Agents and APIs position Boomi for carrying the AI banner in next-gen enterprise architecture – Business

At one point during keynote remarks at his company’s annual conference in Denver on Wednesday, Steve Lucas, CEO of Boomi LP, ran across the stage carrying a flag for the University of Colorado. The banner, while meant to introduce the school’s football coach Deion “Coach Prime” Sanders, could just as easily have said “AI,” for this is what will write much of Boomi’s story going forward.

Keynote presentations, side sessions and interviews with company executives at the iPaaS provider’s Boomi World this week pointed toward a transformational shift to an AI-based architecture in enterprise computing. Boomi is laying the groundwork for this new course through several key acquisitions and enhancements to its Enterprise Platform that will facilitate next-generation information technology management in the AI economy.

“This is a pivotable moment for each and every one of us,” Lucas (pictured) said during his keynote remarks. “We will reimagine enterprise applications. I believe there is a moment coming where we will be surrounded by AI.”

Work tasks can be offloaded to agents

That moment, according to Lucas, will be driven primarily by AI agents, intelligent software that can collect data and perform tasks. Boomi unveiled several new platform capabilities this week that included AI agents for protecting personally identifiable information, autonomously documenting and building data integrations, and providing proscriptive help.

Boomi’s framework, based on integration and no-code development capabilities, will allow customers to run AI agents built by Boomi and its partners, or allow users to develop new tools themselves. It is part of the company’s vision for how AI will transform enterprise operations to automate repetitive application integration tasks.

“Applications are going to get rewritten on this new technology and Boomi absolutely must be a part of it,” Lucas told reporters after his keynote. “I will bet you a dollar that Walmart is building a corporate buying agent. Why would they not do that? The vast number of companies do not have those resources like Walmart. Boomi can help with that.”

Acquisitions for API management and governance

Boomi also announced two acquisitions this week designed to position itself further for an AI agent-driven world. The company purchased Mashery’s application programming interface management assets from Cloud Software Group Inc., a business formed two years ago through the merger of Tibco Software Inc. and Citrix Systems Inc.

In addition to Mashery, Boomi also acquired an API management platform developed by the German firm APIIDA GmbH which will provide a centralized interface for API monitoring. The acquisitions were designed to further Boomi’s evolving AI agent strategy.

“The API is fundamental,” Boomi Chief Technology Officer Matt McLarty said in an interview with SiliconANGLE. “How are those agents going to talk to each other? They are going to be connecting via APIs.”

Boomi’s acquisitions appear designed to head off a potential issue that could arise as AI agents make their way through IT infrastructure. No CIOs will want agents operating in their companies without management or oversight, and APIs provide an ability to monitor performance. The autonomous future still requires governance.

“A corporate registry for these agents must exist,” said Lucas. “Boomi will deliver much of that capability in the due course of time. We will do more acquisitions. We’re not in markets to lose them.”

Customers explore future AI use cases

Although Lucas is quick to note that AI agents exist today, performing operations in various enterprise environments, this is still new technology and Boomi customers are just beginning to assess how it could potentially be used.

At Boston-based Suffolk Construction Co., IT administrators are evaluating how AI agents can help evaluate risks at a job site or identify possible design flaws in architectural drawings.

“We are exploring them,” Dinesh Singh, director, enterprise development and architecture at Suffolk, told SiliconANGLE. “This is another next step with data management. It’s going to make job sites safer. It will give us data insight then and there.”

For the global technology solutions provider Word Wide Technology Inc., AI agents have not yet been deployed in its infrastructure, but that day may not be far off. WWT’s Ken Maglio, principal architect and manager, told SiliconANGLE that, as a Boomi customer, there are several offerings in the company’s portfolio that he will be focused on in the months ahead.

“There’s things coming that we want to take advantage of,” Maglio said. “My goal in the next six months or longer is to take all of the things we are doing with the documentation to manage our business… and merge it into one source and point Boomi at it. Being able to commoditize the infrastructure is coming. You’re going to need tools to do that.”

Boomi has been telegraphing its emerging focus in the API and AI arenas for some time now. Lucas was quoted at the start of the year as saying that the future would be “AI, APIs and automation,” with integration on one side of the coin and automation on the other.

Presentations and comments made at Boomi World in Denver this week revealed more of the company’s strategy for how it will put the pieces together to deliver its vision of an AI future that can be automated and properly governed. Generative AI can be used to create processes, and this will be the way systems will be architected in an emerging AI world.

“We’re in the art of the possible stage right now with AI,” McLarty told SiliconANGLE. “What I love about Boomi is we’re not afraid to experiment. We’re able to place a lot of bets at the same time.”

Photo: Mark Albertson/SiliconANGLE