The past two years have been a wild ride for data integration vendor Boomi Inc. Acquired by Dell Technologies Inc. in 2010, it was sold to private equity firms Francisco Partners Management LLC and TPG Inc. two years ago as Dell sought to pay down debt. Late last year Chief Executive David Meredith stepped down after less than a year on the job.

His replacement, software industry veteran Steve Lucas (pictured), hopes to bring focus and direction to the company following two years of disruption. Lucas, whose 28 years of enterprise software experience includes executive roles at Adobe Systems Inc., Marketo Inc., Salesforce.com Inc. and SAP SE, believes the integration market is primed for accelerated growth as enterprises look to simplify their technology portfolios and get rid of a lot of old technology.

“Our job is not to bring more complexity to businesses; it’s to retire complexity and eliminate technical debt,” he said in an interview with SiliconANGLE.

Turbulent market

The application integration market is crowded but consolidating. The trend kicked off five years ago when Salesforce Inc. bought MuleSoft Inc. for $6.5 billion. Rival Tibco Software Inc., which was acquired by private equity firm Vista Equity Partners in 2014, is being combined with Citrix Systems Inc. under a complex transaction announced last year. At about the same time, Talend SA announced its acquisition by private equity firm Thoma Bravo LP. And Informatica Corp., considered the market leader, has been navigating a two-year-long pivot to the cloud.

Although his own company has hardly been an oasis of calm during that time, Lucas sees an opportunity in disruption. “When you take a large independent company out of the market it certainly creates an opportunity for us, and we’re going to capitalize on it,” he said, referring to the Tibco merger.

For Boomi, that means focusing on simplifying the historically complex data integration process, layering in generative inferencing and doubling down on automation. “We want to be all things integration and then flip the coin to help customers rapidly automate processes as well,” he said.

‘Radical simplification’

Later this year, the company will create a Generative Pre-trained Transformer 3, or GPT-3, experience and enhance the artificial intelligence model to enable it to take actions, something the technology doesn’t do. “It’s a radical simplification of what you want to get done that translates onto the Boomi back end,” Lucas said.

The CEO is also focused on bringing enhanced low-code/no-code capabilities to the product in an appeal to what he calls “citizen innovators,” which are business users who have “the ability to take an idea, connect systems, define a process and achieve an outcome,” he said. “There’s too much of a dark art in the industry in connecting one or more systems to many others. We’re about empowering that citizen innovator, not just to help IT,  but to retire technical debt and accelerate.”

Another initiative is applying machine learning to discover and recommend the most effective integration patterns. “We’re harnessing it to look through the 20,000 customers that we have and the patterns they use, find the repeatable high-efficiency ones and surface those,” he said. The goal is to “radically reduce the time to integrate and automate, taking it from months and years to days and even hours.“

Ripe for change

Application integration is a relatively mature market by software industry standards, but Lucas said it’s ripe for change. “The major software players like SAP, Oracle, Microsoft and Adobe don’t want to talk to each other,” he said. “We live in a heterogeneous world and our job is to embrace the heterogeneity of organizations from the 40-year-old technology all the way up to what is cutting-edge.”

The batch extract/transform/load or ETL products that have dominated the market in the past aren’t going to make a successful transition to real-time integration, Lucas said. “Every CIO is rethinking [integration] entirely,” he said. “The growth we’re experiencing right now is a function of that change in the market.”

At roughly $500 million in annual revenue, Boomi is half the size of Tibco and one-third as big as Informatica, but Lucas said his company has agility on its side. “Ultimately what will continue to differentiate us is not just the breadth of our product line but our ability to absorb new trends and new technologies and fold them in,” he said, citing GPT support as an example.

Lucas expects Boomi to surpass $1 billion in annual revenue in less than five years while the total addressable market expands from about $17 billion today to $25 billion in three years.

“Big projects are being put on hold and CIOs are asking how they can get more out of what they already have,” he said. “Organizations are trying to retire the amount of technical debt they have and business owners have more power than ever. Bringing that all together and integrating it so that companies can run their businesses is what brought me to Boomi.”

Photo: Boomi