Boomi World 2024 | Steve Lucas | Boomi

theCUBE.net

Clips
News
More from Boomi World 2024

Steve Lucas

CEO

Boomi

Boomi centralizes API discovery, management and governance with new control plane

Integration platform-as-a-service provider Boomi LP is building on its vision to simplify the way enterprises manage their information technology infrastructure with the debut of its first major application programming interface product, the result of two key acquisitions earlier in the year.The company has just announced the launch of the Boomi API Control Plane, which is meant to be a centralized platform for companies to discover, manage and govern all of the APIs they use across their organization. Boomi says it hopes to fuel “accelerated business innovation, improved developer productivity and stronger API governance

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

CEO Steve Lucas on Boomi’s vision to simplify IT infrastructure with advanced AI and APIs

In today’s digital era, businesses face the daunting challenge of managing an ever-growing array of applications, databases and application programming interfaces. This complexity has spurred the need for a streamlined approach to enterprise software solutions, focusing on integration and automation to simplify information technology infrastructure.As organizations grapple with disparate systems, the demand for a unified platform that can efficiently connect and manage these elements is becoming increasingly critical

play_circle_outline Boomi: The Ultimate Enterprise Solution for Simplified Integration, Automation, and Software Consolidation

play_circle_outline Boomi's Remarkable Expansion: From iPaaS to Enterprise Platform, A Deep Dive into Data Management and AI

play_circle_outline The integration and automation market is evolving with the rise of AI and large language models.

play_circle_outline Boomi considers itself an independent third party, like Switzerland, in the landscape.

play_circle_outline Unleashing the Transformative Power: Building Enterprise-Grade Agents on the Boomi Platform for Different Line-of-Business Areas

Info

Steve Lucas | Boomi

Steve Lucas

CEO Boomi

search

>> Welcome back everyone to theCube's live coverage here at Boomi World in Denver. I'm John Furrier, host of theCube, day three of our coverage. We're here with Steve Lucas, the CEO of Boomi. Welcome back on theCube. You're solo, we're going to dig into your awesome keynote, but also a lot of questions. Welcome back.

Steve Lucas

>> Thank you, John. It's great to see you.

>> So talking a big game up there on the keynote yesterday, bold vision. It's not iPaaS, it's bigger. Your vision connects an integration market with Boomi's success, and bringing in the dots that connect with GenAI. A lot of people are talking about it.

Steve Lucas

>> Well, look, you and I, we talk about this all the time. We live in a fractured software world, pick a category and there are many, many things out there. The issue that we're trying to solve, it's really quite simple, it's customers have tons of applications, databases, APIs. That's an integration challenge. Why would you solve that integration challenge with a dozen integration products? It doesn't make any sense. So for us, it's a single solution for integration and automation, and I know that makes sense, it's on paper, and proof's going to be in the pudding. But we made some big moves yesterday, announced some acquisitions. We've also expanded our strategy into data management, as well as AI and the like. But to your point, it's more than iPaaS.

>> Yeah, and I think the API move really ups the game, personally, because it's the cloud and on-prem. Boomi's leverage, your CFO had a great chat with me on here, president CFO, it's a good business model, Boomi.

Steve Lucas

>> It is.

>> It's not a lot of professional services, it's all SaaS, it's in the cloud, you've got great agility, your customers love the product, it solves real hard problems on integrating, and then complex systems, by the way, too.

Steve Lucas

>> Right.

>> And then also, you've got the platform opportunity, so you've got a disruptive enablement opportunity, and I want to ask you about that. You've got the enterprise platform that you announced which had all the elements in there, I love the Agent Garden, and we're going to come back to that.

Steve Lucas

>> Yeah.

>> But what I saw up there wasn't an iPaaS company, it was an enterprise platform company. So the question is... And you've been around many cycles of innovation, this one we're in is a disruptive enabler, and that's a good thing-

Steve Lucas

>> Yeah....

>> which means some things will go away in light of the new inflection that we're going through, it happened in every single cycle.

Steve Lucas

>> It will.

>> Some stuff doesn't make it because it's antiquated and old and it deserves to be retired.

Steve Lucas

>> Yeah.

>> What gets disrupted? If you go down this path, what's going to get disrupted?

Steve Lucas

>> There are layers, John, there's layers. The first layer, so first of all, what gets disrupted, irrespective of Boomi, whatever it may be, is everything. The argument yesterday was find me an application that doesn't get disrupted, or really re-imagined, due to large language models and pre-trained transformers. This new world of AI that we're in, it's not the same. This is not a apple giraffe image recognition thing, this is the ability to reason, it really is powerful. I agree with Eric Schmidt, I think that this round of AI is under-hyped, not over-hyped, so there's that. Layer two, what gets disrupted with Boomi going this path? First of all, why would any application vendor rebuild how I connect to applications and databases, how do I wrangle these APIs? Yet, that's a common starting point. It makes no sense, especially given Boomi just does that. But for me it was, how do we apply to our application database and API management solutions, that we have, this open API or infrastructure-

>> Yeah....

Steve Lucas

>> where you can write anything on top of it? That's what we're doing. That opens up a lot, number one. But number two, now coming back to the AI piece, what really changes is we can open up the world of anyone that wants to take a small language model, large language model, and create something overnight-

>> Yeah....

Steve Lucas

>> be disruptive in a category, they can go through Boomi to do that, that lowers the barrier to entry to near zero.

>> Yeah. And it also highlights, it's a very nuanced point but I want to get your reaction to this, it also highlights next generation cloud scale. So iPaaS, I'm going to oversimplify it, my words not data categorical, iPaaS was a category for old stuff, you put it together-

Steve Lucas

>> Yeah....

>> you integrate a platform-

Steve Lucas

>> That's right....

>> keep things together. The internet is one big connective set of things, so now you're always connecting, you're always integrating. And the Stripe relationship's interesting because they do something really, really well, global payments, that gets integrated with a click of some code.

Steve Lucas

>> They do do that well.

>> Okay. So why-

Steve Lucas

>> They're good....

>> and you do your thing. So your partner with Stripe highlights to me where the internet needed to go for cloud next gen, so scale and connecting.

Steve Lucas

>> 100%.

>> Call that integration, we can call it whatever you want, but when you connect two systems together in a global system-

Steve Lucas

>> Yeah....

>> is that a category or is it just reality? That's enterprise reality, not necessarily a category.

Steve Lucas

>> I think the thing is, we as humans, we want to label it all, and it's a little difficult, because it's like, well, what does Boomi do? Well, it integrates things, it automates things. The way I characterize it, we interconnect and build processes, that's what we do. Do we have the perfect label? Yesterday, I heard the term hyperautomation. Ah, not bad.

>> Hyper is a good one to throw in front of anything, hyperscale-

Steve Lucas

>> Hyperautomation....

>> hyperconvergence.

Steve Lucas

>> But here's the thing, organizations like Stripe, what they need-

>> Yeah....

Steve Lucas

>> is the ability to go that last mile, and if Boomi, with 20,000 customers, we already do that, then integrating Stripe and Boomi is the no-brainer.

>> Yeah.

Steve Lucas

>> Now, we need to times that by the many strategic players out there. But I think the Stripe Boomi one is natural.

>> Well, it's also illustrative on another point I want to get your reaction on, and I think this is clear to me at least coming out of Boomi World '24, is that you guys are at scale and so is Stripe. So I could actually create an alternative to Stripe, integrate something easy, put it on my site, but then I can't replicate the back end. They're globally scalable. You guys are uniquely positioned as an independent third party in Switzerland.

Steve Lucas

>> The landscape's crazy.

>> Do you guys consider yourself Switzerland when you look at this layer?

Steve Lucas

>> Yeah.

>> Switzerland meaning independent. Yeah, I think your API play is saying that, "Use whatever you want, customer."

Steve Lucas

>> That's the thing. First of all, if you look at Salesforce acquiring MuleSoft, that was a catalyst for a lot of change in the market, and Salesforce, the reality is, if Salesforce isn't buying something right now, wait five minutes. And they're brilliant over there, they bought MuleSoft, and that was a large independent integration automation player that was taken out of the market as an independent, and that left Boomi as the modern architecture, and we're taking advantage of that, obviously. But we want to expand, so we announced the acquisition of two API management companies yesterday. Why? Well, there's a vacuum in the market.

>> Yeah.

Steve Lucas

>> Why would we not do that? So Boomi's gone from integration automation to plus API management, soon, and we're building out, plus data management as well, we think we can be that one platform for the enterprise.

>> Do you see platform sprawl coming, and tool sprawl, and API sprawl, as a feature or a bug of the future world we're in?

Steve Lucas

>> Yeah.

>> Because if you think about the abstraction, you talk about complexity on stage, I appreciated your comment there, you're solving with simplicity, not more complexity. That's the old way.

Steve Lucas

>> Well, it is. So for all of the... And you said this, and I think you say it better, you have this unique perspective in the world, which is, look, all of these things that have been invented over the past three, four decades, they've converged, they've given rise to things like this new kind of intelligence that we have with AI, and that's great, they all converge, blah, blah, blah. You'd think things would get simpler, yet they're getting more complicated. There's more apps, there's more databases. The average enterprise today has over 360 cloud apps alone, over 1,000 databases.

>> Yeah.

Steve Lucas

>> That's not simpler.

>> Yeah.

Steve Lucas

>> So our job is to help wrangle that, simplify it. That makes sense. But I think things are going to get more complicated before they get simpler-

>> Yeah....

Steve Lucas

>> because we have the agents are coming. Now, we have these large language models, small language models, let's build these semi-autonomous agents on top of them.

>> Yeah.

Steve Lucas

>> Every software company's doing it. So when we introduce those into the API application database, now agent, mix, it gets complex.

>> Well, I think you're onto something. We just put out a new survey research from theCube Research for RSA, when in fact, it's counterintuitive, if you think about it, everybody's talking about platform consolidation and tool consolidation, actually, the tools are increasing-

Steve Lucas

>> Yeah....

>> and they're not sunsetting the old tools, mainly because new use cases are emerging, new threats are emerging, and the older platforms solve that threat, but not... So there are more tools coming out in security, and that's because there's new things to solve.

Steve Lucas

>> Well, and even from an integration... Again, my issue, if you have an integration, let's say, challenge or problem or opportunity, I have hundreds, thousands of applications, the solution is not, oh, let me go get a dozen integration products and solve my integration problem with an integration problem. It doesn't work that way, that's not what you should be doing. But you walk into the average enterprise today, they've got a dozen integration tools, a dozen automation tools. How is that helping? It's not. But again, coming back to the AI piece, this will exacerbate the issue. It's time for organizations to consolidate onto that singular platform.

>> Yeah.

Steve Lucas

>> And again, that's why, if you look at what we're building out, integration, automation, API management, data management, one platform-

>> Yeah....

Steve Lucas

>> we're calling it the Boomi Enterprise Platform, we haven't named it Bob or Susie, but cleverly, the Boomi Enterprise Platform.

>> Well, I think the API plays a good example, because there are players out there that are taking a bottoms-up approach with open source, but if you look at what you guys have is you've got the crown jewels of the company, you're working mission-critical workloads, and I don't think... It's hard to get switching costs to have some random point solution sway a platform that's managing critical systems, critical data, and orchestrating the APIs.

Steve Lucas

>> Yeah.

>> So I think that's a good bet, so I think that might play well. And 85% of all the internet traffic goes through APIs.

Steve Lucas

>> Yeah.

>> So just think about it.

Steve Lucas

>> Just a little bit.

>> It's like the plumbing.

Steve Lucas

>> Yeah, Well, it is. We live in an API-driven world.

>> Yeah.

Steve Lucas

>> This cup, it probably has an API, I don't know. But everything seems to have an API on it.

>> Yeah.

Steve Lucas

>> And look, it's a different view.

>> Yeah.

Steve Lucas

>> Boomi traditionally has been the, hey, we'll connect to all these things, we have connectors, and make it easy to drag, drop, connect, and we've introduced AI versions of that, and that's lovely. But applying APIs to darn near everything in the world, it lets developers interconnect systems and that's cool.

>> Yeah.

Steve Lucas

>> But the average company today is looking at 30 to 50,000 APIs that they have to think about across their applications and systems-

>> Yeah....

Steve Lucas

>> and that's the least complex of these scenarios.

>> Yeah.

Steve Lucas

>> So getting your arms around this, it's not going to get easier.

>> Yeah, and I think APIs, although connecting things, at scale becomes more problematic, I think that's what you guys are doing.

Steve Lucas

>> Yeah.

>> So I want to get to your keynote, you made a couple comments I want to get into. So the integration and automation, check, Boomi.

Steve Lucas

>> Yep. Boomi did that.

>> Gold star, blue ribbon, done.

Steve Lucas

>> Yeah, we're doing our thing.

>> Doing great. Now, you're starting to see the management team come in, a lot of SAP background, a lot of web services, tech people, so you've got the tech. So are you guys looking at it from an IT modernization platform or more of a line of business opportunity, because you've got toes in both waters there, or does that converge too and the ecosystem picks up the line of business market?

Steve Lucas

>> Well, I think-

>> How would you see that playing out?...

Steve Lucas

>> it has to converge, but here's why. IT, especially the past decade, they've ceded some power, capability, authority, to the line of business.

>> Yeah.

Steve Lucas

>> Line of business, they're more empowered to pick an application, come in, and then the CIO has to figure out, okay, how do I graph that into our standards, our governance, and the like?

>> Yeah.

Steve Lucas

>> Line of business empowered, that's not going away, it's not.

>> Yeah.

Steve Lucas

>> So for us, it's how do we, first of all, empower and supercharge IT, do more with less? Again, everything we talked about. But at the same time, in line of business, look at our partnership with Vianai, which is a conversational finance solution-

>> Yeah....

Steve Lucas

>> that technology, their product called FinTalk plugs, right into Boomi, you can literally turn on conversational finance with your SAP system. That's not existed before. I'm not building-

>> Yeah....

Steve Lucas

>> warehouses and lakes and charts and graphs, I'm just talking to it and getting answers, and that's through Boomi, because that's what we're seeing. So I think to your point, it's both.

>> Well, this is why I found it interesting, because there's two issues there to unpack. One, Boomi's go-to-market in the line of business, and technology. So now, the next question is, okay, the Agent Garden and ecosystem that you guys have, do you guys fulfill that line of business creativity, the democratization, does that come from the ecosystem or , how do you see that? Because FinTalk's a great example.

Steve Lucas

>> Well-

>> That's an OEM deal with Vishal Sikka, who, by the way, has great street cred, to get him to put a check mark on you guys.

Steve Lucas

>> Yeah.

>> So does that come from the ecosystem, or is Boomi going to be doing more LO line of business applications?

Steve Lucas

>> So I think it's an ecosystem play first. So Boomi, we've built our own set of agents, but those agents are things like click a button, automatically synchronize all your information, our AI agents that watch where PII goes, data governance, and design agents. That's great. Things like what Vishal Sikka's organization, and what they produce with FinTalk, what that will do, it's the first of many line of business applications integrated by these third parties into Boomi. So I can't help but let my Salesforce heartstrings tug on me a little bit, back to the AppExchange and force.com days.

>> Yeah.

Steve Lucas

>> Look, there are going to be these agent marketplaces. We are introducing what I believe to be the first one.

>> Yeah.

Steve Lucas

>> Now, we're not looking to corner the market on. But I'll tell you one more thing about agent marketplaces, look, you should be able to go into an agent marketplace and say, "I need an agent to talk to my finance system," like what we have with , the same for sales-

>> Yeah....

Steve Lucas

>> the same for marketing, the same for HR, that's going to be part of it, and we're opening the doors, and just here at this conference this week-

>> Yeah....

Steve Lucas

>> hundreds of those opportunities, so we're going to see that. But there's more to it than that.

>> Yeah.

Steve Lucas

>> When these agents, and you know this, again, better than anybody, when these agents are running around your organization, whether they go through Boomi or not is irrelevant, who's minding the shop? Where are these agents registering? How do I know what decisions they're making? No self-respecting CIO or COO will let hundreds of semi-autonomous or autonomous agents just go, "You know what? Do I have a discount for you," and they're hallucinating.

>> Yeah.

Steve Lucas

>> You need to know these things. So beyond the garden-

>> Yeah....

Steve Lucas

>> we're building, and I didn't actually announce this on stage yesterday, but we're building an agent registry, and this is where any agent... So every CIO will want an agent-

>> Yeah....

Steve Lucas

>> it doesn't matter from where, to register.

>> That's great. We got a scoop here on theCUBE, that's a great point. So a couple of things that are coming out of theCUBE interviews which I want to share with you and get your reaction, we're going to come back to this agent registry, one of your CTO mentioned economics. He's writing a book called Unbundled, soon to be on Amazon. Plug for your book, Matt.

Steve Lucas

>> Ah, yes.

>> So economics of data is going to be a discussion. A registry implies some sort of verification.

Steve Lucas

>> Yeah.

>> We're in this data supply chain opportunity. So we've talked about software supply chain, you look at Docker, they have a little registry for containers and serverless, that market's growing. But you look at data, lineage has always been talked about in data-

Steve Lucas

>> Yeah....

>> but you're getting into a world where it's a horizontal, scalable data model, with the ability to have that built into the app as well, so you have two dimensions of... I guess this is the chess game on data-

Steve Lucas

>> Yeah....

>> which is what do you make horizontally scalable-

Steve Lucas

>> Yeah....

>> and how do you manage the supply chain? I don't want rogue agents going out, taking over infrastructure.

Steve Lucas

>> Well, it's data and it's decisions. And it doesn't matter, pick an area of your company. I served up expense reports. I have this war against expense reports, and I am not a fan of expense reports. I'm not a fan, yet here we are in 2024, and you'll get up tomorrow, I'll get up tomorrow, and there will be an expense report to approve. Why, in 2024, with large language models that can be trained perfectly on human judgment and corporate policy, why are we approving expense reports? Two years from now, no one will do that.

>> Yeah.

Steve Lucas

>> Two years from now-

>> Thank God.

Steve Lucas

>> Thank you. But that's a decision that we held as human beings that we will gladly cede to AI. Now, multiply that times 1,000, or 10,000, because of all these decisions that we hold as humans.

>> Yeah.

Steve Lucas

>> So it's not just the data, it's the decisions.

>> Yeah.

Steve Lucas

>> I believe this registry needs to be about the data, the agents, and the decisions that they make-

>> Yeah....

Steve Lucas

>> independent of human beings.

>> Yeah.

Steve Lucas

>> I still want to know what they're deciding.

>> They're basically verified. It's business logic, it's coming back full circle.

Steve Lucas

>> Yep, it is.

>> The world's changed. Okay, so the big strategic question is that, what's next on the M&A front? What's the next organic growth you're going to do? So inorganic growth, organic growth, you're making the big moves, great props there, you've got a great CFO who you've worked with, he's done M&A at SAP-

Steve Lucas

>> Yeah....

>> he's seen the movie many times.

Steve Lucas

>> Yeah.

>> What's the inorganic and organic to-do items for you?

Steve Lucas

>> Well, as you know, so inorganically, we announced the acquisition of Mashery, as well as APIIDA, so that's part of our API management strategy-

>> Yeah....

Steve Lucas

>> on the M&A front, then I'll come back... Well, on the organic front, actually, it's all about data management. So we are building out our ETL, we're building out master data management capabilities, more so than we have today. We are in and expanding in the data management market. We will win there, and M&A will happen there as well. So data management is a big win area for us-

>> Yeah....

Steve Lucas

>> because our customers want us to expand there, we're going to do that. In the AI world, look, Boomi's ability to take something that's really complicated today, I go get a model, like Llama Three, for example, built by Meta-

>> Yeah....

Steve Lucas

>> I have some data, I want to fine-tune or ground that model, that's a complex process. Boomi's enabling that through single clicks now to be able to fine-tune those models.

>> Yeah.

Steve Lucas

>> That's heavy organic investment for Boomi as well. So you're going to see us, across integration automation, API management, data management, we will acquire in all of those areas.

>> So last question for you, I'll set it up by saying just some observations from the interviews here. Fast feedback loops with Boomi, access to customer deployments, 300 million integrations, your AI is now trained.

Steve Lucas

>> Yeah.

>> Look, that's competitive advantage, so opportunity there. Very loyal customer base, they love the product-

Steve Lucas

>> ....

>> they love the product, ecosystems emerging, Agent Guardian shows you the way with a marketplace, you mentioned low code, LangChain, integrating stuff for around data, runtime. This has a growth trajectory that is going beyond iPass.

Steve Lucas

>> 100%.

>> So as you look at that, what is your investment areas that you're going to put the most wood behind the arrow on? Is it ecosystem, product, all of the above? You don't need to give me percentages, but give me a feel for where your priorities will be. And obviously, I can see value, because companies like Amazon and other growth companies, they all start out this way, they got a flywheel going.

Steve Lucas

>> Well, right now, it's about fulfilling demand. So for us, part of this event right here is, how do we engage with partners? The reality is, with the market breaking our way, and you look at companies that are moving away from technology, like MuleSoft, and they're moving into Boomi in particular, we need partners. So you look at what we're doing with Infosys-

>> Yeah....

Steve Lucas

>> and there's a big announcement around that today, it's fulfilling demand. So there's a big investment in just demand fulfillment. And the second thing is go-to-market expansion, where we continue to hire. I look at the news, I look at tech companies and the long list of layoffs, and Boomi's going to continue to hire, continue to expand, continue to grow.

>> Yeah.

Steve Lucas

>> This is our moment.

>> What's your pitch to the people out there that could be partners, and/or people who want to just join in and build on top of the platform? What areas would you say would be good white spaces, or areas to camp out on and build on top of or partner, what's the main ones?

Steve Lucas

>> Well, you called it out there a little bit ago, anything in line of business, if you're looking to... especially in the world of AI, I'm just the firm believer in the transformative power of these agents that are coming. But if you're looking to build enterprise-grade agents for HR, sales, marketing, finance, legal, we want you building those agents through and on the Boomi platform, and they can be done near instantly, so the amount of time from idea to execution is near zero, and that's what we want.

>> Steve, great to have you on theCUBE. Love the vision, love the team, putting together a great trajectory you guys are on.

Steve Lucas

>> Thank you.

>> Market timing is-

Steve Lucas

>> Timing is everything.

>> Boomi's done a lot of the heavy lifting coming into this wave, so you guys are looking good. Final, final question, next year, Boomi 2025, we'll be sitting here, what are we going to be talking about, what conference will be on your checklist, and then what will be the conversation next year?

Steve Lucas

>> Well, I look at a year ago, a year and a half ago, when ChatGPT just became part of the nomenclature, the terminology, everything we're talking about, look at what's happened just here at Boomi, we had an idea, we're going to take all of this data and our AI that we've been working on for a long time, we're going to supercharge that with generative, we're going to build on large language models. We now have a technology a year later that can literally understand, these are the systems I'd like to connect, doing it through English language, and I'd like to do that every Tuesday, could you please synchronize all my data for me? And it just knows.

>> Yeah.

Steve Lucas

>> And that's a year. And we've trained it on 300 million integrations. A year from now, the productivity that we will see will be greater than anything, and I'm talking about in the world of IT, we will see the most productive decade in IT that has ever been known to mankind, and Boomi's going to help usher that in.

>> Yeah.

Steve Lucas

>> Now, that's thanks to the hard work of companies like OpenAI, Meta, Google, Microsoft, and the like-

>> Yeah....

Steve Lucas

>> but I think the world that we live in, one short year from now, profoundly different.

>> Awesome. Well, congratulations on the momentum and continued success. We'll be tracking you guys, I know you'll be on the road, talking to customers. And congratulations, it's been great, what a great event.

Steve Lucas

>> Thank you. Thanks for being here.

>> Steve Lucas, CEO of Boomi, here on theCUBE, bringing all the action, talking the big game here on theCUBE. Check out the great market timing for Boomi. Congratulations on the great team. We'll be back with more coverage after this short break.

Steve Lucas | Boomi

search

>> Welcome back everyone to theCube's live coverage here at Boomi World in Denver. I'm John Furrier, host of theCube, day three of our coverage. We're here with Steve Lucas, the CEO of Boomi. Welcome back on theCube. You're solo, we're going to dig into your awesome keynote, but also a lot of questions. Welcome back.

Steve Lucas

>> Thank you, John. It's great to see you.

>> So talking a big game up there on the keynote yesterday, bold vision. It's not iPaaS, it's bigger. Your vision connects an integration market with Boomi's success, and bringing in the dots that connect with GenAI. A lot of people are talking about it.

Steve Lucas

>> Well, look, you and I, we talk about this all the time. We live in a fractured software world, pick a category and there are many, many things out there. The issue that we're trying to solve, it's really quite simple, it's customers have tons of applications, databases, APIs. That's an integration challenge. Why would you solve that integration challenge with a dozen integration products? It doesn't make any sense. So for us, it's a single solution for integration and automation, and I know that makes sense, it's on paper, and proof's going to be in the pudding. But we made some big moves yesterday, announced some acquisitions. We've also expanded our strategy into data management, as well as AI and the like. But to your point, it's more than iPaaS.

>> Yeah, and I think the API move really ups the game, personally, because it's the cloud and on-prem. Boomi's leverage, your CFO had a great chat with me on here, president CFO, it's a good business model, Boomi.

Steve Lucas

>> It is.

>> It's not a lot of professional services, it's all SaaS, it's in the cloud, you've got great agility, your customers love the product, it solves real hard problems on integrating, and then complex systems, by the way, too.

Steve Lucas

>> Right.

>> And then also, you've got the platform opportunity, so you've got a disruptive enablement opportunity, and I want to ask you about that. You've got the enterprise platform that you announced which had all the elements in there, I love the Agent Garden, and we're going to come back to that.

Steve Lucas

>> Yeah.

>> But what I saw up there wasn't an iPaaS company, it was an enterprise platform company. So the question is... And you've been around many cycles of innovation, this one we're in is a disruptive enabler, and that's a good thing-

Steve Lucas

>> Yeah....

>> which means some things will go away in light of the new inflection that we're going through, it happened in every single cycle.

Steve Lucas

>> It will.

>> Some stuff doesn't make it because it's antiquated and old and it deserves to be retired.

Steve Lucas

>> Yeah.

>> What gets disrupted? If you go down this path, what's going to get disrupted?

Steve Lucas

>> There are layers, John, there's layers. The first layer, so first of all, what gets disrupted, irrespective of Boomi, whatever it may be, is everything. The argument yesterday was find me an application that doesn't get disrupted, or really re-imagined, due to large language models and pre-trained transformers. This new world of AI that we're in, it's not the same. This is not a apple giraffe image recognition thing, this is the ability to reason, it really is powerful. I agree with Eric Schmidt, I think that this round of AI is under-hyped, not over-hyped, so there's that. Layer two, what gets disrupted with Boomi going this path? First of all, why would any application vendor rebuild how I connect to applications and databases, how do I wrangle these APIs? Yet, that's a common starting point. It makes no sense, especially given Boomi just does that. But for me it was, how do we apply to our application database and API management solutions, that we have, this open API or infrastructure-

>> Yeah....

Steve Lucas

>> where you can write anything on top of it? That's what we're doing. That opens up a lot, number one. But number two, now coming back to the AI piece, what really changes is we can open up the world of anyone that wants to take a small language model, large language model, and create something overnight-

>> Yeah....

Steve Lucas

>> be disruptive in a category, they can go through Boomi to do that, that lowers the barrier to entry to near zero.

>> Yeah. And it also highlights, it's a very nuanced point but I want to get your reaction to this, it also highlights next generation cloud scale. So iPaaS, I'm going to oversimplify it, my words not data categorical, iPaaS was a category for old stuff, you put it together-

Steve Lucas

>> Yeah....

>> you integrate a platform-

Steve Lucas

>> That's right....

>> keep things together. The internet is one big connective set of things, so now you're always connecting, you're always integrating. And the Stripe relationship's interesting because they do something really, really well, global payments, that gets integrated with a click of some code.

Steve Lucas

>> They do do that well.

>> Okay. So why-

Steve Lucas

>> They're good....

>> and you do your thing. So your partner with Stripe highlights to me where the internet needed to go for cloud next gen, so scale and connecting.

Steve Lucas

>> 100%.

>> Call that integration, we can call it whatever you want, but when you connect two systems together in a global system-

Steve Lucas

>> Yeah....

>> is that a category or is it just reality? That's enterprise reality, not necessarily a category.

Steve Lucas

>> I think the thing is, we as humans, we want to label it all, and it's a little difficult, because it's like, well, what does Boomi do? Well, it integrates things, it automates things. The way I characterize it, we interconnect and build processes, that's what we do. Do we have the perfect label? Yesterday, I heard the term hyperautomation. Ah, not bad.

>> Hyper is a good one to throw in front of anything, hyperscale-

Steve Lucas

>> Hyperautomation....

>> hyperconvergence.

Steve Lucas

>> But here's the thing, organizations like Stripe, what they need-

>> Yeah....

Steve Lucas

>> is the ability to go that last mile, and if Boomi, with 20,000 customers, we already do that, then integrating Stripe and Boomi is the no-brainer.

>> Yeah.

Steve Lucas

>> Now, we need to times that by the many strategic players out there. But I think the Stripe Boomi one is natural.

>> Well, it's also illustrative on another point I want to get your reaction on, and I think this is clear to me at least coming out of Boomi World '24, is that you guys are at scale and so is Stripe. So I could actually create an alternative to Stripe, integrate something easy, put it on my site, but then I can't replicate the back end. They're globally scalable. You guys are uniquely positioned as an independent third party in Switzerland.

Steve Lucas

>> The landscape's crazy.

>> Do you guys consider yourself Switzerland when you look at this layer?

Steve Lucas

>> Yeah.

>> Switzerland meaning independent. Yeah, I think your API play is saying that, "Use whatever you want, customer."

Steve Lucas

>> That's the thing. First of all, if you look at Salesforce acquiring MuleSoft, that was a catalyst for a lot of change in the market, and Salesforce, the reality is, if Salesforce isn't buying something right now, wait five minutes. And they're brilliant over there, they bought MuleSoft, and that was a large independent integration automation player that was taken out of the market as an independent, and that left Boomi as the modern architecture, and we're taking advantage of that, obviously. But we want to expand, so we announced the acquisition of two API management companies yesterday. Why? Well, there's a vacuum in the market.

>> Yeah.

Steve Lucas

>> Why would we not do that? So Boomi's gone from integration automation to plus API management, soon, and we're building out, plus data management as well, we think we can be that one platform for the enterprise.

>> Do you see platform sprawl coming, and tool sprawl, and API sprawl, as a feature or a bug of the future world we're in?

Steve Lucas

>> Yeah.

>> Because if you think about the abstraction, you talk about complexity on stage, I appreciated your comment there, you're solving with simplicity, not more complexity. That's the old way.

Steve Lucas

>> Well, it is. So for all of the... And you said this, and I think you say it better, you have this unique perspective in the world, which is, look, all of these things that have been invented over the past three, four decades, they've converged, they've given rise to things like this new kind of intelligence that we have with AI, and that's great, they all converge, blah, blah, blah. You'd think things would get simpler, yet they're getting more complicated. There's more apps, there's more databases. The average enterprise today has over 360 cloud apps alone, over 1,000 databases.

>> Yeah.

Steve Lucas

>> That's not simpler.

>> Yeah.

Steve Lucas

>> So our job is to help wrangle that, simplify it. That makes sense. But I think things are going to get more complicated before they get simpler-

>> Yeah....

Steve Lucas

>> because we have the agents are coming. Now, we have these large language models, small language models, let's build these semi-autonomous agents on top of them.

>> Yeah.

Steve Lucas

>> Every software company's doing it. So when we introduce those into the API application database, now agent, mix, it gets complex.

>> Well, I think you're onto something. We just put out a new survey research from theCube Research for RSA, when in fact, it's counterintuitive, if you think about it, everybody's talking about platform consolidation and tool consolidation, actually, the tools are increasing-

Steve Lucas

>> Yeah....

>> and they're not sunsetting the old tools, mainly because new use cases are emerging, new threats are emerging, and the older platforms solve that threat, but not... So there are more tools coming out in security, and that's because there's new things to solve.

Steve Lucas

>> Well, and even from an integration... Again, my issue, if you have an integration, let's say, challenge or problem or opportunity, I have hundreds, thousands of applications, the solution is not, oh, let me go get a dozen integration products and solve my integration problem with an integration problem. It doesn't work that way, that's not what you should be doing. But you walk into the average enterprise today, they've got a dozen integration tools, a dozen automation tools. How is that helping? It's not. But again, coming back to the AI piece, this will exacerbate the issue. It's time for organizations to consolidate onto that singular platform.

>> Yeah.

Steve Lucas

>> And again, that's why, if you look at what we're building out, integration, automation, API management, data management, one platform-

>> Yeah....

Steve Lucas

>> we're calling it the Boomi Enterprise Platform, we haven't named it Bob or Susie, but cleverly, the Boomi Enterprise Platform.

>> Well, I think the API plays a good example, because there are players out there that are taking a bottoms-up approach with open source, but if you look at what you guys have is you've got the crown jewels of the company, you're working mission-critical workloads, and I don't think... It's hard to get switching costs to have some random point solution sway a platform that's managing critical systems, critical data, and orchestrating the APIs.

Steve Lucas

>> Yeah.

>> So I think that's a good bet, so I think that might play well. And 85% of all the internet traffic goes through APIs.

Steve Lucas

>> Yeah.

>> So just think about it.

Steve Lucas

>> Just a little bit.

>> It's like the plumbing.

Steve Lucas

>> Yeah, Well, it is. We live in an API-driven world.

>> Yeah.

Steve Lucas

>> This cup, it probably has an API, I don't know. But everything seems to have an API on it.

>> Yeah.

Steve Lucas

>> And look, it's a different view.

>> Yeah.

Steve Lucas

>> Boomi traditionally has been the, hey, we'll connect to all these things, we have connectors, and make it easy to drag, drop, connect, and we've introduced AI versions of that, and that's lovely. But applying APIs to darn near everything in the world, it lets developers interconnect systems and that's cool.

>> Yeah.

Steve Lucas

>> But the average company today is looking at 30 to 50,000 APIs that they have to think about across their applications and systems-

>> Yeah....

Steve Lucas

>> and that's the least complex of these scenarios.

>> Yeah.

Steve Lucas

>> So getting your arms around this, it's not going to get easier.

>> Yeah, and I think APIs, although connecting things, at scale becomes more problematic, I think that's what you guys are doing.

Steve Lucas

>> Yeah.

>> So I want to get to your keynote, you made a couple comments I want to get into. So the integration and automation, check, Boomi.

Steve Lucas

>> Yep. Boomi did that.

>> Gold star, blue ribbon, done.

Steve Lucas

>> Yeah, we're doing our thing.

>> Doing great. Now, you're starting to see the management team come in, a lot of SAP background, a lot of web services, tech people, so you've got the tech. So are you guys looking at it from an IT modernization platform or more of a line of business opportunity, because you've got toes in both waters there, or does that converge too and the ecosystem picks up the line of business market?

Steve Lucas

>> Well, I think-

>> How would you see that playing out?...

Steve Lucas

>> it has to converge, but here's why. IT, especially the past decade, they've ceded some power, capability, authority, to the line of business.

>> Yeah.

Steve Lucas

>> Line of business, they're more empowered to pick an application, come in, and then the CIO has to figure out, okay, how do I graph that into our standards, our governance, and the like?

>> Yeah.

Steve Lucas

>> Line of business empowered, that's not going away, it's not.

>> Yeah.

Steve Lucas

>> So for us, it's how do we, first of all, empower and supercharge IT, do more with less? Again, everything we talked about. But at the same time, in line of business, look at our partnership with Vianai, which is a conversational finance solution-

>> Yeah....

Steve Lucas

>> that technology, their product called FinTalk plugs, right into Boomi, you can literally turn on conversational finance with your SAP system. That's not existed before. I'm not building-

>> Yeah....

Steve Lucas

>> warehouses and lakes and charts and graphs, I'm just talking to it and getting answers, and that's through Boomi, because that's what we're seeing. So I think to your point, it's both.

>> Well, this is why I found it interesting, because there's two issues there to unpack. One, Boomi's go-to-market in the line of business, and technology. So now, the next question is, okay, the Agent Garden and ecosystem that you guys have, do you guys fulfill that line of business creativity, the democratization, does that come from the ecosystem or , how do you see that? Because FinTalk's a great example.

Steve Lucas

>> Well-

>> That's an OEM deal with Vishal Sikka, who, by the way, has great street cred, to get him to put a check mark on you guys.

Steve Lucas

>> Yeah.

>> So does that come from the ecosystem, or is Boomi going to be doing more LO line of business applications?

Steve Lucas

>> So I think it's an ecosystem play first. So Boomi, we've built our own set of agents, but those agents are things like click a button, automatically synchronize all your information, our AI agents that watch where PII goes, data governance, and design agents. That's great. Things like what Vishal Sikka's organization, and what they produce with FinTalk, what that will do, it's the first of many line of business applications integrated by these third parties into Boomi. So I can't help but let my Salesforce heartstrings tug on me a little bit, back to the AppExchange and force.com days.

>> Yeah.

Steve Lucas

>> Look, there are going to be these agent marketplaces. We are introducing what I believe to be the first one.

>> Yeah.

Steve Lucas

>> Now, we're not looking to corner the market on. But I'll tell you one more thing about agent marketplaces, look, you should be able to go into an agent marketplace and say, "I need an agent to talk to my finance system," like what we have with , the same for sales-

>> Yeah....

Steve Lucas

>> the same for marketing, the same for HR, that's going to be part of it, and we're opening the doors, and just here at this conference this week-

>> Yeah....

Steve Lucas

>> hundreds of those opportunities, so we're going to see that. But there's more to it than that.

>> Yeah.

Steve Lucas

>> When these agents, and you know this, again, better than anybody, when these agents are running around your organization, whether they go through Boomi or not is irrelevant, who's minding the shop? Where are these agents registering? How do I know what decisions they're making? No self-respecting CIO or COO will let hundreds of semi-autonomous or autonomous agents just go, "You know what? Do I have a discount for you," and they're hallucinating.

>> Yeah.

Steve Lucas

>> You need to know these things. So beyond the garden-

>> Yeah....

Steve Lucas

>> we're building, and I didn't actually announce this on stage yesterday, but we're building an agent registry, and this is where any agent... So every CIO will want an agent-

>> Yeah....

Steve Lucas

>> it doesn't matter from where, to register.

>> That's great. We got a scoop here on theCUBE, that's a great point. So a couple of things that are coming out of theCUBE interviews which I want to share with you and get your reaction, we're going to come back to this agent registry, one of your CTO mentioned economics. He's writing a book called Unbundled, soon to be on Amazon. Plug for your book, Matt.

Steve Lucas

>> Ah, yes.

>> So economics of data is going to be a discussion. A registry implies some sort of verification.

Steve Lucas

>> Yeah.

>> We're in this data supply chain opportunity. So we've talked about software supply chain, you look at Docker, they have a little registry for containers and serverless, that market's growing. But you look at data, lineage has always been talked about in data-

Steve Lucas

>> Yeah....

>> but you're getting into a world where it's a horizontal, scalable data model, with the ability to have that built into the app as well, so you have two dimensions of... I guess this is the chess game on data-

Steve Lucas

>> Yeah....

>> which is what do you make horizontally scalable-

Steve Lucas

>> Yeah....

>> and how do you manage the supply chain? I don't want rogue agents going out, taking over infrastructure.

Steve Lucas

>> Well, it's data and it's decisions. And it doesn't matter, pick an area of your company. I served up expense reports. I have this war against expense reports, and I am not a fan of expense reports. I'm not a fan, yet here we are in 2024, and you'll get up tomorrow, I'll get up tomorrow, and there will be an expense report to approve. Why, in 2024, with large language models that can be trained perfectly on human judgment and corporate policy, why are we approving expense reports? Two years from now, no one will do that.

>> Yeah.

Steve Lucas

>> Two years from now-

>> Thank God.

Steve Lucas

>> Thank you. But that's a decision that we held as human beings that we will gladly cede to AI. Now, multiply that times 1,000, or 10,000, because of all these decisions that we hold as humans.

>> Yeah.

Steve Lucas

>> So it's not just the data, it's the decisions.

>> Yeah.

Steve Lucas

>> I believe this registry needs to be about the data, the agents, and the decisions that they make-

>> Yeah....

Steve Lucas

>> independent of human beings.

>> Yeah.

Steve Lucas

>> I still want to know what they're deciding.

>> They're basically verified. It's business logic, it's coming back full circle.

Steve Lucas

>> Yep, it is.

>> The world's changed. Okay, so the big strategic question is that, what's next on the M&A front? What's the next organic growth you're going to do? So inorganic growth, organic growth, you're making the big moves, great props there, you've got a great CFO who you've worked with, he's done M&A at SAP-

Steve Lucas

>> Yeah....

>> he's seen the movie many times.

Steve Lucas

>> Yeah.

>> What's the inorganic and organic to-do items for you?

Steve Lucas

>> Well, as you know, so inorganically, we announced the acquisition of Mashery, as well as APIIDA, so that's part of our API management strategy-

>> Yeah....

Steve Lucas

>> on the M&A front, then I'll come back... Well, on the organic front, actually, it's all about data management. So we are building out our ETL, we're building out master data management capabilities, more so than we have today. We are in and expanding in the data management market. We will win there, and M&A will happen there as well. So data management is a big win area for us-

>> Yeah....

Steve Lucas

>> because our customers want us to expand there, we're going to do that. In the AI world, look, Boomi's ability to take something that's really complicated today, I go get a model, like Llama Three, for example, built by Meta-

>> Yeah....

Steve Lucas

>> I have some data, I want to fine-tune or ground that model, that's a complex process. Boomi's enabling that through single clicks now to be able to fine-tune those models.

>> Yeah.

Steve Lucas

>> That's heavy organic investment for Boomi as well. So you're going to see us, across integration automation, API management, data management, we will acquire in all of those areas.

>> So last question for you, I'll set it up by saying just some observations from the interviews here. Fast feedback loops with Boomi, access to customer deployments, 300 million integrations, your AI is now trained.

Steve Lucas

>> Yeah.

>> Look, that's competitive advantage, so opportunity there. Very loyal customer base, they love the product-

Steve Lucas

>> ....

>> they love the product, ecosystems emerging, Agent Guardian shows you the way with a marketplace, you mentioned low code, LangChain, integrating stuff for around data, runtime. This has a growth trajectory that is going beyond iPass.

Steve Lucas

>> 100%.

>> So as you look at that, what is your investment areas that you're going to put the most wood behind the arrow on? Is it ecosystem, product, all of the above? You don't need to give me percentages, but give me a feel for where your priorities will be. And obviously, I can see value, because companies like Amazon and other growth companies, they all start out this way, they got a flywheel going.

Steve Lucas

>> Well, right now, it's about fulfilling demand. So for us, part of this event right here is, how do we engage with partners? The reality is, with the market breaking our way, and you look at companies that are moving away from technology, like MuleSoft, and they're moving into Boomi in particular, we need partners. So you look at what we're doing with Infosys-

>> Yeah....

Steve Lucas

>> and there's a big announcement around that today, it's fulfilling demand. So there's a big investment in just demand fulfillment. And the second thing is go-to-market expansion, where we continue to hire. I look at the news, I look at tech companies and the long list of layoffs, and Boomi's going to continue to hire, continue to expand, continue to grow.

>> Yeah.

Steve Lucas

>> This is our moment.

>> What's your pitch to the people out there that could be partners, and/or people who want to just join in and build on top of the platform? What areas would you say would be good white spaces, or areas to camp out on and build on top of or partner, what's the main ones?

Steve Lucas

>> Well, you called it out there a little bit ago, anything in line of business, if you're looking to... especially in the world of AI, I'm just the firm believer in the transformative power of these agents that are coming. But if you're looking to build enterprise-grade agents for HR, sales, marketing, finance, legal, we want you building those agents through and on the Boomi platform, and they can be done near instantly, so the amount of time from idea to execution is near zero, and that's what we want.

>> Steve, great to have you on theCUBE. Love the vision, love the team, putting together a great trajectory you guys are on.

Steve Lucas

>> Thank you.

>> Market timing is-

Steve Lucas

>> Timing is everything.

>> Boomi's done a lot of the heavy lifting coming into this wave, so you guys are looking good. Final, final question, next year, Boomi 2025, we'll be sitting here, what are we going to be talking about, what conference will be on your checklist, and then what will be the conversation next year?

Steve Lucas

>> Well, I look at a year ago, a year and a half ago, when ChatGPT just became part of the nomenclature, the terminology, everything we're talking about, look at what's happened just here at Boomi, we had an idea, we're going to take all of this data and our AI that we've been working on for a long time, we're going to supercharge that with generative, we're going to build on large language models. We now have a technology a year later that can literally understand, these are the systems I'd like to connect, doing it through English language, and I'd like to do that every Tuesday, could you please synchronize all my data for me? And it just knows.

>> Yeah.

Steve Lucas

>> And that's a year. And we've trained it on 300 million integrations. A year from now, the productivity that we will see will be greater than anything, and I'm talking about in the world of IT, we will see the most productive decade in IT that has ever been known to mankind, and Boomi's going to help usher that in.

>> Yeah.

Steve Lucas

>> Now, that's thanks to the hard work of companies like OpenAI, Meta, Google, Microsoft, and the like-

>> Yeah....

Steve Lucas

>> but I think the world that we live in, one short year from now, profoundly different.

>> Awesome. Well, congratulations on the momentum and continued success. We'll be tracking you guys, I know you'll be on the road, talking to customers. And congratulations, it's been great, what a great event.

Steve Lucas

>> Thank you. Thanks for being here.

>> Steve Lucas, CEO of Boomi, here on theCUBE, bringing all the action, talking the big game here on theCUBE. Check out the great market timing for Boomi. Congratulations on the great team. We'll be back with more coverage after this short break.