Boomi emphasizes their focus on hyperautomation, as an extrapolation of their traditional integration approach, and unveils Boomi Event Streams and a new Discover catalogue.

Today, at their Out of This World 2021 event, a digital event with three on-prem customer meets across the U.S., Boomi announced both its vision going forward, which is around hyperautomation, as well as several new product announcements.

The hyperautomation vision is an extension of what Boomi aspired to in the past as a part of Dell.

“Before we talked about integrated experiences and unified platform focused on data management,” said Ed Macosky, Head of Product at Boomi. “What has changed for us is that as customers continue to adopt our platform, we are seeing not just our traditional data integration use cases, but new ones around automating business processes and business workflows.”

Hyperautomation is thus a key aspect of extending Boomi’s core integration capabilities.

“In this keynote, our CEO, Chris McNabb, will demonstrate a Blue Force Tracking use case,” Macosky said. “It automates a call to cameras if officer needs help. This is not an integration capability, it’s automation. Hyperautomation adds more and more intelligence and adds more support for intelligence for workflows. It also coincides with a lot of RPA [robotic process automation] vendors talking about hyperautomation.”

Macosky said Boomi sees a logical convergence with themselves and the RPA vendors going forward.

“We are bringing in additional RPA options inside the integration, because we believe there will be a convergence there,” he indicated. “We already integrate with RPA solutions today, and customers publish them to the Boomi platform. We are not going after all RPA capabilities, because some of them are legacy technologies, but we will be bringing in new capabilities like OCR to provide a one-stop shop.”

Back in May, Dell sold Boomi to equity firm Francisco Partners for $4 billion as part of its ongoing effort to reduce debt by selling off assets deemed less strategic to their business. The deal closed on October 1.

“This is purely a growth play,” Macosky said. “Francisco wants to partner with us and grow our integration platform. Our hyperautomation vision is something we are working on together. We acquired two companies as part of Dell and will continue to evaluate further acquisitions where it makes sense.”

Macosky then highlighted the announcements Boomi is making around the event, including its increased emphasis on connectivity.

“On the connectivity front, we have spent the last two years working on simplifying the foundations to make it easier,” he said. “We have improved the user experience, and improved the SDK. We are on this path where we are changing from connectors to connectivity. We have a vision for a connectivity service. We have connected 189,000 unique endpoints to data, and are growing this at 44% year-over-year. We want to bring it down to a couple of clicks of connectivity. We have all the pieces in place for this, but we are still working on a layer to eliminate some of the technical pieces that still have to be built by developers.”

A new embedded event-driven architecture service – Boomi Event Streams – is being announced and is expected to be generally available in 2022. This new service facilitates faster and easier integrations, by fully integrating event-based data to greatly increase speed, flexibility, and scalability to any hybrid IT environment, regardless of complexity.

“We have queuing architecture today, and a partnership with [event streaming and event management provider] Solace which we will maintain,” Macosky indicated. “We have added connectivity in last couple years to all popular event driven architectures. However, customers want this as part of our unified platform, so they don’t have to rely on third-party services.”

The other new offering is a new Discover Catalogue.

“We had libraries before, but at the service level,” Macosky said. “These will be more business solutions that span multiple services.

The Boomi Discover solutions will install directly into an organization’s Boomi platform account, to provide a quicker way to start leveraging The Boomi AtomSphere Platform. The ready-made solutions can be used as-is, or tailored for any use case.

“This provides the ability to publish a full-blown solution and get the customer to time-to-value a lot faster,” Macosky indicated. “We have a vision to make this more intelligent, and also to grow it into a marketplace. We are also adding hyperautomation to the platform for low-code development.”