Boomi CEO Outlines Vision for Integration and Automation Platform

Boomi CEO Steve Lucas took the stage at Boomi World Tour to outline his vision for the company's integration and automation platform. With over 20 years of experience at companies like Marketo and SAP, Lucas brings a unique perspective on how Boomi can help developers and enterprises simplify integration and automation.

Relentless Technology Change

Lucas kicked off by framing the context of relentless, accelerating change in technology and business. He cited the progression from mainframes to PCs, the internet, mobile, and now AI as examples of innovation waves companies must continually adapt to.

"There are these watershed moments in computing where you go, 'Oh, the internet was a big deal.' Mobile is a big deal, cloud was a big deal. AI is one of those 'big deal' moments. It just is. I think it's potentially even bigger than all of those things combined."

This rapid pace can be overwhelming. Lucas called out digital transformation, cloud adoption, app proliferation, and AI specifically as simultaneously exciting new capabilities but also sources of tremendous complexity.

The Problem of Digital Fragmentation

A key theme from Lucas was overcoming "digital fragmentation" — the complexity caused by an explosion of cloud apps, APIs, and data sources. He cited statistics showing enterprises have, on average, 364 SaaS applications, and 79% have over 100 data sources.

"Digital fragmentation is painful. It is real. We need to find a way to combat it. Digital transformation is awesome. We've run to get the latest cloud applications. But now we have sprawl. How many people just don't have enough apps in their environment? Everyone wants and needs more. And all this awesome generates more data sources and data that you have to rationalize and integrate."

Lucas argued this fragmentation causes immense challenges. While businesses invest heavily in digital transformation, only 19% of boards say their companies are actually making real progress. The result is disconnected systems, lost opportunities, and stunted innovation.

"Nearly 70% of IT decision-makers are missing out on opportunities due to poor technology integration."

Intelligent Integration With Boomi

To combat digital fragmentation, Lucas believes businesses need an "intelligent integration and automation platform" like Boomi. He is positioning Boomi to be a strategic partner to help companies seamlessly integrate critical applications, drive digital transformation forward, and support multi-cloud strategies.

"We will work tirelessly to deliver the end-to-end integration and automation platform for you. We will give you the ability to be prepared for whatever technology comes along."

Boomi's core strength has always been its flexible cloud integration platform. But Lucas highlighted initiatives like improved enterprise capabilities, new UX, and AI as areas where Boomi is innovating to meet escalating demands.

Democratizing Innovation With AI

A major announcement from Lucas was the launch of Boomi AI, the company's suite of AI-powered capabilities. Boomi has trained an AI model on hundreds of millions of real-world integrations to automatically suggest integrations.

Lucas demoed how this allows even non-technical users to create integrations in under a minute through natural language:

"It's interpreting that intent and creating your integration automatically. There's not something there, so now it's asking you what you want to do with this. I want to connect with a product opportunity. And that's what is leading you to your business outcome."

Boomi AI encapsulates Lucas' vision for "democratizing innovation" — allowing any business user access to automation, not just IT teams. He shared examples like enhancing sales processes and tailoring AI responses for each company's needs.

"Being able to use Boomi AI as a novice is transformative; being able to use Boomi AI as an expert is game-changing because of the time and productivity. Customers testing Boomi AI reduced the amount of work to get their job done with a 90% reduction of time."

The Boomi Advantage: Data and Practicality

What sets Boomi apart, according to Lucas? Above all, it's their data. No other integration provider has the scale of real-world integrations that Boomi uses to train its AI models.

"We trained our model on over 200 million real integrations, all under Boomi, not from anywhere else. So it's super-clean data, which is part of the issue."

Lucas calls this their "data flywheel" — real customer integration data improves AI models, which in turn enhances integration capabilities. This focus on leveraging real-world data is a major competitive advantage.

In addition, Boomi aims to provide practical solutions to impact business outcomes, not just generic IT augmentation. Lucas highlighted use cases like improving productivity, achieving "machine scale," and enhancing existing processes as core to their strategy.

Empowering Developers

While Lucas emphasized Boomi capabilities for business users, he also outlined key benefits for developers. With Boomi's open and programmable architecture, he wants Boomi to be at the center of every developer's integration strategy.

"Boomi sits at the center, or should sit at the center of a developer strategy, using Boomi to connect systems to connect to applications to integrate those things."

Lucas highlighted Boomi's rich API capabilities, support for events and triggers, and workflows as providing an extensible and flexible platform for developers to build solutions rapidly.

Connecting the Entire Business

Crucially, Lucas stressed, Boomi isn't just for IT — it's a platform for every department. With a simplified interface and AI capabilities, Boomi aims to make integration accessible to business users in finance, operations, sales, and more.

"Boomi is a platform for everyone, not just the IT organization, the CIO or enterprise architects, designers, and so much more than that." This enables less technical employees to leverage integration and automation to improve workflows. 

Vijay Kotu, SVP Analytics at ServiceNow and Boomi customer, expanded on the business benefits:

"The customer journey is about 60% of the systems that we have to integrate and understand as we piece together all this data. It seems to somebody assuming you know, b2b running a b2b business is complex."

For ServiceNow, Boomi provides the connective tissue to bring data together and power AI-driven processes across the customer journey.

The Path Forward: Integration and Automation

In summary, Lucas argues Boomi provides a flexible and intelligent “integration and automation platform for everything you do inside your business.” With strengths in cloud integration, workflow automation, and AI-assisted development, Boomi aims to power digital transformation strategies.

For developers, this means an open and extensible platform to drive rapid innovation. And with its new AI capabilities, Boomi opens up integration superpowers to business users across departments.

"We will work tirelessly to deliver the end-to-end integration and automation platform for you. We will give you the ability to be prepared for whatever technology comes along."

With its robust integration platform and new AI release, Boomi wants to provide businesses with a cohesive solution to connect their stack and create integrated experiences efficiently at scale.

Lucas believes integrating through a unified platform like Boomi is the key to overcoming digital fragmentation and powering the next generation of digital business. In a world of relentless change, Boomi strives to be the engine connecting applications, data, and devices to drive automation and innovation.