mess and just give us product that allows us to innovate." And that's where Datasphere and all the work that's happening there is going to provide them. It's going to give them a platform that's going to grow, expand, and innovate, and they want to quickly get there. They don't want it to be a long-drawn-out process.

>> Dan, and you guys work back from the customer too. I know that from talking to the Boomi folks. What's your perspective from the customer angle there?

Dan McAllister

>> Sure. Well, if I take our customer, not necessarily the end user experience, but which I talked about before, but our customer is often the CIO, and the CIO is inundated with massive shadow IT. I think AI is the new shadow IT, and it is very risky because now somebody can cut and paste corporate documents and just throw it into ChatGPT or some other AI tool just to see what they get back. Well, where does that information go? It's not even restricting email and content like that anymore with an NDA on it, that's out in the universe. And so now all of your confidential information can be put out there. And so it's really, really important for the CIO and the think about security. So, for what they're looking for from us is simplicity. And AWS provides massive simplicity. They have CIO relationships across the full stack of technology that they're looking at, not only from all of the new cloud things that they're buying and easy to onboard. And this is part of the fallacy of SAP, bringing all things in SAP. We have customers still using legacy mainframes. We have partners now that develop connectivity to legacy mainframes. We want to be able to take that data, put it in a place where we can all work with it, and commonly data lake or something like that. And AWS helps us do that, but we still have to have that connectivity all the way down that. But the ultimate experience we have to provide is simplicity to the CIO and the rest of the organization.

Nicole Bradley

>> And I'll just add to that, the CISO is who I find myself talking to more and more over the last two years. And the CISO is the one in the background going, "I can't say no. I have to be a team player, but I also have to protect my company." And so what this offering and what they're doing in the gen AI space is really giving a safe space where the customer can come in and experiment, build their own gen AI platforms or agents, also use the Boomi ones that they're creating, so again, they can get quick ease to use, but then they can also use whatever model they want. They can go to Hugging Face or Cohere or one of our favorite, Anthropic. So, it's really exciting.

>> That's interesting, Nicole, you mentioned that because RSA is going on. We have a CUBE up in San Francisco right now, and we just did some proprietary research with our CUBE research team, and we thought that this would be a consolidation of tools in say cyber for instance, as an example. And what's actually happening, and it was survey is it's expanding. They're keeping their existing tools, adding more, mainly because there are more threats. Again, back to the sprawl. So, this is an evolutionary feature, it's not a bug.

Dan McAllister

>> Sure.

>> So, sprawl's happening. There's two ways to do that, kill the sprawl or rein it in.

Dan McAllister

>> Right.

Nicole Bradley

>> Right.

>> Put an abstraction layer around it, build an innovation opportunity. I think your point is interesting because now you're saying, "Okay, I still got to keep my stuff. How do I innovate?" And that's net new. I think that's going to be where the proof is going to be in the pudding. Where's the agility? Where's that translated to innovation? Does product come out? Is there an outcome?

Dan McAllister

>> That's really the challenge I think Nicole was talking about between the CISO and the CIO, they have to have control. You have to have a safe place for everyone to play, but you've got to let them play an experiment. So, if you can have a federated layer across the top that's flexible enough to allow your community inside your organization to innovate, right? Because you actually do want them to do that. Experimentation that happens with things like AI and other application is going to be the future. Models will be disrupted for sure over the next several years, and we need to give them that ability to do that, but also in a safe place. And so that's why we're excited about how we can deliver that value proposition.

>> All right, so as we get ready to wrap up soon, I want to get into how customers can get involved. How do they take advantage of the solution? What's it look like? What's the consumption side of it look like? I'm an SAP customer. I got kind of a mess in the sense that I got to get in this game, I got to innovate. I want to move fast. I want to have a new higher level services in say, the cloud. I want a simple platform to leverage the future of agents, the agent card, I want all that goodness. What do I do?

Dan McAllister

>> Yeah, give us a call. It's actually amazingly easy.

>> Is there an agent ?

Dan McAllister

>> Yeah, there actually is. And so I think anyone going through this transformation in their organization, thinking about migrating to SAP, again, you're going to be forced to over the next several years anyway. Be thoughtful about how are you going to use this opportunity and this crisis that you're in to get ready for all things in the future. Modernize once as opposed to step along the way and just give us a call. The solution can be deployed immediately. We have a great relationship between Amazon and Boomi. Call either one of us and we're happy to engage -

>> Nicole, what's the Amazon side?

Nicole Bradley

>> I would say it's two things. We just actually came out with a press release today about our collaboration and our partnership in this space around SAP. But it could be anything, right? It could be any application that you're using, but reach out to your account managers at AWS or at Boomi. We have, Marketplace is a great place that you can go and understand what they have and then ultimately at the end of the day, work with your solution architects, work with your technical teams, and we can talk through whatever works best for them.

>> It's interesting, Nicole, I've been studying some of these power dynamics of the cloud for over a decade. SAP has been on Amazon for a long time.

Nicole Bradley

>> Huge .

>> The shadow, a shadow IT cloud with SAP, I remember I taught this to an Amazonian and they're like, "We have more SAP. What's the use case?" Actually, it's the pre-sales motion that the initial... So, everything from getting something stood up quickly, time savings becomes huge. So, the value can be quantified. Again, back to our last conversation, we're in a world now where the consequences of either not acting or not innovating can be measured. You can quantify it.

Nicole Bradley

>> Yeah. And what's great too is you don't have to be an expert in databases and all this other stuff, with managed services and all the collaboration that's happening between the biggest players in this field. Our goal is to make it so that you don't have to worry about that. The value of the cloud is let us handle that with you. And then at that point you go out and be experts in your business and we'll give you the tools so that you can do it quickly.

>>

Dan McAllister

>> Sorry, I would just remind everybody that one of the biggest reasons why large package implementations fail, right? Migrations fail, is integration. So, be thoughtful about that, think in advance as opposed to trying to attach that on at the end. Be thoughtful about it upfront and your backend, the rest of your migration is going to go a lot smoother.

>> And also on the integration side, being mindful of the data modeling going in. Are you going to operationally get the data that you need from the multiple systems that are now connected-

Dan McAllister

>> What are my future needs? Exactly....

>> to the layers of the connection?

Nicole Bradley

>> Absolutely.

Dan McAllister

>> A hundred percent.

>> All right. Final up question to wrap up. As you guys have a great partnership, and I know you guys have a good relationship as Amazon and Boomi, what's next for the partnership? Where do you guys go from here? I can see this evolving into a much more multi-system architecture. What's next?

Nicole Bradley

>> Yeah, thank you for asking that. I would say what's really next is going to be driven back from the customer. What are they going to want to see? As we're getting into this space and the generative AI, I don't think anybody really knows what's next, but what's great is we're going to have the framework in place so that we can be responsive, fast. And between Boomi and AWS and partnering it together, in the case of SAP, it's a migration, but it could be the Garden, which I just sitting in there, I just love that. I can build my own, but I may not have time. I don't need to be an HR expert, let Boomi build the HR assistant agent, and then I just add my data and my flavor to the data. So, I think it's just really going to be what's to see, but we're going to give you the framework to do it together. And I think the three, the customer and the two of us together are going to be best together.

Dan McAllister

>> Yeah, I think what I'm most excited about is exactly what Nicole said. What I'm hearing from the systems integrator community, which is the rest of my job outside of working with the fabulous partner, AWS, is we want the ability to experiment with value propositions, big and small. Some solutions which save you maybe 1% of productivity every day or deliver amazing outcomes. And what we're planning to do from Boomi and AWS is allow systems integrators to innovate with their customers in a place that will allow them to ultimately achieve that value. So, very excited.

>> Dan, Nicole, thank you so much for coming on the CUBE.

Nicole Bradley

>> Thank you.

>> Congratulations on your relationship again. I kind of get what's going on here. Two great companies, very complimentary, customers of each other partners.

Dan McAllister

>> Awesome.

>> Congratulations.

Nicole Bradley

>> Yeah, thank you very much.

Dan McAllister

>> Thanks so much. I appreciate the time.

>> You're watching theCUBE. I'm John Furrier, your host. Thanks for watching Boomi World 2024.