Boomi World 2024 | Steve Lucas | Boomi, Kapil Goel & Suman Mishra | Infosys

theCUBE.net

Clips
News
More from Boomi World 2024

Steve Lucas

CEO

Boomi

Kapil Goel

Associate Vice President and Global Head Of BPM, API and Digital Process

Infosys

Suman Mishra

Sr. Director

Infosys

Three insights you might have missed from theCUBE’s coverage of Boomi World

After spinning out from Dell Technologies Inc., Boomi LP has gone on a generative AI journey. Given the company’s significant base of more than 20,000 customers, what comes next is of great interest.“[This is a] company that has been around the block in iPaaS application integration, which, by the way, is never going away, but they had that relationship with Dell, they spun back out,” said John Furrier, theCUBE Research executive analyst. “This company is really poised … for potentially becoming the next ServiceNow-like company, where their presence in the enterprise is pretty significant.”Unpacking Boomi’s gen AI journey was a central focus of the recent Boomi World 2024 event in Denver

The impact of AI integration in business: Transformations and challenges

The swift advancement of technology, particularly through artificial intelligence, is transforming various sectors by enhancing efficiency, saving costs, providing strategic insights and improving customer experiences. This AI integration in business is helping companies to compete more effectively in the market.Boomi’s Steve Lucas and Infosys’ Kapil Goel and Suman Mishra talk to theCUBE about AI integration in business at Boomi World 2024.One of the major players using AI and automation to address integration challenges and future-proof organizations across different industries is Boomi LP

play_circle_outline Recap of the day's events and guest appearances

play_circle_outline Announcement of Boomi's expansion into API management and data management

play_circle_outline The Evolution of Integration: APIs, Event-Driven Architecture, and AI's Impact on Innovation and Cost Reduction

play_circle_outline Integration challenges faced by customers, such as future-proofing and manual steps

play_circle_outline The Growing Importance of Hyperautomation and AI-RPA Integration in Organizations: Managing Agents and Technologies

Info

Steve Lucas | Boomi, Kapil Goel & Suman Mishra | Infosys

Steve Lucas

CEO Boomi

Kapil Goel

Associate Vice President and Global Head Of BPM, API and Digital Process Infosys

Suman Mishra

Sr. Director Infosys

search

>> Good afternoon integration community and welcome back to beautiful Denver, Colorado. My name is Savannah Peterson. Very excited to be here midway through day two of our three days of coverage here on theCUBE. We've got some of the most VIP guests of the show to kick off our programming today. We've got Suman, Kapil and Steve who is the CEO of Boomi. You've had a huge day. You've all had a really big day. Most importantly, you all got the memo on how to dress the sharpest of any of our guests. Very impressed. Matching jackets. Steve, you were up on stage. You were running around with the University of Colorado flag. You kicked it with Deon Sanders this morning.

Steve Lucas

>> Yeah, just a regular Wednesday-

>> Casual Wednesday.

Steve Lucas

>> Yeah, very casual.

>> Yeah. So give us a little bit of a recap of what happened this morning? It was a lot of things.

Steve Lucas

>> Yeah, it was a lot of things. The whole low-key, Deon Sanders, Coach Prime, that was actually really special.

>> He complimented your fit too. It's the drip. Yeah.

Steve Lucas

>> It did work. It did work. But first of all, we obviously wanted to engage with our customers and partners. That's what these events are all about, mission accomplished. And the second thing was making sure that we share the big news around Boomi's integration and automation platform, but expanding into API management. We announced two acquisitions, the acquisition of Mashery from the cloud software group, as well as a technology or company called APIIDA as well. Big expansion in API management. And then lastly, Boomi's expansion and data management. And really, the story there is whether you're looking to drive integration for your business, automation across your processes, or you're looking to innovate with AI, we announced the whole thing, it's out there. .

>> I don't know any companies thinking about doing that right now.

Steve Lucas

>> All three. All three. So it's very unique for Boomi. The reality is organizations, they have this massive integration challenge today. Why are you attacking an integration challenge with a dozen or more integration products? That's one integration problem for another. You don't want to do that. Using the singular Boomi enterprise platform, we can solve all of that in one go.

>> Sounds like a solution most people want. Kapil, when we were getting ready here and setting up, you've been in the integration game for 25 years. Casual, also casual, two casual gentlemen here sitting with me today. How has the integration journey changed? We talked a little bit about it before we went live, but I want you to bring us up to speed on that evolution?

Kapil Goel

>> Yeah, sure. Well, 20 years ago, organizations were just trying to connect the data from one point to the other. But in the last past decade, we've seen the rise of APIs and microservices. Clients started building small focused apps, very focused business apps, and they wanted these apps to communicate via APIs, and that's where the rise of APIs happened, along with digital. Now came cloud where the traditional boundaries of all this on-prem integration was shattered. Clients wanted to communicate on-prem, off-prem, across digital apps. They wanted all the scalability and the agility. Now, when you have this digital first and cloud first at the same time, clients are building a lot of apps around. So the number of apps increased dramatically around us. Associated with apps, the amount of data increased, and this was all kind of data, not just in volume, but also in variety, structured data, unstructured data, streaming data, all of that. Now, obviously with all this kind of data being out there, there was a need to sophistically handle this data, and that's where event-driven architecture was becoming more and more prevalent. Clients wanted to build apps which could leverage the event-driven architecture out there. So I think that's where Boomi fits extremely well. It's able to bring in this unification of data from different sources, different protocols, different formats. It's going to put all of this together and create that protocol. So I would say yeah, we are at very exciting times ahead in terms of the future of integration, particularly with AI coming into the mix. And people are using AI now, not just for streamlining and automating the integration lifecycle, but also to infuse AI into monitoring the health of the integration and monitoring the predictive part of the integration. And I think that's where the future lies, to really be able to shift them from the everyday AI use cases to the game-changing AI use cases. So that's what I think the evolution has been now and that's going to be the next decade.

>> You've seen quite a journey and that was very well summarized. Thank you for that. And you mentioned AI, so I want to sit there just for a second. A couple of people in the room talking about it this week and in general in our ecosystem. And I know Steve, you bring this up a lot, average enterprise now juggling over 364 applications like you mentioned. That's a lot. How does AI affect the integration game going a little bit further? Suman, I'm going to bring this to you so you can join us in the chat?

Suman Mishra

>> Sure. So what is happening with the AI right now, it's a narrative. People are experimenting with it. So in the whole lifecycle of STLC process, right from functional specification, design, development, testing and so on, so forth, AI is going to play the role. So we are also working with the customer, looking at it that where it'll fit in and solve the puzzle of reducing the cost and getting to the market faster. And we have solutions around it and we are going to see that success in months, not in years anymore.

>> That's an exciting time for everyone. Steve, you said something awesome earlier when you had Tropicana on stage today that the juice flows through Boomi.

Steve Lucas

>> The juice flows through Boomi.

>> That must've been a great moment for you on stage. It made me smile. Why is this customer partnership so magic?

Steve Lucas

>> Well, we're doing terrific things together, obviously from both a customer partner and solution provider standpoint. And I think everything that you talked about, we've been successfully doing together for some time. But the message that we delivered today and why this works is everything is about to change. 30 years in technology, and I can promise you, everything is about to change. And the message that we delivered this morning is everything that humanity has invented up until now, starting with language, how we communicate to modern technology and the like, all of these things have converged to give us this new kind of AI. This is not, "Is it an apple? Is it a giraffe?" Kind of machine learning. This is a new form of consciousness. I'm not the only one out there saying this. I was listening to Eric Schmidt earlier in the week, former CEO of Google, and he talks about the arrival of this technology in the next few years, not 50, not ten, five. This technology, in my mind, causes us to need to rewrite everything we know in enterprise software. Every application you're aware of, Salesforce automation, ERP, it's all going to get rewritten because applications, they need to be able to reason and learn. And that's what we're doing right now together is building a new set of applications that can reason, and we're building those technologies with AI. That's what I'm so excited about is just how powerful this next generation of enterprise applications is going to be. This partnership together, that's exactly what it's all about.

>> Well, it sounds like you guys are decreasing complexity and making things easier collectively. What are some of the trends and challenges you're seeing some of your customers face? Kapil, you've got a nice grin on your face. I'm going to you.

Kapil Goel

>> Yeah. So if you look at our customers, I think two or three challenges. Number one, future-proofing integration. That continues to be the problem, right? The architecture that you build today is going to last for long. It has to consider all the integration patterns, all the integration requirements, et cetera, beforehand. So the architecture that we build has to be future-proof, it has to be scalable, it has to be flexible. Then the second challenge they face is addressing all the integration patterns, really doing an in-depth analysis of all their application landscapes, data models, data formats, et cetera. And really building those patterns for tomorrow as well. That's the second challenge, I think. Third challenge is of course, integration sits in the middle, and of course, there are app teams around the corner, their business teams as well. So integration in some sense has to be the stakeholder driving each one of these out there in terms of clear responsibilities and ownership. And the fourth one is the most important. Customers are facing a lot of time, spending that time on repetitive manual steps while doing integration. And that's where Steve was talking about the future of AI infused into integration where we are no longer doing the routine manual mappings or configurations inside the integrations. We are no longer worried about data quality after integrations because imagine if there is an AI agent which is going to look at the past data flows and suggest and tell you beforehand, "Hey, this pattern is wrong, this mapping is wrong. You're going to land into data issues." Imagine the predictive health of your integrations and the runtime health of your integrations are actually notified by AI beforehand. And to some extent, or to a large extent, self-healing happens. I think those are the kind of issues that stakeholders, integration customers are grappling with because they're putting in a lot of cost. So what if we give them a world where cost is reduced? They're able to get out of this grappling issue of modernization by implementing a platform like Boomi, which is going to make this all streamlined in terms of data flows and solve most of these integration challenges by infusing AI into the process. So imagine AI really, Steve, identifies the integration problems, itself wires the integrations out there, and then what more, it's able to tell inside the integration, "Hey, this is the possible problem you're going to get. How do you prevent it before it even disrupts your flow?

Steve Lucas

>> Well, what you're talking to, the challenge that we all have is these enterprise applications that we believe in, that we rely on, that we trust. None of them were built to talk to each other.

>> Right.

Steve Lucas

>> One, Oracle doesn't speak the language.

>> It's all silos.

Steve Lucas

>> It is. Oracle doesn't speak the language of SAP, doesn't speak the language of Microsoft, and they don't want to. And it's not because they don't want to help out customers. That's just not their job. So Boomi's job with our organizations as well is to get these applications, these data silos to talk to each other. Not exactly the easiest thing to do in the world, to your point. But once you've done that, and once you have that flow, the logical next question is how can we make it less brittle, more adaptive, more malleable so it just senses and then actuates or heals based on how your organization is changing? Because organizations are organisms as well. They evolve, they grow and change. The glue between all these applications must evolve, grow and change, and that's what we've built. That's what we're delivering.

>> How do you decide what tools are going to help you future-proof things for your customers, and as Boomi being a platform solution for people across verticals? We've got different models. We've got different pieces of software. When we're talking about AI and self-healing, how do you know that what you're helping them build is going to do the future-proofing?

Steve Lucas

>> Well, and I think you'll have a few comments on this as well, but I would say don't invent in silos, number one.

>> Yes, I could go across the board for pretty much everything.

Steve Lucas

>> Yeah. And the road is littered with technology companies that just invented in silos. Great solution with absolutely no problem, no use case. And I've seen that for 30 years, we all have. Really, what Boomi is focused on is how do we take this technology, get it out into the wild and break it, improve it, iterate? And that's stuff that we do together and we have done and we'll continue to do together. To me, that's just a great business practice. Anyone can do it. Few do.

>> It's true. It's very true.

Suman Mishra

>> So data is a currency. Right? The only job for us is to make relevant data exposure to the people to consume and use that, and the moment we get that done, we give the community the power of inventing. Right?

>> Yes.

Suman Mishra

>> So that's the goal for us.

>> That's exciting for us. Yeah. What gets you most excited when you look at what the community is inventing? I'm going to ask all three of you this because I think it's exciting.

Suman Mishra

>> So the power of creation, and with your announcement today with the agent economy, this is really giving power of creation for the developer community. Now, they're not dependent for somebody to tell them what they can invent. They're working with the business directly, invent, try, see, experiment. If it is successful, launching the production. And that will really speed up the innovation track, and that is what I'm super excited about.

Steve Lucas

>> Well, when you think about how organizations, especially in a technology-driven era, which we are in, right? This is software. Software's not eating the world. It ate the world.

>> Right.

Steve Lucas

>> So it happened. That's a thing. But when you think about solving technology problems, you're normally, of course, you're thinking about code, et cetera, et cetera, but the major business components or business objects within a need, a problem, a solution, whatever, is you've got applications, you have databases, you have APIs. These are common lingua franca type components that we all think about and how do we piece these together in an interconnected process? That feels very standard. We're all comfortable with that world. We have slides and pictures and charts and graphs. What's happening now is these AI, and by that I mean semi-autonomous and autonomous agents are being built not by the dozens, not thousands, but hundreds of thousands, soon to be millions of these agents. We had the app economy, we all remember that, 2007, 2008. We're all guilty of saying it 10,000 times.

>> Yes. Buzzword bingo to max.

Steve Lucas

>> Exactly. Well, the agent economy, it's not just coming. It's here. You can go to Hugging Face where it is a community for AI. I checked this morning, 640,000 different models.

>> Wow, that's .

Steve Lucas

>> They've been uploaded for you to just go get. So if you want Llama 3 which Meta built, you want to download it casually, you just can. But there's so many questions that come with that. And here's the question that I will ask our listeners, you, anyone within earshot. Two years from now, when you have not hundreds, but thousands of these semi-autonomous and autonomous agents just running around your company, deciding things, chatting with customers, potentially hallucinating and making up corporate policies or discounts or offers, where are these agents being managed? What system are they registering with? Who's in charge of the agent asylum? Who is in charge?

>> a little bit.

Steve Lucas

>> It is. No self-respecting CIO will allow dozens or let alone hundreds, thousands of these agents to run around their company making decisions. Yet that's exactly what we're headed for.

>> What's your advice?

Suman Mishra

>> I think that's where it is, right? So if you see the economy of RPA, how it happened, right? So there are thousands of robotic automation processing happening. Now, CIO is struggling, what do I do with these robots?

Steve Lucas

>> All the robots, yeah.

Suman Mishra

>> Yeah. So what do I do with this RPA technology? And now we are helping customer to consolidate it, govern it, manage it, and make it more relevant for the organization, rather than just develop and leave it there and it does whatever it does for the organization. So that is definitely a strong point. While we build this agent, we give the economy to the developer community, but it's very important to govern it because you will run out of space, memory, cost, and so on, so forth if you don't manage it well.

>> Right.

Steve Lucas

>> And what we're doing, Boomi, with Infosys in particular, which is really exciting for me, is we're helping organizations see that future, that it's not just apps and databases and APIs. Very important. That's today here and now, but add agents into that mix and it gets infinitely more complex. You can't really tackle that future without having a good grasp on your current, today. Consolidating different integration and automation systems on one platform. That's what we've been partnering on amongst many things, but grateful for that opportunity, and certainly a compelling opportunity going forward.

Kapil Goel

>> And I would just like to add, adding to what Suman said, it's really a combination of two things. Number one, a tighter governance and strategy around it, where you have some of the protocols which are defined at dog level, but at the same time, giving a lot of freedom and flexibility to the different business units for democratization of development as well. So it has to be a fine balance of both these things. But essentially, the way Steve was described about the data reservoirs and the GenAI agents, which are feeding off this data and giving you meaningful insights, I think it's a future of composability as well, which Boomi is bringing onto the table.

>> That's a great point.

Kapil Goel

>> Imagine this word of the Boomi platform where you have the GenAI agents, and you have these apps which are modular building blocks, and they're guided by this hand of GenAI where on demand you could build composable apps, leveraging the capabilities of these GenAI agents and the data around there.

Steve Lucas

>> I just want to ask you a question because you and I talked about this many times, but these enterprise applications that you invest in, it's almost like they need to be more headless in nature and that you can talk to them, understand them, build these hyper composable solutions between them. So it's less about what they're solving in the UI or UX that they individually build-

Kapil Goel

>> Exactly.

Steve Lucas

>> And more of what you can compose in-between them.

Kapil Goel

>> On demand. Yes, exactly. And hyper automation also becomes a part of that picture. The AI and the RPA part, they come together along with that in the entire equation.

>> Taking in a totally different direction as we start to wrap up here, you mentioned your kids in the keynote this morning. What do your kids think about AI? What are they saying?

Steve Lucas

>> Wow. Well, it's one of those things that... So both of my kids, they're grown now, but still, they're Gen Z. So they're in that Gen Z, and I was like how I answer the phone, how they answer the phone. Right? Their perspective is 100% acceptance, openness. And I realize that to both your points on governance, security, acceptability, at my age, turning 52 this year, I have more conservatism in terms of what I will let into my environment. Younger people tend to embrace this technology much, much quicker. The reality is that, and again, I'll come back to where we started, the apps being built today and the ones that we're imagining today, look nothing like the applications we imagined 20, 30 years ago. They will reason, they will make decisions for us at levels that I couldn't have even fathomed just even five years ago.

>> It's cool to think about. I feel like their tolerance or need for privacy is a little bit lower than the rest of us because they never had it-

Steve Lucas

>> 100%, yes.

>> In the same way that we did. But then the notion of an AI buddy that helped you out or an agent that's helping you live a more efficient life.

Steve Lucas

>> I don't even have an Instagram account. I got to get there. So there you go.

>> I'm sure your marketing team loves that.

Steve Lucas

>> I know. I know. It's a tough one. It's a tough one.

>> All right, last question for you gentlemen, since I am confident we'll be back here hopefully in Denver again, it's so lovely.

Steve Lucas

>> 100%.

>> And then you don't have to commute. What can't you say today in this conversation that you hope we can say next time we get the chance to sit down together? Suman, I'm going with you first.

Suman Mishra

>> See, we are going to see in a year or two, these agents, what Steve is talking about, is going to take over a lot of manual task. And then it is going to innovate on top of it. The things which we are doing, the way which we are doing is completely going to change. And for the next generation, it's adoption for us. It comes naturally to them, right? When they take over from us, it'll be an amazing journey to see, right?

>> Great point.

Suman Mishra

>> And then we'll be talking about innovation and productivity rather than talking about I'm logged in my silos and code base and things like that.

>> Right.

Suman Mishra

>> It'll be gone as a legacy very fast. Right?

Kapil Goel

>> Absolutely, and I agree with Suman. And come to think of it, we're saving a lot of the precious time for our developers, be it analysis, be it creating project documentation, be it the repetitive mappings, be it the health of the integration. All of that is work taken away by Boomi. And the developers can focus on something important. They can focus on the more challenging tasks. The developers are so focused on the manual work so far, but now they could be focused on the correctness and the completeness of the project. To me, that's a game changer. In all the projects, and this is industry-wide, innovation and doing something new never seemed to have enough time available for it. And I think that time should be available now with Boomi's technology.

Steve Lucas

>> Well, so do I get to go now?

>> You do.

Steve Lucas

>> Okay.

>> Yes.

Steve Lucas

>> Well, speaking of time, which I agree with, a year from now, look, I firmly believe that this, so we'll start at a decade, this decade will be the most productive decade in the history of humankind as we know it. Just look at the light speed level of acceleration. What happened when ChatGPT... And you have to give credit to obviously Google for inventing large language model concepts, OpenAI really to bringing that to fruition. But in one short... Just look at a year ago. We were just learning what can ChatGPT do, like write songs in Yoda language kind of a thing.

>> Exactly.

Steve Lucas

>> And now we've gone to full-blown AI-based engineers that can write code. Is it general AI yet? No, but I will tell you that in one year, we're going to start having serious conversations about what will humans do with all of this productivity that we're enjoying either now or in the future with AI? That's the conversation that we're going to start having, getting the kind of muck out of the middle, all the manual work that we call knowledge work. I'm not really sure. Getting that out of the way, AI's just going to eat that up.

>> I like it. What are we going to do with more productivity, with more time?

Steve Lucas

>> That's right.

>> We were chatting with McKinsey a couple of weeks ago and they talked about how the dog's going to benefit because we're all going to spend more time walking the dogs.

Steve Lucas

>> That's right.

>> We'll have all these activities done.

Steve Lucas

>> Someone might say three-day work week.

>> Right. I love it. I love it.

Steve Lucas

>> I'm not.

>> I was going to say, wait, is that another announcement that Boomi is making in this show?

Steve Lucas

>> No, definitely not.

>> Maybe next time. Well, Steve, Kapil, Suman, thank you so much for being here with us on the show. This has been absolutely fantastic and congratulations on many years of partnership and all the big announcements that happened today.

Steve Lucas

>> Pleasure.

Kapil Goel

>> Thank you.

Suman Mishra

>> Thank you for your time.

>> It's been absolutely wonderful. And thank all of you for turning in, nerd fam, to our wonderful three days of coverage here at Boomi World 2024. We're midway through day two, lots of coverage yet to come. My name's Savannah Peterson. You're watching theCUBE, the leading source for enterprise tech news.

Steve Lucas | Boomi, Kapil Goel & Suman Mishra | Infosys

search

>> Good afternoon integration community and welcome back to beautiful Denver, Colorado. My name is Savannah Peterson. Very excited to be here midway through day two of our three days of coverage here on theCUBE. We've got some of the most VIP guests of the show to kick off our programming today. We've got Suman, Kapil and Steve who is the CEO of Boomi. You've had a huge day. You've all had a really big day. Most importantly, you all got the memo on how to dress the sharpest of any of our guests. Very impressed. Matching jackets. Steve, you were up on stage. You were running around with the University of Colorado flag. You kicked it with Deon Sanders this morning.

Steve Lucas

>> Yeah, just a regular Wednesday-

>> Casual Wednesday.

Steve Lucas

>> Yeah, very casual.

>> Yeah. So give us a little bit of a recap of what happened this morning? It was a lot of things.

Steve Lucas

>> Yeah, it was a lot of things. The whole low-key, Deon Sanders, Coach Prime, that was actually really special.

>> He complimented your fit too. It's the drip. Yeah.

Steve Lucas

>> It did work. It did work. But first of all, we obviously wanted to engage with our customers and partners. That's what these events are all about, mission accomplished. And the second thing was making sure that we share the big news around Boomi's integration and automation platform, but expanding into API management. We announced two acquisitions, the acquisition of Mashery from the cloud software group, as well as a technology or company called APIIDA as well. Big expansion in API management. And then lastly, Boomi's expansion and data management. And really, the story there is whether you're looking to drive integration for your business, automation across your processes, or you're looking to innovate with AI, we announced the whole thing, it's out there. .

>> I don't know any companies thinking about doing that right now.

Steve Lucas

>> All three. All three. So it's very unique for Boomi. The reality is organizations, they have this massive integration challenge today. Why are you attacking an integration challenge with a dozen or more integration products? That's one integration problem for another. You don't want to do that. Using the singular Boomi enterprise platform, we can solve all of that in one go.

>> Sounds like a solution most people want. Kapil, when we were getting ready here and setting up, you've been in the integration game for 25 years. Casual, also casual, two casual gentlemen here sitting with me today. How has the integration journey changed? We talked a little bit about it before we went live, but I want you to bring us up to speed on that evolution?

Kapil Goel

>> Yeah, sure. Well, 20 years ago, organizations were just trying to connect the data from one point to the other. But in the last past decade, we've seen the rise of APIs and microservices. Clients started building small focused apps, very focused business apps, and they wanted these apps to communicate via APIs, and that's where the rise of APIs happened, along with digital. Now came cloud where the traditional boundaries of all this on-prem integration was shattered. Clients wanted to communicate on-prem, off-prem, across digital apps. They wanted all the scalability and the agility. Now, when you have this digital first and cloud first at the same time, clients are building a lot of apps around. So the number of apps increased dramatically around us. Associated with apps, the amount of data increased, and this was all kind of data, not just in volume, but also in variety, structured data, unstructured data, streaming data, all of that. Now, obviously with all this kind of data being out there, there was a need to sophistically handle this data, and that's where event-driven architecture was becoming more and more prevalent. Clients wanted to build apps which could leverage the event-driven architecture out there. So I think that's where Boomi fits extremely well. It's able to bring in this unification of data from different sources, different protocols, different formats. It's going to put all of this together and create that protocol. So I would say yeah, we are at very exciting times ahead in terms of the future of integration, particularly with AI coming into the mix. And people are using AI now, not just for streamlining and automating the integration lifecycle, but also to infuse AI into monitoring the health of the integration and monitoring the predictive part of the integration. And I think that's where the future lies, to really be able to shift them from the everyday AI use cases to the game-changing AI use cases. So that's what I think the evolution has been now and that's going to be the next decade.

>> You've seen quite a journey and that was very well summarized. Thank you for that. And you mentioned AI, so I want to sit there just for a second. A couple of people in the room talking about it this week and in general in our ecosystem. And I know Steve, you bring this up a lot, average enterprise now juggling over 364 applications like you mentioned. That's a lot. How does AI affect the integration game going a little bit further? Suman, I'm going to bring this to you so you can join us in the chat?

Suman Mishra

>> Sure. So what is happening with the AI right now, it's a narrative. People are experimenting with it. So in the whole lifecycle of STLC process, right from functional specification, design, development, testing and so on, so forth, AI is going to play the role. So we are also working with the customer, looking at it that where it'll fit in and solve the puzzle of reducing the cost and getting to the market faster. And we have solutions around it and we are going to see that success in months, not in years anymore.

>> That's an exciting time for everyone. Steve, you said something awesome earlier when you had Tropicana on stage today that the juice flows through Boomi.

Steve Lucas

>> The juice flows through Boomi.

>> That must've been a great moment for you on stage. It made me smile. Why is this customer partnership so magic?

Steve Lucas

>> Well, we're doing terrific things together, obviously from both a customer partner and solution provider standpoint. And I think everything that you talked about, we've been successfully doing together for some time. But the message that we delivered today and why this works is everything is about to change. 30 years in technology, and I can promise you, everything is about to change. And the message that we delivered this morning is everything that humanity has invented up until now, starting with language, how we communicate to modern technology and the like, all of these things have converged to give us this new kind of AI. This is not, "Is it an apple? Is it a giraffe?" Kind of machine learning. This is a new form of consciousness. I'm not the only one out there saying this. I was listening to Eric Schmidt earlier in the week, former CEO of Google, and he talks about the arrival of this technology in the next few years, not 50, not ten, five. This technology, in my mind, causes us to need to rewrite everything we know in enterprise software. Every application you're aware of, Salesforce automation, ERP, it's all going to get rewritten because applications, they need to be able to reason and learn. And that's what we're doing right now together is building a new set of applications that can reason, and we're building those technologies with AI. That's what I'm so excited about is just how powerful this next generation of enterprise applications is going to be. This partnership together, that's exactly what it's all about.

>> Well, it sounds like you guys are decreasing complexity and making things easier collectively. What are some of the trends and challenges you're seeing some of your customers face? Kapil, you've got a nice grin on your face. I'm going to you.

Kapil Goel

>> Yeah. So if you look at our customers, I think two or three challenges. Number one, future-proofing integration. That continues to be the problem, right? The architecture that you build today is going to last for long. It has to consider all the integration patterns, all the integration requirements, et cetera, beforehand. So the architecture that we build has to be future-proof, it has to be scalable, it has to be flexible. Then the second challenge they face is addressing all the integration patterns, really doing an in-depth analysis of all their application landscapes, data models, data formats, et cetera. And really building those patterns for tomorrow as well. That's the second challenge, I think. Third challenge is of course, integration sits in the middle, and of course, there are app teams around the corner, their business teams as well. So integration in some sense has to be the stakeholder driving each one of these out there in terms of clear responsibilities and ownership. And the fourth one is the most important. Customers are facing a lot of time, spending that time on repetitive manual steps while doing integration. And that's where Steve was talking about the future of AI infused into integration where we are no longer doing the routine manual mappings or configurations inside the integrations. We are no longer worried about data quality after integrations because imagine if there is an AI agent which is going to look at the past data flows and suggest and tell you beforehand, "Hey, this pattern is wrong, this mapping is wrong. You're going to land into data issues." Imagine the predictive health of your integrations and the runtime health of your integrations are actually notified by AI beforehand. And to some extent, or to a large extent, self-healing happens. I think those are the kind of issues that stakeholders, integration customers are grappling with because they're putting in a lot of cost. So what if we give them a world where cost is reduced? They're able to get out of this grappling issue of modernization by implementing a platform like Boomi, which is going to make this all streamlined in terms of data flows and solve most of these integration challenges by infusing AI into the process. So imagine AI really, Steve, identifies the integration problems, itself wires the integrations out there, and then what more, it's able to tell inside the integration, "Hey, this is the possible problem you're going to get. How do you prevent it before it even disrupts your flow?

Steve Lucas

>> Well, what you're talking to, the challenge that we all have is these enterprise applications that we believe in, that we rely on, that we trust. None of them were built to talk to each other.

>> Right.

Steve Lucas

>> One, Oracle doesn't speak the language.

>> It's all silos.

Steve Lucas

>> It is. Oracle doesn't speak the language of SAP, doesn't speak the language of Microsoft, and they don't want to. And it's not because they don't want to help out customers. That's just not their job. So Boomi's job with our organizations as well is to get these applications, these data silos to talk to each other. Not exactly the easiest thing to do in the world, to your point. But once you've done that, and once you have that flow, the logical next question is how can we make it less brittle, more adaptive, more malleable so it just senses and then actuates or heals based on how your organization is changing? Because organizations are organisms as well. They evolve, they grow and change. The glue between all these applications must evolve, grow and change, and that's what we've built. That's what we're delivering.

>> How do you decide what tools are going to help you future-proof things for your customers, and as Boomi being a platform solution for people across verticals? We've got different models. We've got different pieces of software. When we're talking about AI and self-healing, how do you know that what you're helping them build is going to do the future-proofing?

Steve Lucas

>> Well, and I think you'll have a few comments on this as well, but I would say don't invent in silos, number one.

>> Yes, I could go across the board for pretty much everything.

Steve Lucas

>> Yeah. And the road is littered with technology companies that just invented in silos. Great solution with absolutely no problem, no use case. And I've seen that for 30 years, we all have. Really, what Boomi is focused on is how do we take this technology, get it out into the wild and break it, improve it, iterate? And that's stuff that we do together and we have done and we'll continue to do together. To me, that's just a great business practice. Anyone can do it. Few do.

>> It's true. It's very true.

Suman Mishra

>> So data is a currency. Right? The only job for us is to make relevant data exposure to the people to consume and use that, and the moment we get that done, we give the community the power of inventing. Right?

>> Yes.

Suman Mishra

>> So that's the goal for us.

>> That's exciting for us. Yeah. What gets you most excited when you look at what the community is inventing? I'm going to ask all three of you this because I think it's exciting.

Suman Mishra

>> So the power of creation, and with your announcement today with the agent economy, this is really giving power of creation for the developer community. Now, they're not dependent for somebody to tell them what they can invent. They're working with the business directly, invent, try, see, experiment. If it is successful, launching the production. And that will really speed up the innovation track, and that is what I'm super excited about.

Steve Lucas

>> Well, when you think about how organizations, especially in a technology-driven era, which we are in, right? This is software. Software's not eating the world. It ate the world.

>> Right.

Steve Lucas

>> So it happened. That's a thing. But when you think about solving technology problems, you're normally, of course, you're thinking about code, et cetera, et cetera, but the major business components or business objects within a need, a problem, a solution, whatever, is you've got applications, you have databases, you have APIs. These are common lingua franca type components that we all think about and how do we piece these together in an interconnected process? That feels very standard. We're all comfortable with that world. We have slides and pictures and charts and graphs. What's happening now is these AI, and by that I mean semi-autonomous and autonomous agents are being built not by the dozens, not thousands, but hundreds of thousands, soon to be millions of these agents. We had the app economy, we all remember that, 2007, 2008. We're all guilty of saying it 10,000 times.

>> Yes. Buzzword bingo to max.

Steve Lucas

>> Exactly. Well, the agent economy, it's not just coming. It's here. You can go to Hugging Face where it is a community for AI. I checked this morning, 640,000 different models.

>> Wow, that's .

Steve Lucas

>> They've been uploaded for you to just go get. So if you want Llama 3 which Meta built, you want to download it casually, you just can. But there's so many questions that come with that. And here's the question that I will ask our listeners, you, anyone within earshot. Two years from now, when you have not hundreds, but thousands of these semi-autonomous and autonomous agents just running around your company, deciding things, chatting with customers, potentially hallucinating and making up corporate policies or discounts or offers, where are these agents being managed? What system are they registering with? Who's in charge of the agent asylum? Who is in charge?

>> a little bit.

Steve Lucas

>> It is. No self-respecting CIO will allow dozens or let alone hundreds, thousands of these agents to run around their company making decisions. Yet that's exactly what we're headed for.

>> What's your advice?

Suman Mishra

>> I think that's where it is, right? So if you see the economy of RPA, how it happened, right? So there are thousands of robotic automation processing happening. Now, CIO is struggling, what do I do with these robots?

Steve Lucas

>> All the robots, yeah.

Suman Mishra

>> Yeah. So what do I do with this RPA technology? And now we are helping customer to consolidate it, govern it, manage it, and make it more relevant for the organization, rather than just develop and leave it there and it does whatever it does for the organization. So that is definitely a strong point. While we build this agent, we give the economy to the developer community, but it's very important to govern it because you will run out of space, memory, cost, and so on, so forth if you don't manage it well.

>> Right.

Steve Lucas

>> And what we're doing, Boomi, with Infosys in particular, which is really exciting for me, is we're helping organizations see that future, that it's not just apps and databases and APIs. Very important. That's today here and now, but add agents into that mix and it gets infinitely more complex. You can't really tackle that future without having a good grasp on your current, today. Consolidating different integration and automation systems on one platform. That's what we've been partnering on amongst many things, but grateful for that opportunity, and certainly a compelling opportunity going forward.

Kapil Goel

>> And I would just like to add, adding to what Suman said, it's really a combination of two things. Number one, a tighter governance and strategy around it, where you have some of the protocols which are defined at dog level, but at the same time, giving a lot of freedom and flexibility to the different business units for democratization of development as well. So it has to be a fine balance of both these things. But essentially, the way Steve was described about the data reservoirs and the GenAI agents, which are feeding off this data and giving you meaningful insights, I think it's a future of composability as well, which Boomi is bringing onto the table.

>> That's a great point.

Kapil Goel

>> Imagine this word of the Boomi platform where you have the GenAI agents, and you have these apps which are modular building blocks, and they're guided by this hand of GenAI where on demand you could build composable apps, leveraging the capabilities of these GenAI agents and the data around there.

Steve Lucas

>> I just want to ask you a question because you and I talked about this many times, but these enterprise applications that you invest in, it's almost like they need to be more headless in nature and that you can talk to them, understand them, build these hyper composable solutions between them. So it's less about what they're solving in the UI or UX that they individually build-

Kapil Goel

>> Exactly.

Steve Lucas

>> And more of what you can compose in-between them.

Kapil Goel

>> On demand. Yes, exactly. And hyper automation also becomes a part of that picture. The AI and the RPA part, they come together along with that in the entire equation.

>> Taking in a totally different direction as we start to wrap up here, you mentioned your kids in the keynote this morning. What do your kids think about AI? What are they saying?

Steve Lucas

>> Wow. Well, it's one of those things that... So both of my kids, they're grown now, but still, they're Gen Z. So they're in that Gen Z, and I was like how I answer the phone, how they answer the phone. Right? Their perspective is 100% acceptance, openness. And I realize that to both your points on governance, security, acceptability, at my age, turning 52 this year, I have more conservatism in terms of what I will let into my environment. Younger people tend to embrace this technology much, much quicker. The reality is that, and again, I'll come back to where we started, the apps being built today and the ones that we're imagining today, look nothing like the applications we imagined 20, 30 years ago. They will reason, they will make decisions for us at levels that I couldn't have even fathomed just even five years ago.

>> It's cool to think about. I feel like their tolerance or need for privacy is a little bit lower than the rest of us because they never had it-

Steve Lucas

>> 100%, yes.

>> In the same way that we did. But then the notion of an AI buddy that helped you out or an agent that's helping you live a more efficient life.

Steve Lucas

>> I don't even have an Instagram account. I got to get there. So there you go.

>> I'm sure your marketing team loves that.

Steve Lucas

>> I know. I know. It's a tough one. It's a tough one.

>> All right, last question for you gentlemen, since I am confident we'll be back here hopefully in Denver again, it's so lovely.

Steve Lucas

>> 100%.

>> And then you don't have to commute. What can't you say today in this conversation that you hope we can say next time we get the chance to sit down together? Suman, I'm going with you first.

Suman Mishra

>> See, we are going to see in a year or two, these agents, what Steve is talking about, is going to take over a lot of manual task. And then it is going to innovate on top of it. The things which we are doing, the way which we are doing is completely going to change. And for the next generation, it's adoption for us. It comes naturally to them, right? When they take over from us, it'll be an amazing journey to see, right?

>> Great point.

Suman Mishra

>> And then we'll be talking about innovation and productivity rather than talking about I'm logged in my silos and code base and things like that.

>> Right.

Suman Mishra

>> It'll be gone as a legacy very fast. Right?

Kapil Goel

>> Absolutely, and I agree with Suman. And come to think of it, we're saving a lot of the precious time for our developers, be it analysis, be it creating project documentation, be it the repetitive mappings, be it the health of the integration. All of that is work taken away by Boomi. And the developers can focus on something important. They can focus on the more challenging tasks. The developers are so focused on the manual work so far, but now they could be focused on the correctness and the completeness of the project. To me, that's a game changer. In all the projects, and this is industry-wide, innovation and doing something new never seemed to have enough time available for it. And I think that time should be available now with Boomi's technology.

Steve Lucas

>> Well, so do I get to go now?

>> You do.

Steve Lucas

>> Okay.

>> Yes.

Steve Lucas

>> Well, speaking of time, which I agree with, a year from now, look, I firmly believe that this, so we'll start at a decade, this decade will be the most productive decade in the history of humankind as we know it. Just look at the light speed level of acceleration. What happened when ChatGPT... And you have to give credit to obviously Google for inventing large language model concepts, OpenAI really to bringing that to fruition. But in one short... Just look at a year ago. We were just learning what can ChatGPT do, like write songs in Yoda language kind of a thing.

>> Exactly.

Steve Lucas

>> And now we've gone to full-blown AI-based engineers that can write code. Is it general AI yet? No, but I will tell you that in one year, we're going to start having serious conversations about what will humans do with all of this productivity that we're enjoying either now or in the future with AI? That's the conversation that we're going to start having, getting the kind of muck out of the middle, all the manual work that we call knowledge work. I'm not really sure. Getting that out of the way, AI's just going to eat that up.

>> I like it. What are we going to do with more productivity, with more time?

Steve Lucas

>> That's right.

>> We were chatting with McKinsey a couple of weeks ago and they talked about how the dog's going to benefit because we're all going to spend more time walking the dogs.

Steve Lucas

>> That's right.

>> We'll have all these activities done.

Steve Lucas

>> Someone might say three-day work week.

>> Right. I love it. I love it.

Steve Lucas

>> I'm not.

>> I was going to say, wait, is that another announcement that Boomi is making in this show?

Steve Lucas

>> No, definitely not.

>> Maybe next time. Well, Steve, Kapil, Suman, thank you so much for being here with us on the show. This has been absolutely fantastic and congratulations on many years of partnership and all the big announcements that happened today.

Steve Lucas

>> Pleasure.

Kapil Goel

>> Thank you.

Suman Mishra

>> Thank you for your time.

>> It's been absolutely wonderful. And thank all of you for turning in, nerd fam, to our wonderful three days of coverage here at Boomi World 2024. We're midway through day two, lots of coverage yet to come. My name's Savannah Peterson. You're watching theCUBE, the leading source for enterprise tech news.