CIO Influence Interview with Matt McLarty, Chief Technology Officer and VP of Product at Boomi

“AI will bring brand new business capabilities, will open up heretofore unfeasible automation scenarios, and lower the barrier of entry for people to become solution builders.”

Hi Matt, what are the key features of data integration tools that every CIO must focus on, in 2024?

Due to the complexity of enterprise IT environments, it’s not enough to just provide tools that connect data source “A” to a data consumer “B”.

Here are the three characteristics that are critical for data integration solutions to scale with all the dimensions of the enterprise:

Composability

In a high-change, high-scale enterprise environment, chances are data endpoints will be involved in many pipelines. As such, data integration solutions need to follow a composable architecture, allowing endpoints and functions to plug and play. This is essential for dealing with changing requirements and in order to rapidly get new solutions to market.

Democratization

Data and digital solutions are increasingly the core of operations in a modern enterprise. That means more people need to be involved in building digital solutions. In fact, having more personas involved in the data pipeline leads to better outcomes based on more eyes (QA) and more ideas (innovation).

So, data integration tools need to be accessible by all people in the enterprise: from the frontline business folks to the hardcore techies.

Visibility & Control

Connecting data to points of consumption is a great opportunity to understand the business and protect it.

Data integration tools need to help organizations see the big picture that comes from their data flow, and enact enterprise-wide policies to protect data privacy and other governance concerns.

Those three characteristics are foundational, but we can’t ignore the most important consideration for 2023: AI. The explosion of generative AI functionality will transform the enterprise IT landscape. For data integration, that means utilizing the technology within the tools and also utilizing the tools within the context of enterprise AI adoption.

How have new AI and computing capabilities transformed data integration techniques? Any specific example that you want to provide from Boomi Data integration/ AtomSphere that you can share with our readers?

AI–especially generative AI–will transform the IT landscape in many ways. AI will bring brand new business capabilities, will open up heretofore unfeasible automation scenarios, and lower the barrier of entry for people to become solution builders. Boomi has been leveraging AI technologies for years, most notably with our machine-learning-based Boomi Suggest capability that allows users to automate common integration use cases.

Top Data Integration News: BMC Simplifies Application and Data Workflow Orchestration with New Cloud and Data Integrations

We launched more technologies based on generative AI tech that will allow users to configure high-power integration workflows using a chat-based interface. We’re very excited about this as it will dramatically speed up the work of our core users, as well as opening up our platform to users from every team in the enterprise.

This is just the first in a long line of AI-based features we will be releasing.

Thank you, Matt! That was fun and we hope to see you back on CIO Influence.