A little more than a year after joining Boomi Inc., Steve Lucas isn’t declaring victory, but he believes the artificial intelligence-infused future of the data integration and automation provider is looking pretty bright.

Boomi will reach the $500 million recurring revenue mark this year and is growing more than 20% annually, said Lucas (pictured). Equally important is that it’s developing new ways to incorporate generative AI into its product line.

Last fall, the company introduced Boomi GPT, a conversational copilot that helps users build integrations, application program interfaces and master data models. Trained on a database of more than 300 million anonymized integration patterns the company has collected from its 20,000 customers, the software can design an outline of a requested integration that users can then implement.

That’s just the tip of the iceberg, Lucas, a 28-year software industry veteran, said in an interview with SiliconANGLE. Future iterations will enable users to interact with their business systems in new ways and ultimately automate the process of creating integrations and putting them into production.

A conversation with the business

“You’re collecting all this metadata about your business, processes, business rules and outcomes,” he said. “Large language models are really good at understanding what a human wants to do, so why can’t humans have a conversation with their business about itself?”

Instead of poring through transaction logs trying to figure out why an invoice wasn’t generated, users should be able to ask for an explanation in natural language. That’s what they’ll be able to do with the next product in the Boomi AI suite, which should be out sometime this year.

In the third Boomi AI product, which is scheduled for release in 2025, Lucas said, “you literally will be able to say, ‘I want to automate something. Do it.’” The functions to create integrations automatically already exist within the company’s current portfolio. It just needs to be married with a large language model for execution.

Predator mode

The data integration market has been consolidating for several years, beginning when Salesforce Inc. bought MuleSoft Inc. in 2018 and continuing with Tibco Software Inc.’s merger with Citrix Systems Inc. and Qlik Tech International AB’s acquisition of Talend Inc. last year. With some of his rivals in turmoil, Lucas said mergers and acquisitions are coming soon. “We are in absolute predator mode,” he said.

Falling valuations precipitated by the shift of venture capital funding to generative AI, he added, “creates incredibly compelling acquisition opportunities. We’re going to be doing some M&A in the next couple of months.”

That won’t mean broadening the company’s charter beyond data integration and automation, a market that Grand View Research Inc. expects will reach nearly $30 billion by 2030. Rather, Boomi is stirring application programming interface management into the mix. “The future is three As: AI, APIs and automation,” he said. “The vision is integration on one side of the coin and automation on the other.”

Lucas said Boomi has already solved the data ingestion problem with its preconfigured integrations with thousands of devices, applications and data sources ranging from vector databases to Raspberry Pi computers. Its Master Data Hub is a cloud-based data synchronization platform that can be used to clean data and maintain quality.

“On the output side, we can move that information into applications using our API management capability to drive events,” he said. “There is no system we can’t get to in the cloud or on-premises, which makes Boomi unique.”

Photo: Boomi