Boomi World 2024 | Ed Macosky | Boomi

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Ed Macosky

Chief Product & Technology Officer

Boomi

Data integration solutions transform business agility and risk management

Data integration, which connects disparate data sources—whether cloud-based, on-premise or hybrid—to facilitate the flow of data to its required destination, is essential for maintaining business agility and managing operational risk.Boomi LP aims to deliver integrated and unified solutions to its customers. These customers often struggle with various integration technologies. Boomi addresses this by consolidating them into a single, unified platform, highlighting the significance of data, explained Ed Macosky (pictured), Boomi’s Chief Product and Technology Officer.Ed Macosky, CPTO of Boomi, talks to theCUBE about data integration solutions at Boomi World 2024

play_circle_outline Boomi World 2024: Exploring the Future of Integration in Denver, Colorado with CUBE Co-founder - Interview with John Furrier

play_circle_outline The role of data in the platform and the vision for the agent garden

play_circle_outline The distinction between old and new conversational AI

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Ed Macosky | Boomi

Ed Macosky

Chief Product & Technology Officer Boomi

search

>> Good afternoon, and welcome back to gorgeous Denver, Colorado. We are midway through day two here in the Mile High City of Boomi World 2024. My name is Savannah Peterson. Delighted to be joined by CUBE co-founder, John Furrier. John, what a brilliant afternoon.

>> Yeah, awesome. We've got the chief product officer here on theCUBE.

>> We got all the C-suite up here all day.

>> He's got the piece of the kingdom. This is going to be... We're going to unlock the secrets of Boomi if we can get up to relieve the road map for us. CUBE alumni too. CUBE alumni.

>> On that note, Ed, thank you so much for being here with us today, welcome to the show.

Shahid Ahmed

>> Yeah, thanks for having me. I'm excited to be here.

>> Excited to be here on a very exciting day. Big news coming out on the platform team earlier today. Can you give us some of the highlights from this morning?

Shahid Ahmed

>> Yeah, so big news wise, Steve, on stage, talked a lot about AI agents and our AI agent framework and things that we're doing there. We talked about our intentions in the data management space and where we expect to grow there, but I think the biggest news was probably in our API management space and a couple of the acquisitions that we announced today in APIIDA and the assets from the cloud software group with Mashery.

>> The Boomi enterprise platform really, to me, got my attention because there now it's platforms of platforms. Customers have more platforms than ever before. The tools are increasing. We were just talking before around how even in... We thought there'd be consolidation. No, there's expansion of more tools. So more tools, more platforms, is this the new normal that we're seeing customers dealing with, the multitude of platforms, multiple of tools? What's your take on this? Because is that a feature or is that a bug?

Shahid Ahmed

>> No, it's a great question because I think customers are stressed out with the multiple platforms of platforms and that sort of thing. And in fact, the expansion of our platform is us actually indicating a consolidation into our platform. And our strategy as we're driving it is based on feedback from our customers. When we go into a large enterprise customer, they're solving middleware problems or integration and automation problems, sometimes with five, 10, 12 integration technologies, and we are consistently working to consolidate those into a common interface to speak Boomi language like Steve talks about, and doing it and consolidating on one iPaaS, or one integration automation platform.

>> And the role of data becomes huge. I want to get your thoughts on the fact that the platform now has partners in there. So one of the things that got my attention, the keynote we were mentioning in our review was the agent garden, which is really awesome. I'll just say there'll be more agents coming online.

Shahid Ahmed

>> Yes.

>> How do you guys see that development as a marketplace? And from a product integration standpoint, how do people get involved in that agent garden? Do they grow their own agents? Is it going to be a marketplace? Take us through the vision of the agent garden.

Shahid Ahmed

>> Yeah, so there are three tiers of agents as we think about them. I'll dive into it a little more in my keynote tomorrow, but we have Boomi agents that we're building to automate things, bring more developer productivity, management productivity, that sort of thing in the Boomi enterprise platform. There are third party agents. We announced our partnership with earlier today and bringing agents into the platform where we can allow IT and help IT bridge into line of business with providing value from the Boomi platform. And then there is bring your own agents where we're working with our customers that are building their own large language model stacks and their own agents to build and to come and plug into the Boomi platform. And in fact, not to tease it much, but in tomorrow's keynote, I'm actually going to be covering more around connectivity agents and how we're blurring the lines between iPaaS and automation and agents and how we are going to bring forth how it's going to work in the future.

>> Explain what connectivity agents mean. Is that like network connectivity or connecting agents? Just give us a quick taste.

Shahid Ahmed

>> Yeah, great question. So we are looking to reinvent the way connectors work in the iPaaS or integration ecosystem. Today across all platforms, connectors are static things. APIs exist. Connectors connect APIs, and they're gateways to connect different applications. Connectivity agents will be, as we are working with them, will be almost living, breathing artificial intelligence agents to interface with APIs, replacing the connector and a new paradigm and a new way of integrating your organization. Imagine instead of having a CRM connector that is static, that only understands that version of an API, an agent that is the smartest salesperson in your organization in terms of interfacing with your CRM and empowering that agent to connect with other agents in your organization to automate workflows in your business. That's what we're looking to do.

>> Savannah, how old is connectors? I'm . How many break all the time?

Shahid Ahmed

>> Oh, I know.

>> You built them.

Shahid Ahmed

>> Right.

>> The guy's... She's gone. He's not there anymore.

>> Oh yeah.

>> It doesn't work.

>> Talk about a legacy issue. Yeah.

Shahid Ahmed

>> I mean, I've been integrating for my entire career. I got my degree in application integration. So for me,-

>> Wow....

Shahid Ahmed

>> in over 20 years, this is the most exciting inflection point where the whole way integrations and integration paradigm is done is being reinvented. We've been doing PubSub and hub and spoke and point-to-point integrations for years. This is a whole new green field for us to go an reinvent-

>> So Steve Lucas on stage joked about marketing automation should be automated away. He was kind of kidding, but wasn't kidding. You're talking about the connectors have been the link for marketing automation for-

>> Well, yeah, and I want to come back to something that you've brought up that I think is a unique way of phrasing this. You talked about blurring the line a bit between these tools between APIs, AI, all the different things, automation, everything that's happening here. Those are three core focuses, I know Steve's mentioned in his keynote, obviously for Boomi as well. Do you think in the future we won't be delineating in the same way that we do currently? Do you think it will be blurrier?

Shahid Ahmed

>> I think it's blurring. I think it's all converging. And unless we just... I'm using this all week, but unless we keep paving the car path, we're not going to see advancement in technology. And we're trying to just think of things and invent things in a new way. So I don't like being in these silos or these lanes of automation, integration, or even app integration, data integration. For us, it's always been a pragmatic approach for Boomi. And what do our customers need? The labels don't matter.

>> So we are seeing clearly, we've been reporting again on theCUBE at SiliconANGLE, agents are coming even more and more. Every event's the same thing. Can you define for us the difference between conversational AIs we once knew? Because everyone's like, "Oh, that's not yesterday's chatbot," because we always say, "Hey, that's kind of lame chatbot generation stuff." There's now a marker being put down kind of free GenAI AI chatbots or conversational A. Remember that was a category? What is it the difference now between true conversational ai, which is agents you're getting at the minions that do the work, as they said in the stage to the old school definition? How do you compare what was one's conversational AI to what's happening now? What's the main distinction?

Shahid Ahmed

>> Well, the difference you might even recall, we've been doing chatbots from a flow perspective for a number of years from Boomi technology. We have workflow, we have mobile, we have chatbots, and that sort of thing. But before generative AI and what's happening now with conversational ai, it was mostly fixed routing, going to data sources, finding static data, and someone behind the scenes building all these pipes for to work. Now, these large language models are giving intelligence to the bots, and it's getting them to not have self-awareness, per se. We're not thinking too futuristic,

>> Not quite AGI.

Shahid Ahmed

>> Not quite that, but can actually pull these data sources together very quickly and actually come up with answers on the fly. And even the GenAI things where we're building, where we're helping our customers with answers and generating things in our platform, they're surprising us every day with the amount of things that could take on itself and learn and adapt and build things within our platform.

>> Can you share any examples that have surprised you? You just mentioned all the customers.

Shahid Ahmed

>> Yeah, an example that literally surprised me, I was at one of our conferences for executives a couple of weeks ago, and I saw on LinkedIn, Steve posted something about our Boomi GPT functionality that was just released. He posted a screen shot. I called up and I saw a picture, something in the background. And I called up our head of engineering and I said, the head of engineering for the AI, and said, "I use... Does that do what I think it does?" And he said, "I don't know. Let me try it." So he went, he said, "Ed, I think it does.' And I went to my hotel room during the conference, and I myself logged into Boomi and started building integrations on the fly based on my knowledge of the way the platform should work, and I started having a conversation it was generating for me on the fly. We didn't even know it was that powerful with the release, but it came out and it worked perfectly. So that's an example that I experienced.

>> So you're impressing even yourself.

Shahid Ahmed

>> Yes. I was impressing myself.

>> Now that going in weeds, but that just gave me a good thought to ask you. Well, since we're in the weeds, I saw one of your community bulletins how you guys talk about OpenAI, Pinecone. Obviously you're doing some retrieval augmentation generation. Is that a big part of the customer's uses of what you're doing right now with flows? You guys are doing some stuff with Pinecone and OpenAI?

Shahid Ahmed

>> It is.

>> Is that mainly through their APIs or do you have your own kind of thing going on now?

Shahid Ahmed

>> It is. So what happened is we naturally found ourselves in a right to win. We have over 20,000 customers now, and they're running all of their data through Boomi's platform. They're integrating all their applications. They're using our hub to centralize data and ensure high data quality, so on and so forth. They naturally came, our customers came to us saying, "We want to embrace these technologies, and you're helping us with all the data pipes anyway. We want to get this data. We want to get the data in these technologies." And our team was in a perfect spot to just embrace this and work with them, and we've been innovating with our customers in that manner, which is what drove us a lot towards our agent guard and agent frameworks that we're building today because we've been learning along with our customers.

>> We had chats before at Boomi World a couple of years ago and before the pandemic. I remember we had a conversation, what's the vibe inside Boomi? Because the world shifts really on your doorstep. You guys have been doing a lot of grinding, blocking and tackling, chopping wood, carrying, whatever metaphor you want to use in this integration pipeline with data specifically and workflows now, the whole world's saying, "Hey, if you have workflows that are proprietary and unique to your company and data that's with it, that's now the new intellectual property for the company."

Shahid Ahmed

>> Yes.

>> That's where you focus your energy on the generative ai rather than risking any kind of false positives or errors.

Shahid Ahmed

>> Yes.

>> It's error-free, pretty much. It's your workflow.

Shahid Ahmed

>> Yep.

>> That's where the automation action is happening. So the world kind of spun in your direction. What's the vibe like inside Boomi?Are people like, "Man, this is our time. It's our moment."

Shahid Ahmed

>> 100%. This is our moment. When ChatGPT hit the market, hit mainstream, we've been prepping for this. We've had Boomi suggest. We've been building our intelligent framework now into our generative AI framework for years waiting for this moment. And when it hit mainstream with ChatGPT and everyone understood what this meant, and people, their minds opened to what the possibilities were. We were waiting there saying, "Hey, we can help you. And we already... One key thing for us was when our customers came to us with all these security concerns, it's like we had all the answers. We had been through that for them. We're FedRAMP certified. We're IRAP certified in Australia. We had all the answers saying, "Look, this is how we do it," and they look to us to help guide them down this path, and we're stoked to do it.

>> So now you're running products, you of the roadmap. You have the keys to the kingdom. We saw today on the news. Steve was on stage talking about the M&A. So every successful company has great organic and inorganic growth, inorganic meaning you do M&A to make some moves. You guys are making some moves.

Shahid Ahmed

>> Yes.

>> Michelle powering your FinTalk. You got the API management with Mashery, which has been around since the beginning, and now you've got the federated side, hot startup, great, inorganic, check, check, check, make some power moves, move the needle. Where's the organic innovation coming from on the product side? Could you share your vision on what's coming down on the roadmap? Can you share, if anything, with the audience on the organic?

Shahid Ahmed

>> So what I can tell you is our acquisitions of APIIDA and Mashery are also a story of organic innovation we're doing as well. What I'm excited about is we brought in some API leaders. I think Matt McClarty was on earlier today, Jamie Ryan, et cetera, that understand the API management space from different angles where I'm loving the team members that are coming over from Mastery and APIIDA, and we have our API management organic team that's been building our platform already. We're bringing all these folks together to invent and now build the next-gen API management platform together moving forward. This isn't just about acquiring the assets to plug them in and check a box. It is, we are going to be bringing groups together. We're not just consolidating things, but we are bringing it into the stack, and then going to be organically building moving forward, so excited about that.

>> So step function change for you guys.

Shahid Ahmed

>> Step function change, because we are not rationalizing resources or anything like that. We're accelerating things for all three of these entities coming together as one. The other area where we've been organically really accelerating is in the data management space. We had talked about master data Hub as this discrete product that our customers love, and we've been investing and building and building and building to the point where we're now embracing and talking about a publicly, a data management strategy where we're now organically building more master data capabilities. We're looking to build more ETL large data movement capabilities. We may look inorganic there as well, but I love having the support of Steve, and Arlan, our CFO, around this balanced approach of innovating organically, also plugging gaps if we need to quickly inorganically and continue to innovate on behalf of our customers. It's an exciting time.

>> Really is an exciting moment for Momentum. What's it mean for you to be in a room with all your customers here like this in person?

Shahid Ahmed

>> Oh, it's incredible. Y'all know I was one of... Well, maybe you don't. I was one of the first 10 employees at Boomi. And when I joined Boomi originally,-

>> That must've been wild-

Shahid Ahmed

>> Yes....

>> to be here today compared. Yeah.

Shahid Ahmed

>> Yeah, that's what I mean. So when you ask that, I'm literally getting chills because when I... And also when I joined, I was a... I said I was an integrator earlier. I was helping our customers literally do integration projects and helping, not officially product management, but helping our engineering team build the products that our customers love. And I was able to... It was like a drug of success, seeing customer outcomes, seeing this happen. And as the company grew, I left for a few years and joined another company and then came back and have, I'm blessed to run product and engineering here and work with our customers and come to events like this where people tell me all day the impacts our technology actually have on their businesses, it's like nothing else for me.

>> Awesome.

Shahid Ahmed

>> It's soul fuel. That's why you get up in the morning.

>> I know. It is.

>> Yeah.

>> It's your moment.

Shahid Ahmed

>> As nerdy as it sounds, I am an integrator and I love to connect things, and I found what I like to do in life.

>> Well, I think that's really important though. It all about... We were talking to Ann about earlier, it's finding your passion, and especially in this AI space, it's don't try and do what everybody else is doing necessarily, but especially if you're new into this world and not necessarily traditional, find that thing you're passionate about and figure out how AI is going to apply to that, not the other way around,-

Shahid Ahmed

>> Exactly....

>> which is really exciting. Okay, last question for you before we wrap well, and then we'll have you back, which is great. We'll just have a little home for you here on theCUBE. We'll have a special little desk for you. What do you hope that you can... It's such an exciting time right now. presuming that Boomi World 2025 is around this time next year, what do you hope you're able to say then that you can't yet say today.

Shahid Ahmed

>> Next year?

>> Mm-hmm.

Shahid Ahmed

>> I hope to come next year with a whole bunch of success stories around how our customers embraced the AI agent economy, the agent garden we're bringing, seeing actual results. A lot of where we are today in the AI realm is prototyping. You talk to a lot of CIOs and developers. They're prototyping in their environments. I'm just yearning for solving actual use cases that provide value to organizations. And AI, that's where you need to be focused, not on the technology's fun, but what are the outcomes? And that's what I'm always focused on. So next year, I want to be celebrating the outcomes that we have from these technologies that we're bringing to our customers.

>> I love it, Ed. We'll be celebrating right along with you. Thank you so much for joining us for this segment and for the ones in the future. John, always the pleasure. And thank all of you for tuning in to our three days of coverage here live at Boomi World 2024. You're watching theCUBE. My name's Savannah Peterson. Thank you for tuning in to the leading enterprise tech coverage outlet, theCUBE.

Ed Macosky | Boomi

search

>> Good afternoon, and welcome back to gorgeous Denver, Colorado. We are midway through day two here in the Mile High City of Boomi World 2024. My name is Savannah Peterson. Delighted to be joined by CUBE co-founder, John Furrier. John, what a brilliant afternoon.

>> Yeah, awesome. We've got the chief product officer here on theCUBE.

>> We got all the C-suite up here all day.

>> He's got the piece of the kingdom. This is going to be... We're going to unlock the secrets of Boomi if we can get up to relieve the road map for us. CUBE alumni too. CUBE alumni.

>> On that note, Ed, thank you so much for being here with us today, welcome to the show.

Shahid Ahmed

>> Yeah, thanks for having me. I'm excited to be here.

>> Excited to be here on a very exciting day. Big news coming out on the platform team earlier today. Can you give us some of the highlights from this morning?

Shahid Ahmed

>> Yeah, so big news wise, Steve, on stage, talked a lot about AI agents and our AI agent framework and things that we're doing there. We talked about our intentions in the data management space and where we expect to grow there, but I think the biggest news was probably in our API management space and a couple of the acquisitions that we announced today in APIIDA and the assets from the cloud software group with Mashery.

>> The Boomi enterprise platform really, to me, got my attention because there now it's platforms of platforms. Customers have more platforms than ever before. The tools are increasing. We were just talking before around how even in... We thought there'd be consolidation. No, there's expansion of more tools. So more tools, more platforms, is this the new normal that we're seeing customers dealing with, the multitude of platforms, multiple of tools? What's your take on this? Because is that a feature or is that a bug?

Shahid Ahmed

>> No, it's a great question because I think customers are stressed out with the multiple platforms of platforms and that sort of thing. And in fact, the expansion of our platform is us actually indicating a consolidation into our platform. And our strategy as we're driving it is based on feedback from our customers. When we go into a large enterprise customer, they're solving middleware problems or integration and automation problems, sometimes with five, 10, 12 integration technologies, and we are consistently working to consolidate those into a common interface to speak Boomi language like Steve talks about, and doing it and consolidating on one iPaaS, or one integration automation platform.

>> And the role of data becomes huge. I want to get your thoughts on the fact that the platform now has partners in there. So one of the things that got my attention, the keynote we were mentioning in our review was the agent garden, which is really awesome. I'll just say there'll be more agents coming online.

Shahid Ahmed

>> Yes.

>> How do you guys see that development as a marketplace? And from a product integration standpoint, how do people get involved in that agent garden? Do they grow their own agents? Is it going to be a marketplace? Take us through the vision of the agent garden.

Shahid Ahmed

>> Yeah, so there are three tiers of agents as we think about them. I'll dive into it a little more in my keynote tomorrow, but we have Boomi agents that we're building to automate things, bring more developer productivity, management productivity, that sort of thing in the Boomi enterprise platform. There are third party agents. We announced our partnership with earlier today and bringing agents into the platform where we can allow IT and help IT bridge into line of business with providing value from the Boomi platform. And then there is bring your own agents where we're working with our customers that are building their own large language model stacks and their own agents to build and to come and plug into the Boomi platform. And in fact, not to tease it much, but in tomorrow's keynote, I'm actually going to be covering more around connectivity agents and how we're blurring the lines between iPaaS and automation and agents and how we are going to bring forth how it's going to work in the future.

>> Explain what connectivity agents mean. Is that like network connectivity or connecting agents? Just give us a quick taste.

Shahid Ahmed

>> Yeah, great question. So we are looking to reinvent the way connectors work in the iPaaS or integration ecosystem. Today across all platforms, connectors are static things. APIs exist. Connectors connect APIs, and they're gateways to connect different applications. Connectivity agents will be, as we are working with them, will be almost living, breathing artificial intelligence agents to interface with APIs, replacing the connector and a new paradigm and a new way of integrating your organization. Imagine instead of having a CRM connector that is static, that only understands that version of an API, an agent that is the smartest salesperson in your organization in terms of interfacing with your CRM and empowering that agent to connect with other agents in your organization to automate workflows in your business. That's what we're looking to do.

>> Savannah, how old is connectors? I'm . How many break all the time?

Shahid Ahmed

>> Oh, I know.

>> You built them.

Shahid Ahmed

>> Right.

>> The guy's... She's gone. He's not there anymore.

>> Oh yeah.

>> It doesn't work.

>> Talk about a legacy issue. Yeah.

Shahid Ahmed

>> I mean, I've been integrating for my entire career. I got my degree in application integration. So for me,-

>> Wow....

Shahid Ahmed

>> in over 20 years, this is the most exciting inflection point where the whole way integrations and integration paradigm is done is being reinvented. We've been doing PubSub and hub and spoke and point-to-point integrations for years. This is a whole new green field for us to go an reinvent-

>> So Steve Lucas on stage joked about marketing automation should be automated away. He was kind of kidding, but wasn't kidding. You're talking about the connectors have been the link for marketing automation for-

>> Well, yeah, and I want to come back to something that you've brought up that I think is a unique way of phrasing this. You talked about blurring the line a bit between these tools between APIs, AI, all the different things, automation, everything that's happening here. Those are three core focuses, I know Steve's mentioned in his keynote, obviously for Boomi as well. Do you think in the future we won't be delineating in the same way that we do currently? Do you think it will be blurrier?

Shahid Ahmed

>> I think it's blurring. I think it's all converging. And unless we just... I'm using this all week, but unless we keep paving the car path, we're not going to see advancement in technology. And we're trying to just think of things and invent things in a new way. So I don't like being in these silos or these lanes of automation, integration, or even app integration, data integration. For us, it's always been a pragmatic approach for Boomi. And what do our customers need? The labels don't matter.

>> So we are seeing clearly, we've been reporting again on theCUBE at SiliconANGLE, agents are coming even more and more. Every event's the same thing. Can you define for us the difference between conversational AIs we once knew? Because everyone's like, "Oh, that's not yesterday's chatbot," because we always say, "Hey, that's kind of lame chatbot generation stuff." There's now a marker being put down kind of free GenAI AI chatbots or conversational A. Remember that was a category? What is it the difference now between true conversational ai, which is agents you're getting at the minions that do the work, as they said in the stage to the old school definition? How do you compare what was one's conversational AI to what's happening now? What's the main distinction?

Shahid Ahmed

>> Well, the difference you might even recall, we've been doing chatbots from a flow perspective for a number of years from Boomi technology. We have workflow, we have mobile, we have chatbots, and that sort of thing. But before generative AI and what's happening now with conversational ai, it was mostly fixed routing, going to data sources, finding static data, and someone behind the scenes building all these pipes for to work. Now, these large language models are giving intelligence to the bots, and it's getting them to not have self-awareness, per se. We're not thinking too futuristic,

>> Not quite AGI.

Shahid Ahmed

>> Not quite that, but can actually pull these data sources together very quickly and actually come up with answers on the fly. And even the GenAI things where we're building, where we're helping our customers with answers and generating things in our platform, they're surprising us every day with the amount of things that could take on itself and learn and adapt and build things within our platform.

>> Can you share any examples that have surprised you? You just mentioned all the customers.

Shahid Ahmed

>> Yeah, an example that literally surprised me, I was at one of our conferences for executives a couple of weeks ago, and I saw on LinkedIn, Steve posted something about our Boomi GPT functionality that was just released. He posted a screen shot. I called up and I saw a picture, something in the background. And I called up our head of engineering and I said, the head of engineering for the AI, and said, "I use... Does that do what I think it does?" And he said, "I don't know. Let me try it." So he went, he said, "Ed, I think it does.' And I went to my hotel room during the conference, and I myself logged into Boomi and started building integrations on the fly based on my knowledge of the way the platform should work, and I started having a conversation it was generating for me on the fly. We didn't even know it was that powerful with the release, but it came out and it worked perfectly. So that's an example that I experienced.

>> So you're impressing even yourself.

Shahid Ahmed

>> Yes. I was impressing myself.

>> Now that going in weeds, but that just gave me a good thought to ask you. Well, since we're in the weeds, I saw one of your community bulletins how you guys talk about OpenAI, Pinecone. Obviously you're doing some retrieval augmentation generation. Is that a big part of the customer's uses of what you're doing right now with flows? You guys are doing some stuff with Pinecone and OpenAI?

Shahid Ahmed

>> It is.

>> Is that mainly through their APIs or do you have your own kind of thing going on now?

Shahid Ahmed

>> It is. So what happened is we naturally found ourselves in a right to win. We have over 20,000 customers now, and they're running all of their data through Boomi's platform. They're integrating all their applications. They're using our hub to centralize data and ensure high data quality, so on and so forth. They naturally came, our customers came to us saying, "We want to embrace these technologies, and you're helping us with all the data pipes anyway. We want to get this data. We want to get the data in these technologies." And our team was in a perfect spot to just embrace this and work with them, and we've been innovating with our customers in that manner, which is what drove us a lot towards our agent guard and agent frameworks that we're building today because we've been learning along with our customers.

>> We had chats before at Boomi World a couple of years ago and before the pandemic. I remember we had a conversation, what's the vibe inside Boomi? Because the world shifts really on your doorstep. You guys have been doing a lot of grinding, blocking and tackling, chopping wood, carrying, whatever metaphor you want to use in this integration pipeline with data specifically and workflows now, the whole world's saying, "Hey, if you have workflows that are proprietary and unique to your company and data that's with it, that's now the new intellectual property for the company."

Shahid Ahmed

>> Yes.

>> That's where you focus your energy on the generative ai rather than risking any kind of false positives or errors.

Shahid Ahmed

>> Yes.

>> It's error-free, pretty much. It's your workflow.

Shahid Ahmed

>> Yep.

>> That's where the automation action is happening. So the world kind of spun in your direction. What's the vibe like inside Boomi?Are people like, "Man, this is our time. It's our moment."

Shahid Ahmed

>> 100%. This is our moment. When ChatGPT hit the market, hit mainstream, we've been prepping for this. We've had Boomi suggest. We've been building our intelligent framework now into our generative AI framework for years waiting for this moment. And when it hit mainstream with ChatGPT and everyone understood what this meant, and people, their minds opened to what the possibilities were. We were waiting there saying, "Hey, we can help you. And we already... One key thing for us was when our customers came to us with all these security concerns, it's like we had all the answers. We had been through that for them. We're FedRAMP certified. We're IRAP certified in Australia. We had all the answers saying, "Look, this is how we do it," and they look to us to help guide them down this path, and we're stoked to do it.

>> So now you're running products, you of the roadmap. You have the keys to the kingdom. We saw today on the news. Steve was on stage talking about the M&A. So every successful company has great organic and inorganic growth, inorganic meaning you do M&A to make some moves. You guys are making some moves.

Shahid Ahmed

>> Yes.

>> Michelle powering your FinTalk. You got the API management with Mashery, which has been around since the beginning, and now you've got the federated side, hot startup, great, inorganic, check, check, check, make some power moves, move the needle. Where's the organic innovation coming from on the product side? Could you share your vision on what's coming down on the roadmap? Can you share, if anything, with the audience on the organic?

Shahid Ahmed

>> So what I can tell you is our acquisitions of APIIDA and Mashery are also a story of organic innovation we're doing as well. What I'm excited about is we brought in some API leaders. I think Matt McClarty was on earlier today, Jamie Ryan, et cetera, that understand the API management space from different angles where I'm loving the team members that are coming over from Mastery and APIIDA, and we have our API management organic team that's been building our platform already. We're bringing all these folks together to invent and now build the next-gen API management platform together moving forward. This isn't just about acquiring the assets to plug them in and check a box. It is, we are going to be bringing groups together. We're not just consolidating things, but we are bringing it into the stack, and then going to be organically building moving forward, so excited about that.

>> So step function change for you guys.

Shahid Ahmed

>> Step function change, because we are not rationalizing resources or anything like that. We're accelerating things for all three of these entities coming together as one. The other area where we've been organically really accelerating is in the data management space. We had talked about master data Hub as this discrete product that our customers love, and we've been investing and building and building and building to the point where we're now embracing and talking about a publicly, a data management strategy where we're now organically building more master data capabilities. We're looking to build more ETL large data movement capabilities. We may look inorganic there as well, but I love having the support of Steve, and Arlan, our CFO, around this balanced approach of innovating organically, also plugging gaps if we need to quickly inorganically and continue to innovate on behalf of our customers. It's an exciting time.

>> Really is an exciting moment for Momentum. What's it mean for you to be in a room with all your customers here like this in person?

Shahid Ahmed

>> Oh, it's incredible. Y'all know I was one of... Well, maybe you don't. I was one of the first 10 employees at Boomi. And when I joined Boomi originally,-

>> That must've been wild-

Shahid Ahmed

>> Yes....

>> to be here today compared. Yeah.

Shahid Ahmed

>> Yeah, that's what I mean. So when you ask that, I'm literally getting chills because when I... And also when I joined, I was a... I said I was an integrator earlier. I was helping our customers literally do integration projects and helping, not officially product management, but helping our engineering team build the products that our customers love. And I was able to... It was like a drug of success, seeing customer outcomes, seeing this happen. And as the company grew, I left for a few years and joined another company and then came back and have, I'm blessed to run product and engineering here and work with our customers and come to events like this where people tell me all day the impacts our technology actually have on their businesses, it's like nothing else for me.

>> Awesome.

Shahid Ahmed

>> It's soul fuel. That's why you get up in the morning.

>> I know. It is.

>> Yeah.

>> It's your moment.

Shahid Ahmed

>> As nerdy as it sounds, I am an integrator and I love to connect things, and I found what I like to do in life.

>> Well, I think that's really important though. It all about... We were talking to Ann about earlier, it's finding your passion, and especially in this AI space, it's don't try and do what everybody else is doing necessarily, but especially if you're new into this world and not necessarily traditional, find that thing you're passionate about and figure out how AI is going to apply to that, not the other way around,-

Shahid Ahmed

>> Exactly....

>> which is really exciting. Okay, last question for you before we wrap well, and then we'll have you back, which is great. We'll just have a little home for you here on theCUBE. We'll have a special little desk for you. What do you hope that you can... It's such an exciting time right now. presuming that Boomi World 2025 is around this time next year, what do you hope you're able to say then that you can't yet say today.

Shahid Ahmed

>> Next year?

>> Mm-hmm.

Shahid Ahmed

>> I hope to come next year with a whole bunch of success stories around how our customers embraced the AI agent economy, the agent garden we're bringing, seeing actual results. A lot of where we are today in the AI realm is prototyping. You talk to a lot of CIOs and developers. They're prototyping in their environments. I'm just yearning for solving actual use cases that provide value to organizations. And AI, that's where you need to be focused, not on the technology's fun, but what are the outcomes? And that's what I'm always focused on. So next year, I want to be celebrating the outcomes that we have from these technologies that we're bringing to our customers.

>> I love it, Ed. We'll be celebrating right along with you. Thank you so much for joining us for this segment and for the ones in the future. John, always the pleasure. And thank all of you for tuning in to our three days of coverage here live at Boomi World 2024. You're watching theCUBE. My name's Savannah Peterson. Thank you for tuning in to the leading enterprise tech coverage outlet, theCUBE.