Dell Boomi recently concluded its second annual Boomi World conference in Las Vegas at the Wynn Encore hotel, bringing together more than 1,000 customers, partners and leading businesses and IT innovators from around the world. This year’s theme was “Your Journey. Our platform. Unlimited possibilities.” And one clear message that came through, which has always been at the forefront for Boomi, is their commitment to innovation.
“Unlimited possibilities” seemed apropos, as attendees of this event were there because they find themselves building connected businesses atop Boomi’s unified, cloud-native platform for integration, master data, API management, workflow automation and B2B/EDI connectivity.
As part of that theme, Boomi CEO Chris McNabb told audience members, “Our platform does much more than data integration today. The possibilities on our platform are unlimited.” Adding, “We are much more than your integration vendor. You need to look at Boomi as your transformation partner.”
Throughout the show, Boomi customers and partners remained front and center, and were key components of keynote presentations and breakout sessions. Their stories demonstrated the critical, strategic advantage of integration for helping businesses transform and become better.
During his opening keynote session, McNabb highlighted the strategic importance of integration in driving organizational transformation and the company’s spectacular growth. He talked about having more than 7,500 customers, 64,000 users, and 350 partners engaged in more than 1,000 projects. Boomi is adding about five to six new customers per day. And McNabb emphasized the role that the company’s partners have played in that growth.
Boomi World attendees were given the opportunity to participate in 30+ sessions this year, covering the spectrum of integration best-practices and guidance. They were also a great way to hear first hand customer stories on how they are using Boomi integration to transform their own businesses. And there was something for everyone at every level – introductory, intermediate and advanced topics. Some of the customers being featured during breakout sessions included the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Candy.com, Gilead, GE, MOD Pizza, Moderna, Origin Energy, Vanguard, SAS Institute, Cornell University, the University of Miami and PCL Construction.
The Connections Expo was also a busy area. It was staffed with Boomi employees and partners, but also had a series of self-service kiosks where attendees could explore at their leisure and see demos of both existing and new enablement tools, including a brand new partner portal experience. Not only could partners and customers get any questions answered about the partner program or how to find the right resources, they could also provide direct feedback on product enhancements and requests.
Being a partner and customer focused event, Boomi also spent time honoring some of their top performing partners, customers and community members with awards and acknowledgements during the show.
One of the highlights of the show was Michael Dell, founder and CEO of Dell Technologies, making an appearance during the keynote presentation.
Dell told audience members that the world is undergoing four major transformations: digital transformation, IT transformation, workforce transformation and security transformation. And data is the key to addressing all of those transformations. For without data, he said, there would be no business. And Boomi is going to be the key platform for helping organizations revolutionize how they use that data.
In a fireside chat type session, Dell and McNabb discussed how emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence and edge computing will play a big role in our increasingly connected future. When it comes to AI, Dell used an analogy of a rocket ship and its fuel, describing how the technology requires data to power it, saying “data is the fuel for the rocketship that is organizational transformation, and I would actually argue that your data is more valuable than your applications.” Adding, “And that’s why I’m such a fan of Boomi. It allows companies to quickly and easily use data any way they need to make their company better. I haven’t found an organization yet that doesn’t need Boomi.”
Smart sensors, connected devices and IoT deployments are on the rise. And with it, they will bring massive amounts of data. But Dell told attendees that much of that data and intelligence will have to reside at the edge where it is created and distributed, because it won’t be feasible to go back and forth to the cloud. In his example, Dell talked about a level four autonomous vehicle that could generate 4TB of data per day. ‘Imagine your car is going down the road at 70 to 80 miles per hour and something happens. Do you want to wait for the cloud to send back a response?’ No, the answer to the issue has to be at the edge, in the car, so you’re going to have distributed intelligence.
What’s next?
In 2008, Boomi pioneered the integration platform as a service (iPaaS) market. And they’ve been a leader in Gartner’s iPaaS Magic Quadrant for the last five years. Now, Boomi is reinventing the category again. The “i” in iPaaS is now all about intelligence, and that’s what Boomi means when they talk about iPaaS 2.0.
The company is taking aim at user experience for integrators of every skill level. They are also planning to incorporate AI and machine learning into a greater share of its integration software.
“It’s about adding intelligence to the platform so that you don’t need expensive talented engineers to do every little thing around integration,” explained McNabb. “You can create services to allow people to be able to do things for themselves. That’s what’s going to transform people’s businesses and allow them to create transformational experiences.”
New enhancements are coming, and they will draw on this intelligence to make real-time suggestions for building integrations, creating flows, and managing key data-centric operations.
The vision involves further deepening the amount of intelligence in the platform, and continuing to evolve from vision-based UI’s to voice based UI’s.
