Last year, at Boomi World in Las Vegas, Boomi emphasized how its core iPaaS [Integration Platform-as-a-Service] platform is extending beyond its original integration use case, to better support customers’ broader digital transformation journey. This year, at Boomi World in Washington D.C., Boomi provided an update on this vision, several key technology advances – and a minor rebranding.
“It’s an update on the next generation of Boomi that we talked about last year, to show how far we have gotten,” said Steve Wood, Boomi’s CPO.
“We win head to head because of our single-instance, multi-tenant architecture,” said Will Corkery, Boomi’s SVP of Sales. “We have 30 TB of anonymized metadata that no one else has, and use artificial intelligence and machine learning on that. It provides deep insight to customers about how their data is being used. It’s just incredible capability, which provides deeper insights on categorization of data than anyone else.”
That much is not new.
“We’ve always had that, but now we have 9000 customers using it, who can leverage the fact that so much has been done on a single platform,” Corkery said. “That’s what provides the power, and it shows how powerful the architecture is.”
What is new is expanded Boomi full lifecycle API Management capabilities that are designed to enable customers to leverage these APIs to generate new services.
“This API management is a modern extension of our integration,” Corkery said.
This new full lifecycle API management consists of three key functionalities – API Proxy, API Gateway, and API Developer Portal.
Boomi API Proxy lets customers use Boomi as a centralized mechanism for all APIs and services created within or outside, to easily incorporate third-party data and third-party APIs.
“The fact that we are now coming with much fuller support of API Proxy is spectacular for us because customers look to deliver services through API,” Corkery indicated. “It gives us an even broader approach to service the customer.”
The Boomi API Gateway is designed to provide greater security for APIs that require governance and protection, through a governance mechanism that protects the execution of APIs while ensuring scalability. It is built on top of the Boomi Atom runtime distribution technology.
“This is particularly valuable in edge use cases,” Wood said. “Our Atom fabric is our scalable runtime technology that crunches the workflows, and provides the ability to communicate over very difficult scenarios – like connecting to data that doesn’t normally allow incoming communication.”
The other new component, the Boomi API Developer Portal, provides developers with self-service options to self-administer applications, self-register and approve the use of APIs.
“We are extremely focused on developer productivity,” Wood said. “As customers move more into steaming, it increases the need to make it easy for developers. We are doing things like working with Kafka to consume events from their products, so customers can build event driven applications on the Boomi platform.”
This ties into another key announcement at Boomi World, the announcement of a new customer-focused program that enables customers to connect everything seamlessly with Event Driven Architectures. Customers can learn and deploy Event Driven Architecture solutions with Boomi through a new EDA page.
EDA is a critical advance for digital business, allowing the capture of real-world business events in digital form by “listening” to event sources like Internet of Things devices, mobile applications, ecosystems, and social and business networks.
“Our ability to provide this listening support in SDK sounds very dull but it’s critical to enable the building of event-driven applications on the Boomi platform,” Wood said. “We know this is new for many customers, and we want to give clear guidance from industry leaders on EDA.”
To this end, Boomi is emphasizing its strategic partnerships in this space, with Dell EMC around its Pravega project, Amazon Web Services with its Event Bridge service, Solace with its PubSub+ technology, and Pivotal with its RabbitMQ product.
“We are seeing less of scenarios where people want to do ETL,” Corkery said. “We are taking that next step into servicing where the market is going.”
“We also are showing a new GUI experience, with ‘drag and drop,’” Wood said. “Just ahead of Boomi World we also added suggested filtering, so we can give them the filter automatically based on what the community typically does.
“We are also talking a lot about insight at Boomi World this year,” Wood added. “As an iPaaS, we have ability to key across the IT landscape in a way competitors like Salesforce can’t. They don’t have the multitenancy or distribution architecture. We can show things like lead volumes down 25 per cent and case volumes up 25 per cent in a very unique way. We can see the movement of data across the multi-cloud environment, and can provide more insight the more you adopt Boomi. That’s our big bang at the end.”
Boomi also announced a slight rebranding, where they now become Boomi a Dell Technologies Business, and not Dell Boomi, as they were before. They are still not one of the formal Dell Technology companies, however,
“We are still not on the big logo slide,” Corkery said. “We are growing rapidly as a business, compared to three years ago. But there was concern about too many logos. We didn’t want to look like a NASCAR car. But we are the data layer in Dell Technologies. Even though we aren’t on the logo slide, we know that what we provide is heavily strategic to Dell Technologies.”
