Boomi World 2024 | Doug Henschen | Constellation Research

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Doug Henschen

VP & Principal Analyst

Constellation Research Inc.

The rise of intelligent integration: Transforming IPaaS with AI and data orchestration

In the evolving landscape of technology integration platforms, the recent focus on artificial intelligence and data orchestration — termed intelligent integration — is reshaping how companies address internal and customer-facing challenges.The integration-platform-as-a-service sector, traditionally aimed at simplifying connectivity across various software applications, is now seeing a significant shift toward leveraging AI to enhance automation and data management capabilities. This shift not only promises improved efficiencies, but also ushers in a new era of business intelligence and operational agility

play_circle_outline Boomi's Integrated Data Management: Enabling Automation and Converging iPaaS in the Tech Industry

play_circle_outline Boomi Expands its OEM Strategy with Strategic Partnerships for On-Premises and Edge Market Growth, while Exploring AI-Driven Agents

play_circle_outline The Powerful Impact of Boomi's Partnership Ecosystem: A Game-Changer for iPaaS and Data Management

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Doug Henschen | Constellation Research

Doug Henschen

VP & Principal Analyst Constellation Research Inc.

search

>> Welcome back everyone, TheCUBE's live coverage here in Denver for Boomi World. I'm John Furrier, your host of theCUBE. Savannah Peterson is with me. She's not here today, she had to get back to the ranch. Doug Hutchinson is here. He is the principal analyst at Constellation Research. Doug, Cube Alumni, great to see you. Always great to have you on theCUBE, contributing to the audience and the community. Great to have you back.

>> Great to see you.

>> So I'll say not a lot of analysts here, surprisingly, you asked me if there's a lot of analysts. There are analysts, but not a lot. I think next year after what we saw here in the keynote, there should be more, because from my conversations, this management team is locked in on growth. They've got great customers, they've got a new management team. Steve Lucas at the helm, energetic, visionary, knows his product, not afraid to make moves. Two M&A deals out of the gate. Vishal Sikka is doing a deal, an OEM deal, deal with Stripe. I mean, Doug, what's your assessment? What's your analysis?

>> Yeah, he's definitely raising the profile of Boomi. They already had 20,000 plus customers, more than 20, I think it's 25 years in the industry, kind of pioneered the iPaaS space, but they're kind of a quiet company until Steve really is upping the game. And I thought yesterday's keynote was really visionary and kind of bold to be saying they might be orchestrating things that you might see from CRM or from marketing automation or firing up dashboards. You talk to the product people, they're like, "No, no, we're focused on integration and automation."

>> Settle down, boss.

>> But he's got some bigger ambitions.

>> He's talking a big game. Steve is talking a big game. But you got to have that game, because I think Boomi, I mean, I've been saying this for years and I still don't understand what iPaaS is. It's integrated, it's an older definition, but the fundamentals of what it is, it's basically, I used to call it the cleanup crew. Go clean up the legacy stuff. There's a lot of sausage being made, guts on the floor. IT is screwed up, go fix it. Integrate the big systems. A lot of legacy, a lot of hard problems.

>> Yeah.

>> Okay. Okay, cool, but that's modernization. So now iPaaS conceptually is connecting apps to infrastructure.

>> Well, that's part of the confusion of iPaaS because it was always an aspirational category. You had a group of people in iPaaS that came from the application integration space. You had a group of players that came in from the data integration space and they didn't really... The premise of the iPaaS was, "We cover it all," but they didn't. And what they've been doing in recent years is scrambling to do more of what they didn't do. So you see Boomi here talking more about data management and focus on data where it's coming out of the app integration space.

>> API, their moves on the M&A API.

>> Well, all of them are stepping up on API management, and that's where you hear the tagline, "The AI economy is the API economy." That's why that's really important. So everybody in the space, iPaaS space is stepping up on API management, but you also see the folks with the app focus stepping up. You saw a rumor last week, since disavowed that Salesforce ala MuleSoft looking at acquiring Informatica, stepping up on the data space. So the data players stepping up on API management.

>> Well, a rumor about Informatica and Salesforce, that kind of went away.

>> Yes, it did.

>> Someone walked away.

>> It did, but that would be the sense. They have MuleSoft, but they didn't have the data integration stuff as richly as one would think.

>> I'm going to dig into who left who at the table there, or was there even a table? Because sometimes refreshed when I get clicks, it'll try. I want to get your thoughts on something because you brought up an interesting point about iPaaS and we were just riffing on the categories. In all these major reflection points one of my things I've observed over my career is that there's disruptive enablement, meaning something has to go away for the new to come in. That's just natural evolution. Enabling platforms do enable value proposition, but sometimes they're not disruptive, they're valuable. But in this market, there's disruption. So when you think about iPaaS or even categories like application programming management, these old areas, AI ops, these are old pre-GenAI, well-informed market categories. In your research and your view of the landscape, what are the most volatile categories that might change and or reform or merge? So I mean, I brought up APM maybe because it just jumped in my head, but application informed management, every application needs performance management. Is it a category or is iPaaS a category? What is that?

>> You're going to see convergence. I think you're going to see companies that don't really fulfill every need going away. Because companies, if they have integration, automation problem, they don't want to make that integration, automation problem harder by bringing in multiple tools for integration, automation. That's why there's been this effort to fill in all the blanks, to be the one platform that companies can standardize to serve all their needs. So a lot of people talk about connectors. I think when you get into a world of agents that sort of connector count race is going to go away. You want smart agents that are going to be able to connect everything. So the integration automation companies that aren't sophisticated, that aren't stepping up on AI are the ones that are going to be vulnerable.

>> Are you bullish on the agent velocity trend that's happening, what they're saying?

>> Yes, I am. I mean, I think there's great potential there. I think you'll hear more in today's keynote about the potential for agents. Yesterday, Steve Lucas, the CEO kind of alluded to greater potential than just integration and automation. Yesterday's announcements were very much about AI within Boomi for integration, for automation. Today, I think you're going to hear more about this potential of agents and the orchestration capabilities of Boomi to enable companies to harness AI and to have agents that could orchestrate those agents with many different skills to get work done and to take action.

>> I had Arlen on who's the CFO president, he ran M&A at SAP. We were talking about, has a lot of SAP DNA here. He loves this business. Not a lot of professional services, a lot of SaaS, they're in the cloud, so they play well with the hyperscalers. So and LC Amazon competing with them anytime soon because they're making good bank off them and with the cloud play there, but they're also at scale. So if Boomi can bring that next level down and get into that, a classic enterprise platform, they have a potential to go after the holy grail, which is the data layer. I mean, they want to be switching them. That's their positioning. What's your reaction to that? Is it too early to call that or even kind hint at it? I mean, they're saying.

>> Well, I think they're one of the players, one of the iPaaS players that could really span a lot and bring it all together and orchestrate agents. You're right. I don't think the public clouds have particularly good... They have kind of lower level collections of integration and automation services. They haven't really pulled them together. They're partnering to a large extent with the Informaticas, with the Boomis, with Salesforce/ MuleSoft. So I think these companies with these independents, with a large customer base are in a great position to go beyond just integration automation and play in this AI agent space.

>> It's interesting. One of our main principles around a super cloud narrative was that a Snowflake can build on top of AWS and not have to build their own cloud, right? So Boomi is in that same luxury position where they can build on top of AWS or cloud and get all the betters of the CapEx and be a customer of Amazon. Hence, Amazon has to figure out, "Well, I might compete with a feature, but I'm not going to compete with iPaaS. I'm not going to compete with Boomi." Why would they? They don't need to.

>> Yeah.

>> They help each other, right? So okay, check.

>> Provide the compute and the storage and the network. Boomi can do the orchestration.

>> If I'm a private equity or I'm an investor investing that's going to, "Okay, they're not going to get rolled on by Amazon. Amazon likes them." Then you go, "Okay, what's their opportunity on-premise and edge?" Then you get into the, okay, data, trusted data layer, which I find very fascinating, this news here. What's your take there? Does that have legs in your opinion? Because-

>> They can very much address on-prem. They already have. Some of the acquisitions they've made are to bolster with Mashery and with APIIDA, is to both solidify the on-prem capabilities, API gateways for on-prem, for the cloud, have APIIDA, is the control plane to orchestrate it all together. So I think they're really well-positioned.

>> Interesting, is that Mashery and APIDA, they're both cloud-based too, but they also work on-prem.

>> Yes.

>> Mashery is old school.

>> Yes. 2006, I think.

>> Remember? Yeah. I remember the founders when they started that company, I'm like, there was no... API marketplace was just emerging and they have good tech.

>> So everything back when in 2006 was very much on-prem still, so definitely have the credit.

>> I mean, the Digirati or the Cloudera, as we call them back then was a small group of people at that time. Cloud was just emerging, early days. So now we fast-forward, APIs are running 80% of the traffic through APIs, and so APIs are a data connector. We saw the relationship with Stripe here earlier with Matt and Body from Stripe. Great example of an integration play where, I mean to me, integration on iPaaS, that's just the industry. I mean, everyone is integrating. It's not like... There's no monoliths anymore.

>> Yeah. Well, I think the area where Boomi is stepping up is on the data side. Saw yesterday a little bit more scale and depth in just the basics of ETL, ELT, talking about data movement at scale. That's very much in demand for AI needs. Change data capture, some things they're talking about bringing to the fore. So they're really becoming that well-rounded integration player.

>> What do you think about their OEM strategy? They have a deal with Vishal Sikka's company, Vinia, I think it's called.

>> Vishal Sikka? Vianai?

>> Vianai.

>> Vianai.

>> Vianai. Okay, tough name to pronounce, but Boomi FinTalk is powered by that company.

>> Exactly.

>> So interesting application.

>> Yeah. Now, this is an interesting area where Boomi will have to mature out of its roots. I was asking some of the executives, "Okay, are Boomi customers who have been all about integration, are they really dabbling in AI? Are they really the ones that are going to be looking into line of business areas? They're not finance people." But I think this agent concept very compelling. We're getting to lots of conversations about having natural language interfaces and hiding the complexity. So if they can get some line of business apps, their agent garden is going to have a lot of these third-party agents and they'll have to help do the selling and convincing of finance types, for example, that they have a really compelling AI-driven experience for finance questions, and Boomi is there tapping the data, tapping the APIs, tapping the models and orchestrating all that behind the scenes to have more of a natural language interaction for a process and questions for finance types.

>> So interesting you brought that up. I'm glad you brought that up. It's a great analysis by the way, so props to you on that. The next question is this, as we observe the management team, we were talking before, cameras, a lot of SAP, getting a lot of web services nerds, old school like plumbing, but also lines of business. Will the iPaaS Boomi transition from a modernizing IT challenge to line of business solution and can they thread the needle? Or does it matter? Does it become one?

>> Yeah, I mean that's going to be part of the challenge, educating their customers, reaching a higher level within their customer base, the CXO level. They're even talking today, and I think you'll hear in today's keynote that they can be a low-code lang chain. But can they convince, are they really, is their customer of today really the buyer of a lang chain? They have to help bring together the data engineering and data science people at their company and let them know, "Hey, we already have access to all this data. We already have access to the APIs. We can bring the models together too." So they do have an education and a maturation challenge ahead to up-level the discussion within their customers to get them to more of the transformational opportunities they're seeing with AI.

>> So Steve has got a big game going on here, starting a big game, they're executing, got a good management team. Questions for you is, is this a land grab for Boomi? And if it is, there's a bold statement, you're alerting the competition.

>> Yes.

>> Okay, this is what we're going to do. We're going to be the horizontally scalable data layer that manages independently all the different best of breed products for a mix and match composability architecture that ideally I'm buying that product if I'm an enterprise. Now, implementing is a whole nother story, but you sell me that value proposition, I'm interested.

>> Yeah.

>> So it's kind of a land grab. That's my words. What do you think? Is it a land grab? What can go deep with them?

>> You see this, Steve Lucas saying some pretty ambitious, out there visionary things, and you see their team focused on the space they're in today and accelerating that and maybe moving into not just gen AI and capabilities for integration and automation, but also helping companies to harness that to solve business problems. So I think they're going to have to mature it, but they're already signaling to competitors like an Informatica, "Hey, we're going deeper into data management, into ETL, into high-scale data movement." They're already signaling to competitors, "We're moving up." And obviously with acquisitions, putting some wood behind the arrow on stepping up on API management. So they're already grabbing for more within the integration, automation space. I think some of the partners where you might envision it as, say it's a land grab, I think they're going to be partners, they're going to be in that agent garden as partners.

>> So you see the ecosystem really leveraging the agent garden option?

>> Yeah.

>> Big time.

>> Yeah. I think that'll be a big partnership opportunity. Yesterday, had some conversations with analysts where you might see RPA players. You might see other process players in their garden among their partners.

>> So if Boomi continues to execute on this vision, whose lunch do they start eating? You mentioned some of the RPA players.

>> Well, I think you're already seeing in the iPaaS space, that's the first cut, you're going to see some players fall away. You're going to see some consolidation. You've already seen some with Talon getting acquired last year. These companies are in the integration space, have to cover all the bases. That's the starting point. If they don't, if they're not able to help companies harness GenAI for integration needs and help them harness GenAI and other forms of AI for their business, they're not going to be the one platform that companies choose. So that's the first cut. After that, I think we will see where these agent possibilities bring them.

>> Yeah, we'll see how the execution is. Final question for you is, as we look at Boomi, what's your analysis of what they should be working on? If you're the M&A advisory board, you're advising the CFO, you've got to shore up these areas, what are their to-do lists if you had to give them a to-do list?

>> Well, I think they've already done the API management to-do list. They're clearly working on that. It'll be integrating Mastery and APIIDA. I think on the data management side, they have some opportunities. They've talked about upping their game. There was a fellow on yesterday's second half keynote who talked about, "This is all about data now." So they've really got to step up on the data management side. You already see with their new data hub that they have that vision. I could easily see some acquisitions of theirs. There's some very cutting edge cloud-centric data integration players out there that could become part of their future.

>> Awesome. Doug, great to have you on theCUBE. Give a quick plug in the research that you're working on. What's your main focus now? Obviously your area, but what are you digging into? What are you turning over in terms of research? Share what your focus is.

>> Well, very much everything I talked about in iPaaS maturing into a more complete integration platform that's also enabling the next generation of AI. That's one part. Then moving up into analytical data platforms, we're seeing the lake houses emerging. That's another aspect of what I'm covering. You're seeing open standards emerge there and everybody pretty much offering a lake house today, and then BI and analytics. Obviously GenAI is kind of an enabler and a threat, and we're seeing all of those products really evolve.

>> Did you notice they used the word data reservoir on stage yesterday? I asked them about that, they're like, "We just want to use something." I'm like, "Okay. I'm okay with that." But they're moving away from a lake. Interesting kind of posture. Yeah, reservoir, lake.

>> For me, it's a lake. They can create a reservoir that can become part of somebody's lake. I think they're going to become a lake house player, but they'll be part of the integration world for those analytical data platforms.

>> Well, we're going to keep track on it. I really appreciate it. The runtime aspect is certainly fascinating. As things become more real-time, the roll of data will be key. You've got a hot area, Doug.

>> Very hot area.

>> Thank you coming on. Okay, we'll be back more with theCUBE. We have a CEO coming on, Steve Lucas talking about the big game. He's going to come on theCUBE where all the big game talk happens. I'm John Furrier with theCUBE, we'll be right back after the short break.

Doug Henschen | Constellation Research

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>> Welcome back everyone, TheCUBE's live coverage here in Denver for Boomi World. I'm John Furrier, your host of theCUBE. Savannah Peterson is with me. She's not here today, she had to get back to the ranch. Doug Hutchinson is here. He is the principal analyst at Constellation Research. Doug, Cube Alumni, great to see you. Always great to have you on theCUBE, contributing to the audience and the community. Great to have you back.

>> Great to see you.

>> So I'll say not a lot of analysts here, surprisingly, you asked me if there's a lot of analysts. There are analysts, but not a lot. I think next year after what we saw here in the keynote, there should be more, because from my conversations, this management team is locked in on growth. They've got great customers, they've got a new management team. Steve Lucas at the helm, energetic, visionary, knows his product, not afraid to make moves. Two M&A deals out of the gate. Vishal Sikka is doing a deal, an OEM deal, deal with Stripe. I mean, Doug, what's your assessment? What's your analysis?

>> Yeah, he's definitely raising the profile of Boomi. They already had 20,000 plus customers, more than 20, I think it's 25 years in the industry, kind of pioneered the iPaaS space, but they're kind of a quiet company until Steve really is upping the game. And I thought yesterday's keynote was really visionary and kind of bold to be saying they might be orchestrating things that you might see from CRM or from marketing automation or firing up dashboards. You talk to the product people, they're like, "No, no, we're focused on integration and automation."

>> Settle down, boss.

>> But he's got some bigger ambitions.

>> He's talking a big game. Steve is talking a big game. But you got to have that game, because I think Boomi, I mean, I've been saying this for years and I still don't understand what iPaaS is. It's integrated, it's an older definition, but the fundamentals of what it is, it's basically, I used to call it the cleanup crew. Go clean up the legacy stuff. There's a lot of sausage being made, guts on the floor. IT is screwed up, go fix it. Integrate the big systems. A lot of legacy, a lot of hard problems.

>> Yeah.

>> Okay. Okay, cool, but that's modernization. So now iPaaS conceptually is connecting apps to infrastructure.

>> Well, that's part of the confusion of iPaaS because it was always an aspirational category. You had a group of people in iPaaS that came from the application integration space. You had a group of players that came in from the data integration space and they didn't really... The premise of the iPaaS was, "We cover it all," but they didn't. And what they've been doing in recent years is scrambling to do more of what they didn't do. So you see Boomi here talking more about data management and focus on data where it's coming out of the app integration space.

>> API, their moves on the M&A API.

>> Well, all of them are stepping up on API management, and that's where you hear the tagline, "The AI economy is the API economy." That's why that's really important. So everybody in the space, iPaaS space is stepping up on API management, but you also see the folks with the app focus stepping up. You saw a rumor last week, since disavowed that Salesforce ala MuleSoft looking at acquiring Informatica, stepping up on the data space. So the data players stepping up on API management.

>> Well, a rumor about Informatica and Salesforce, that kind of went away.

>> Yes, it did.

>> Someone walked away.

>> It did, but that would be the sense. They have MuleSoft, but they didn't have the data integration stuff as richly as one would think.

>> I'm going to dig into who left who at the table there, or was there even a table? Because sometimes refreshed when I get clicks, it'll try. I want to get your thoughts on something because you brought up an interesting point about iPaaS and we were just riffing on the categories. In all these major reflection points one of my things I've observed over my career is that there's disruptive enablement, meaning something has to go away for the new to come in. That's just natural evolution. Enabling platforms do enable value proposition, but sometimes they're not disruptive, they're valuable. But in this market, there's disruption. So when you think about iPaaS or even categories like application programming management, these old areas, AI ops, these are old pre-GenAI, well-informed market categories. In your research and your view of the landscape, what are the most volatile categories that might change and or reform or merge? So I mean, I brought up APM maybe because it just jumped in my head, but application informed management, every application needs performance management. Is it a category or is iPaaS a category? What is that?

>> You're going to see convergence. I think you're going to see companies that don't really fulfill every need going away. Because companies, if they have integration, automation problem, they don't want to make that integration, automation problem harder by bringing in multiple tools for integration, automation. That's why there's been this effort to fill in all the blanks, to be the one platform that companies can standardize to serve all their needs. So a lot of people talk about connectors. I think when you get into a world of agents that sort of connector count race is going to go away. You want smart agents that are going to be able to connect everything. So the integration automation companies that aren't sophisticated, that aren't stepping up on AI are the ones that are going to be vulnerable.

>> Are you bullish on the agent velocity trend that's happening, what they're saying?

>> Yes, I am. I mean, I think there's great potential there. I think you'll hear more in today's keynote about the potential for agents. Yesterday, Steve Lucas, the CEO kind of alluded to greater potential than just integration and automation. Yesterday's announcements were very much about AI within Boomi for integration, for automation. Today, I think you're going to hear more about this potential of agents and the orchestration capabilities of Boomi to enable companies to harness AI and to have agents that could orchestrate those agents with many different skills to get work done and to take action.

>> I had Arlen on who's the CFO president, he ran M&A at SAP. We were talking about, has a lot of SAP DNA here. He loves this business. Not a lot of professional services, a lot of SaaS, they're in the cloud, so they play well with the hyperscalers. So and LC Amazon competing with them anytime soon because they're making good bank off them and with the cloud play there, but they're also at scale. So if Boomi can bring that next level down and get into that, a classic enterprise platform, they have a potential to go after the holy grail, which is the data layer. I mean, they want to be switching them. That's their positioning. What's your reaction to that? Is it too early to call that or even kind hint at it? I mean, they're saying.

>> Well, I think they're one of the players, one of the iPaaS players that could really span a lot and bring it all together and orchestrate agents. You're right. I don't think the public clouds have particularly good... They have kind of lower level collections of integration and automation services. They haven't really pulled them together. They're partnering to a large extent with the Informaticas, with the Boomis, with Salesforce/ MuleSoft. So I think these companies with these independents, with a large customer base are in a great position to go beyond just integration automation and play in this AI agent space.

>> It's interesting. One of our main principles around a super cloud narrative was that a Snowflake can build on top of AWS and not have to build their own cloud, right? So Boomi is in that same luxury position where they can build on top of AWS or cloud and get all the betters of the CapEx and be a customer of Amazon. Hence, Amazon has to figure out, "Well, I might compete with a feature, but I'm not going to compete with iPaaS. I'm not going to compete with Boomi." Why would they? They don't need to.

>> Yeah.

>> They help each other, right? So okay, check.

>> Provide the compute and the storage and the network. Boomi can do the orchestration.

>> If I'm a private equity or I'm an investor investing that's going to, "Okay, they're not going to get rolled on by Amazon. Amazon likes them." Then you go, "Okay, what's their opportunity on-premise and edge?" Then you get into the, okay, data, trusted data layer, which I find very fascinating, this news here. What's your take there? Does that have legs in your opinion? Because-

>> They can very much address on-prem. They already have. Some of the acquisitions they've made are to bolster with Mashery and with APIIDA, is to both solidify the on-prem capabilities, API gateways for on-prem, for the cloud, have APIIDA, is the control plane to orchestrate it all together. So I think they're really well-positioned.

>> Interesting, is that Mashery and APIDA, they're both cloud-based too, but they also work on-prem.

>> Yes.

>> Mashery is old school.

>> Yes. 2006, I think.

>> Remember? Yeah. I remember the founders when they started that company, I'm like, there was no... API marketplace was just emerging and they have good tech.

>> So everything back when in 2006 was very much on-prem still, so definitely have the credit.

>> I mean, the Digirati or the Cloudera, as we call them back then was a small group of people at that time. Cloud was just emerging, early days. So now we fast-forward, APIs are running 80% of the traffic through APIs, and so APIs are a data connector. We saw the relationship with Stripe here earlier with Matt and Body from Stripe. Great example of an integration play where, I mean to me, integration on iPaaS, that's just the industry. I mean, everyone is integrating. It's not like... There's no monoliths anymore.

>> Yeah. Well, I think the area where Boomi is stepping up is on the data side. Saw yesterday a little bit more scale and depth in just the basics of ETL, ELT, talking about data movement at scale. That's very much in demand for AI needs. Change data capture, some things they're talking about bringing to the fore. So they're really becoming that well-rounded integration player.

>> What do you think about their OEM strategy? They have a deal with Vishal Sikka's company, Vinia, I think it's called.

>> Vishal Sikka? Vianai?

>> Vianai.

>> Vianai.

>> Vianai. Okay, tough name to pronounce, but Boomi FinTalk is powered by that company.

>> Exactly.

>> So interesting application.

>> Yeah. Now, this is an interesting area where Boomi will have to mature out of its roots. I was asking some of the executives, "Okay, are Boomi customers who have been all about integration, are they really dabbling in AI? Are they really the ones that are going to be looking into line of business areas? They're not finance people." But I think this agent concept very compelling. We're getting to lots of conversations about having natural language interfaces and hiding the complexity. So if they can get some line of business apps, their agent garden is going to have a lot of these third-party agents and they'll have to help do the selling and convincing of finance types, for example, that they have a really compelling AI-driven experience for finance questions, and Boomi is there tapping the data, tapping the APIs, tapping the models and orchestrating all that behind the scenes to have more of a natural language interaction for a process and questions for finance types.

>> So interesting you brought that up. I'm glad you brought that up. It's a great analysis by the way, so props to you on that. The next question is this, as we observe the management team, we were talking before, cameras, a lot of SAP, getting a lot of web services nerds, old school like plumbing, but also lines of business. Will the iPaaS Boomi transition from a modernizing IT challenge to line of business solution and can they thread the needle? Or does it matter? Does it become one?

>> Yeah, I mean that's going to be part of the challenge, educating their customers, reaching a higher level within their customer base, the CXO level. They're even talking today, and I think you'll hear in today's keynote that they can be a low-code lang chain. But can they convince, are they really, is their customer of today really the buyer of a lang chain? They have to help bring together the data engineering and data science people at their company and let them know, "Hey, we already have access to all this data. We already have access to the APIs. We can bring the models together too." So they do have an education and a maturation challenge ahead to up-level the discussion within their customers to get them to more of the transformational opportunities they're seeing with AI.

>> So Steve has got a big game going on here, starting a big game, they're executing, got a good management team. Questions for you is, is this a land grab for Boomi? And if it is, there's a bold statement, you're alerting the competition.

>> Yes.

>> Okay, this is what we're going to do. We're going to be the horizontally scalable data layer that manages independently all the different best of breed products for a mix and match composability architecture that ideally I'm buying that product if I'm an enterprise. Now, implementing is a whole nother story, but you sell me that value proposition, I'm interested.

>> Yeah.

>> So it's kind of a land grab. That's my words. What do you think? Is it a land grab? What can go deep with them?

>> You see this, Steve Lucas saying some pretty ambitious, out there visionary things, and you see their team focused on the space they're in today and accelerating that and maybe moving into not just gen AI and capabilities for integration and automation, but also helping companies to harness that to solve business problems. So I think they're going to have to mature it, but they're already signaling to competitors like an Informatica, "Hey, we're going deeper into data management, into ETL, into high-scale data movement." They're already signaling to competitors, "We're moving up." And obviously with acquisitions, putting some wood behind the arrow on stepping up on API management. So they're already grabbing for more within the integration, automation space. I think some of the partners where you might envision it as, say it's a land grab, I think they're going to be partners, they're going to be in that agent garden as partners.

>> So you see the ecosystem really leveraging the agent garden option?

>> Yeah.

>> Big time.

>> Yeah. I think that'll be a big partnership opportunity. Yesterday, had some conversations with analysts where you might see RPA players. You might see other process players in their garden among their partners.

>> So if Boomi continues to execute on this vision, whose lunch do they start eating? You mentioned some of the RPA players.

>> Well, I think you're already seeing in the iPaaS space, that's the first cut, you're going to see some players fall away. You're going to see some consolidation. You've already seen some with Talon getting acquired last year. These companies are in the integration space, have to cover all the bases. That's the starting point. If they don't, if they're not able to help companies harness GenAI for integration needs and help them harness GenAI and other forms of AI for their business, they're not going to be the one platform that companies choose. So that's the first cut. After that, I think we will see where these agent possibilities bring them.

>> Yeah, we'll see how the execution is. Final question for you is, as we look at Boomi, what's your analysis of what they should be working on? If you're the M&A advisory board, you're advising the CFO, you've got to shore up these areas, what are their to-do lists if you had to give them a to-do list?

>> Well, I think they've already done the API management to-do list. They're clearly working on that. It'll be integrating Mastery and APIIDA. I think on the data management side, they have some opportunities. They've talked about upping their game. There was a fellow on yesterday's second half keynote who talked about, "This is all about data now." So they've really got to step up on the data management side. You already see with their new data hub that they have that vision. I could easily see some acquisitions of theirs. There's some very cutting edge cloud-centric data integration players out there that could become part of their future.

>> Awesome. Doug, great to have you on theCUBE. Give a quick plug in the research that you're working on. What's your main focus now? Obviously your area, but what are you digging into? What are you turning over in terms of research? Share what your focus is.

>> Well, very much everything I talked about in iPaaS maturing into a more complete integration platform that's also enabling the next generation of AI. That's one part. Then moving up into analytical data platforms, we're seeing the lake houses emerging. That's another aspect of what I'm covering. You're seeing open standards emerge there and everybody pretty much offering a lake house today, and then BI and analytics. Obviously GenAI is kind of an enabler and a threat, and we're seeing all of those products really evolve.

>> Did you notice they used the word data reservoir on stage yesterday? I asked them about that, they're like, "We just want to use something." I'm like, "Okay. I'm okay with that." But they're moving away from a lake. Interesting kind of posture. Yeah, reservoir, lake.

>> For me, it's a lake. They can create a reservoir that can become part of somebody's lake. I think they're going to become a lake house player, but they'll be part of the integration world for those analytical data platforms.

>> Well, we're going to keep track on it. I really appreciate it. The runtime aspect is certainly fascinating. As things become more real-time, the roll of data will be key. You've got a hot area, Doug.

>> Very hot area.

>> Thank you coming on. Okay, we'll be back more with theCUBE. We have a CEO coming on, Steve Lucas talking about the big game. He's going to come on theCUBE where all the big game talk happens. I'm John Furrier with theCUBE, we'll be right back after the short break.