Boomi, a unit of Dell Technologies, completed a successful Boomi World 2019 event at the Washington Hilton in Washington DC last week.  The event brought together customers and partners from across all industries and across the globe, in anticipation of learning what Boomi was bringing new to the table in an effort to deliver on bold promises to help with digital transformation.

The week provided a series of informative keynote discussions, many deep dive breakout sessions led by both Boomi experts and customers and partners, as well as exhibits and demos.

Boomi CEO Chris McNabb opened the event expressing thanks to its growing list of partners and customers.  McNabb made it clear, the company is on a positive trajectory, and with that growth, the company is celebrating with a new brand identity to service unlimited possibilities and exploration.  In a word, the event was about growth. 

Since introducing the company's iPaaS in 2007, Boomi has grown dramatically.  The company's customer base is growing, its number of partners is growing, and its platform has become more comprehensive and advanced.  McNabb showcased on stage that the company now has more than 9,000 customers, 580 partners, and a presence across 80 countries.  The Boomi platform itself has been used for 103 million data mappings, connected to over 1,500 unique applications, resolved more than 8,000 errors, and supplied 31,000 transformational outcomes.   

"As Boomi continues to grow, innovate and lead the industry, we are enabling our customers to achieve accelerated business outcomes.  Our new brand is a visual representation of that and matches who we are today and who we want to be tomorrow," McNabb told audience members.

There were a number of new features and capabilities of the Boomi platform discussed during Boomi World 2019, some of which included:

OpenAPI Support

In the near future, Boomi customers will be able to add OpenAPI-compliant APIs without writing any code or write their own APIs, thanks to Boomi's new OpenAPI Technology connector.

Boomi Atoms on Pivotal

Boomi Data Services for Pivotal Platform makes Boomi a first-class native Pivotal Platform Service.  Boomi Data Services makes it fast and easy to connect Pivotal Platform environments, services and applications with your enterprise applications, data and devices - whether in the cloud or on-premise. 

At Boomi World, Ian Andrews, Pivotal's SVP products and marketing, talked about the two Dell Technologies businesses working more closely together and supporting the deployment of Boomi Atoms on Pivotal Platform.  Non-technical Boomi users can now publish APIs on Pivotal, and senior developers can read those APIs and combine them with other services in the Pivotal Marketplace, creating a new solution that draws on the work of both non-technical and highly technical users.

While speaking with VMblog, McNabb said with Pivotal and Boomi being sister companies as Dell Technologies subsidiaries, there's an extra set of relationships, even with VMware as well.  Pivotal is world class as an app development platform, and Boomi is world leading at data, so when you combine apps and data, you get something very powerful.

Atom Fabric

Data is distributed everywhere: on-premise, on the edge and in multi-cloud environments.  Workloads are distributed across on-premise systems and the cloud.  A future Atom Fabric will allow customers to create a fabric of connectivity and a fabric of data across complex networks and multi-cloud environments, so they can call on data in any location.  It will provide a secure and easy way to communicate across the firewall, and allow an integration process to call a remote integration process from another Atom and then return the result.

As Boomi CTO Michael Morton explained it to VMblog, there are two fundamental reasons for the Fabric.  To get to APIs behind the firewall securely, and then basically split up the integration processing because of what applications or databases can be accessed by one Atom versus another.

Conversational AI

Boomi is working in concert with Accenture to develop conversational user interfaces that are infused with artificial intelligence (AI) through which organizations will be able to integrate and analyze business processes.  This will bring the power of the Boomi Platform for workflow automation into the realm of quick and easy voice commands.  Accenture's conversational AI capabilities support multiple accents and multiple languages, making voice technology applicable to more use cases and markets than ever before.

The platform-independent speech interfaces from Accenture are being layered on top of a Boomi Bot Framework which can be used to build chatbots that support any combination of business rules and AI models.  The Boomi Bot Framework is a bundle of assets that enable a low-code application developer to build a chatbot that supports any combination of business rules and AI.  This set of pre-built assets is 'more packaged' than a classic code-level Software Development Kit and it is more flexible and less restricted than a standalone bot-configuration platform.  Thus, it enables easy innovation and quick time to value.  Together, the partner companies will deliver new, personalized, effective ways to communicate with customers.

McNabb told conference attendees that conversational AI will be employed to drive business process integrations and associated analytics using verbal commands.  Stating, "It's not the art of the possible, it's the art of the real."

McNabb also underscored an expanded focus on helping partners tap the conversational AI capabilities already available in its iPaaS integration platform using Flow, the company's SaaS-based workflow automation offering, to deliver ground breaking solutions incorporating conversational AI.

This is just one of the many ways Boomi is working with AI and it will only continue to grow in scope and depth as more customers use Boomi to solve more problems.

Insights

While at Boomi World, Morton made a bold proclamation: 'Boomi is going to offer business insights.'  These insights will help customers make more informed business and technology decisions - and the more a customer integrates with Boomi, the richer the insights will become.

As an example, from the very same meta-data that is produced today, customers have the opportunity to gain insights into the detection and movement of sensitive data, which applications are moving the data and how often it is being moved.  These business insights allow customers to make more informed business and technology decisions.

These intelligence capabilities will raise the bar in the iPaaS market.  Boomi can deliver real, actionable insights about how a customer's business operates day-to-day in a way that no other iPaaS can.  And its technology can deliver a higher order of insights around the categorization of data that customers are transacting. 

Morton said a platform that integrates a company's data and applications can also do double duty in the areas of analytics, data privacy and security.

Most data moving through the Boomi Platform includes some personally identifiable information (PII), things like customer records with names, addresses and other contact information.  New data privacy regulations, such as those from the EU GDPR, mandate that companies track the PII of EU residents.  But most companies have great difficulty knowing what personal data they have, which applications are using it and where it's being used.  And that's where Boomi insights can help by answering those questions.

Data mappings reveal exactly which applications are sending which data and where.  Through Boomi, compliance officers get the information they need to report on data collection practices, avoiding potential costly fines for non-compliance.

Boomi is still deciding whether it will bake in privacy features or charge separately for them. 

Boomiverse

To help get partners and customers ready for this expanding world, Boomi announced the launch of a brand new Boomi Universe, the Boomiverse -- the company's online community for learning, resources and knowledge sharing.  Within the community, Boomi hopes to provide a platform that encourages partners and customers to interact with one another and share information and best practices, and take advantage of internal Boomi experts and training materials.

Boomi hopes this will lead to an increase in the number of IT professionals that have Boomi certifications.  In the last two years, Boomi has increased the number of certifications being attained from about five per day to now more than 50 per day as it makes a concerted effort to increase the amount of iPaaS integration expertise available to customers.  More than 2,000 articles are now available in Boomi's Training and Support Knowledge Base.  And over 20,000 users have already been certified as Boomi developers or administrators.

All Boomi customers have free access to the Boomiverse.

Boomi World moves to San Francisco next year, September 15-17th, 2020.  How much will change or develop over the next 11 months?  We can't wait to find out.