Connecting APIs, Data, and AI Agents: The Composable Future with Boomi

Welcome everyone, I'm Ron Powell, Executive Director of the Analyst Consultant Advisory Network or ACAN. Today's podcast is a follow-up to our recent private forum with Boomi, where we explored how API management, integration, and AI-driven agent experiences are reshaping digital transformation.

I'm excited to welcome Jamie Ryan, Senior Vice President at Boomi, to dive deeper into what we learned during the forum and hear how Boomi is helping customers accelerate business value in this new AI-driven era.

Jamie, it's great to have you here.

Thank you, great to be here.

Ron: In the forum, you spoke about how Boomi has moved beyond traditional integration into a unified platform for APIs, data, and AI agents. Can you share what that transformation means for customers and how it sets Boomi apart in the market?

Jamie:

To have any kind of transformation, you need to be transforming your business. And all our customers have made investments over the last 20 years, going back even further than that, from mainframes to mobile to different data sources to SaaS. These investments have already been made. Nobody wants to rip and replace.

So even when you get to a new technology trend like AI, we can bring to bear the assets you've built and refined without compromising the security and governance of those systems. So, it's important for us to build on top of the foundation that we've been providing for our customers for the last 20 years. A CIO has purview across all these areas.

They're being challenged on how to do more with less. And whether our customers are ready to jump in with both feet and go fully agentic or whether you want to incrementally improve your existing systems, your existing processes with some additional intelligence, we're quite different from our competitors in that we can address that with the secure, managed, governed assets to begin with.

Ron: You also gave some very powerful examples across industries from financial services to healthcare, travel, and retail, where customers are running mission-critical workloads on Boomi. What did those use cases tell us about the trust enterprises are placing in Boomi's platform?

Jamie:

We're incredibly proud of our customer base. And the use cases that they use us for. We are truly mission-critical to the business. If Boomi fails, checks don't get written, money doesn't move, people don't fly. And so, it is truly inspiring that our customers trust us. And that's because of the relationships that we've built over the years, the investments we've made in security and the resilience of our platform.

And it also shows the true value of these assets, these integration assets, these API assets, these data assets, and how you can leverage those to drive new sources of revenue, to find new ways to engage with your customers, to make your user experience better. Those are the types of things that we enable for our customers. And it means real business value for them.

Ron: So, you've become a real strategic partner to them?

Jamie:

Absolutely. And we consider them strategic partners to us as well. Every time we do a roadmap presentation, we highlight the things that came as direct feedback from our customers that we went out and built for them.

Ron: One of the standout themes was how Boomi's API management is fueling growth. Whether you're replacing legacy platforms like TIBCO or powering loyalty programs or retail peaks like Black Friday or vaccine rollouts, how does API management act as a catalyst for both new business and upsell opportunities across your platform?

Jamie:

We've made a ton of investments in API management over the last couple of years, from acquisitions to organic development to really aligning our comprehensive portfolio around some key areas. But really, the value of Boomi is in the platform. API management can be a landing place for our customers. We can go in and compete against our competitors in that space. But then the fact that we can also bring integration to bear and data management to bear and now AI management to bear, it's a powerful story that nobody else can replicate.

And the same is true from the other direction. As people get into these agentic automation workflows, they need the assets that they already have built. And in our API management, we can bring together all the APIs that our customers have built and deployed across numerous API gateways and API management platforms.

We can bring all of those into one place, whether you built them on Boomi, and provide additional value around business context, productization, governance, making sure that you're ready to meet these new challenges around AI and agentic automation.

Ron: It opens the door for broader platform adoption and driving upsell opportunities and deeper customer relationships, wouldn't you say?

Jamie:

It really does. AI agents are only as strong as their tools, and APIs are one of those strategic tools. And the fact that we can bring them in one place, define API products, and then selectively expose those things to these AI agents means the agent doesn't experience things like agent bloat or tool bloat. It means they can focus on the use case and solve a real business problem so that you don't see some of these failed AI proofs of concepts that companies are running into these days.

Ron: Security and governance are also clearly remaining central. In the forum, you mentioned Boomi's 4.9 SLA, your published non-compliance fees, and industry-leading certifications. How does that commitment to security and reliability differentiate Boomi as enterprises scale their API and agent landscapes?

Jamie:

Security is key from the very beginning. We think securely from the ground up, from how we manage keys and certificates, to how you interact with the configuration, to the role-based access control. So, you can have a separation of concerns, and different personas can have access to different parts of the platform and focus on just their area. And then at runtime, everything that we do is fully secured from the ground up, from the protocol to the payloads, to the threat protection that we can put on any API transaction, for instance. And then as a company, this is something that we're really committed to across the board.

So, you mentioned our certifications. We've got more certifications than all our competitors. We've got a very clear public compliance page. We've got a very clear public SLA page where that 4.9 SLA is published. And we put it right out there. If we breach that SLA, here are the fees that we're responsible for it.

It's something we want to be transparent with and open with our customers and help them feel secure about their partnership with us. There are things out there like the security scorecard, and we blow away our competitors in that space as well. It's nice that you have that security scorecard that not many companies are that transparent.

Ron: A big part of the forum also focused on innovation, particularly Agentstudio and the way Boomi is enabling AI-driven agent use cases. How are customers starting to use agents today, and where do you see this evolving over the next 12 to 18 months?

Jamie:

We're incredibly proud of our Agentstudio, which focuses both on the design and creation of AI agents that run on the Boomi platform, and our control tower that manages and governs agents that are running both in Boomi's platform, but also in third-party platforms like AWS Bedrock, Microsoft Copilot, and others. It's that federation, just like our API federation, that really differentiates and distinguishes our ability to manage agents across the board.

But in driving these AI agent use cases, the ability to rapidly design them, to use natural language to describe our business goals, and the technical goals come from there, to connect to tools, whether those tools are existing integration processes, or APIs, or data models, canonical data models that represent your golden records, your customer instances, for bringing those tools together, and then putting them in the hands of a no-code, low-code approach to agent building is really powerful. When we first released that, even internally, I built 25 agents in three days, just because it was so fun. It was in my spare time while I was on vacation, and I couldn't get away from building new agents.

And the more that you leverage the investments that you've already made in those tools, whether it's APIs or integration workflows, the more valuable those agents can be. We also see a dichotomy in our customer adoption of these agents. Some are ready to jump in and make it 100% agentic. Here's the business process I need this agent to solve, and here are the tools, and go do it. Others want to build on the investments that they've already made, take an existing integration process, and make it more intelligent by lopping off one branch of the flow, and then putting in an agent, and making that more intelligent. And either way is perfectly reasonable and appropriate.

But over the next 12 to 18 months, I really see a huge variety of use cases that people can't even really imagine now. I think we have a somewhat of a crisis of creativity in thinking about how folks can leverage AI to really revolutionize their business.

Ron: You know, looking at the roadmap, you outlined advances like policy federation, event API management, and the upcoming AI gateway. How will these innovations help customers accelerate time to value while maintaining strong security and governance?

Jamie:

I mentioned these different trends that have happened over the last 20 years, and we recognize in those trends, and in the cycle of kind of responses to those, and how things like API management or SOA governance at the time are applied to them, we can learn from that history. We can reapply those concepts to new patterns, new protocols, and new types of assets. Leveraging AI to generate policy, so that you don't need to configure individual policies, or bring in policies from all your different API gateways, and then choose which ones get deployed for new APIs.

It really streamlines that user experience, that early API lifecycle. And then doing things like event API management, where you can take your events, connect your message brokers, and manage those from a provider experience, and a consumer experience, just like you do REST APIs today. Again, it's just a new pattern, a new approach, but putting all those assets back in the hands of our customers, and the people who are building their applications, whether those are internal or external consumers.

And with AI, we're seeing lots of new protocols, new patterns, things like MCP, things like A2A, and we fill in the gaps, essentially, in those specifications around security, around identity, around manageability, and we're able to leverage those to expand your ecosystem, but at the same time, provide end-to-end native experiences that don't rely on any less mature specifications, let's put it that way.

Ron: I also liked how the AI gateway ensures that companies adopt MCP or other protocols, that they don't lose control of security and governance.

Jamie:

It's important to govern whatever you can natively, and leverage those governed assets, curate those, and make them available as products, and then when you need to expand your ecosystem beyond that, but just that is thousands of applications, thousands of APIs, thousands of different data sources, and fields, and records.

When you need to expand beyond that, absolutely, MCP is a great way to do it, but you need to be cautious, and you need to leverage tools that can put some security and governance on top of that specification as it exists today, and give you those assets in a way that doesn't make any compromises, because these are enterprise, as we said, these are mission-critical enterprise processes, and you don't want to play around with those.

Ron: Finally, we wrapped the forum with several customer case studies, including a Netherlands bank, a leading European airline, and a global logistics provider. What do these wins say about Boomi's ability to deliver both immediate ROI and long-term strategic partnerships?

Jamie:

It's a great question, because two of those were longtime customers that we've seen grow over time, and expand the number of use cases, and so that was all built on a foundation of trust, both of our product and of our company. In terms of support and customer success and helping them drive their stories ahead.

We love those partnerships, those long-term partnerships, but we also get into new opportunities where customers don't have any Boomi in-house at all. They're comparing us against our multiple competitors in multiple different spaces, and the ability to tell those stories, to immediately show the ROI that they're going to achieve by attacking their core use cases, the things that are most transformative to them, and prepare them for this major shift in the way we do things. That's what really gets us those new deals, and allows us to compete head-to-head, not just on a technical level where we can win in a bake-off, but really from a partnership level, so that those customers feel like they're immediately part of the Boomi team.

Ron: When you talked about scaling billions of secure API transactions without disruption, that says a lot.

Jamie:

It's something people underestimate, like how much of the lifeblood of our customers' organizations are APIs. You think about every interaction you have with the companies that you interact with daily, either on your mobile phone, in a mobile banking application, or at a point of sale, in a shop, or in a retail location, or at a restaurant when you're putting in your order.

Every single one of those things is an API call. Every single one has revenue ramifications, has financial impact, both on the customer and on you, and so we want to make sure that we govern those things, we secure those things. Really, it's about how we're changing the way those folks do business, and that means maybe coming up with an API, and slowly introducing that into your applications, and then as those ramp up, and suddenly that becomes your main method of engagement, those go from thousands to hundreds of thousands to millions to billions.

We love to see that because our customer success is our success, and it just makes it a whole lot easier to go out there and talk to the next customer about the successes we've had, and the way that we've been able to change business for some of our 25,000 customers.

Ron: Well, Jamie, I want to thank you for sharing your insights. It's clear that Boomi isn't just evolving with the market, it's helping define the future of integration, API management, and AI agents. And to our listeners, thank you for joining us. If you're part of the ACAN community, this is just one of the many deep dives into the strategies shaping data, analytics, and AI. Until next time, I'm Ron Powell.