LONDON – TechEx Global, a leading enterprise technology exhibition and conference, wrapped up its two-day event on February 6th, showcasing the latest innovations across a range of sectors.
This year's event highlights the growing importance of AI, Big Data, Cyber Security, and other key technologies in driving digital transformation.
TechEx has been running for over eight years with the aim to bring industry leaders together responsible for pushing game-changing tech and strategy together, to craft relationships and creative solutions.
EM360Tech spoke with Ann Maya, the EMEA CTO of Boomi, a platform for intelligent connectivity and automation about the challenges of data integration in the age of agentic AI from application, data store to API sprawl.
EM360Tech: What are the key trends you’ve observed in the tech industry?
Maya: It's no surprise that we're seeing a ton of agentic AI. It's just exploding everywhere. Alongside that, we're seeing a continuation of digital fragmentation. This is where people have implemented parts of digital transformation and they become overwhelmed. Now AI is here. It's sort of a catch up and fix.
The other thing is data silos and increased attention to APIs. Because what we all know is that APIs will be one of the sole drivers of agentic AI. It's a key tool that agents will use to access tasks and be able to instigate autonomy.
It also represents a fantastic surface area. Unfortunately, for cyberattacks and data leaks, it's an element that has been an ongoing problem in digital transformation and has now been exacerbated with AI.
EM360Tech: What's the biggest challenge associated with integrating data from diverse applications and platforms?
Maya: In short, our observations with enterprise organisations, or small organisations even show that applications are just the way we do business. First thing you do, either go on Slack or email or use another form of communication tool.
That's how you start your workday, and not a single person in today's world doesn't use an application. When you're working with the current world of data, those applications each have a data store. Each of those data stores can either get fed into a big data lake or warehouse somewhere.
With this application sprawl, your data store sprawl happens simultaneously, but also they're driven a lot of times by APIs in the modern world, and now you have API sprawl on top of that. So there are a bunch of silos out there, and a bunch of potential risks pertaining to the security of your organisation.
So the challenges we see are with managing those API frameworks, so they're not over complicated, but you can still get control and federated governance. You don't need to hamper with the pace of innovation, but you ensure that your data is secure. Also, data security is a key concern. Ensuring that the right access to the right people at the right time is still there.
As you move forward with the pace of innovation and especially spot on by AI, we know data fuels AI, but you can't rush to implement an AI solution without ensuring that you're safeguarding either your country, your customers, or your own employee and business data. It's really important to think about those aspects and manage them efficiently.
Integrating data in today's world, especially for large organisations undergoing acquisitions or mergers, can be extremely complex. This is a significant challenge we've observed and one that we've addressed. Boomi's unified, intelligent integration platform solves these problems for our customers.
Ensure that integration across every technical stack, be it application, API, or data, can happen seamlessly in a low code, cloud native way. This makes it really easy to manage. It also makes it easier to manage the APIs that are formed and created within an organisation and used to communicate outside the organisation in a very controlled way, but allows federated governance.
We saw that many enterprises had adopted very complex API frameworks. Now that becomes another management concern and adds another layer of technical work that needs to happen. And that work can only happen by a small number of people with that talent who could do that.
So democratising the ability to manage API frameworks is really important to us. That has been the ethos of our low code organisation. We believe in simplifying all of that digital complexity.
EM360Tech: How have you prepared for the challenges associated with data integration in diverse applications and platforms
Maya: We've taken our approach to the API. We are introducing a new API that is really simple, because it can be imported into a control plane. That control plane can automatically apply security policies.
What that means is that it can also create a security score and quality score so that every API entering into your environment from an internal perspective can be scored. This gives you an idea of what you have across your organisation.
The other really cool thing is that many organisations have multiple API gateways and those gateways can represent a security surface area that can be problematic.
But what we can do is scan those gateways and register all the APIs that you have in those gateways and tell you what it is. The quality score or security score is as well as identifying. This is a key aspect, zombie and shadow APIs. It can immediately trigger a potential security problem in your organisation.
The other thing would be to ensure that data management is secure. This includes everything from the front – mass ingestion of data, as well as being able to categorise that data, ensure it's synced up to date and safe, and also being able to combine that data.
What we do is integration at the core. We can also take that integrated data and map it to different fields. For example, a customer might have a record in Salesforce, a record in NetSuite, and potentially a Workday entry as well. If you want a complete view of that customer (or employee, or your business), then you need to make sure you have the right and correct data for them in each system.
What we can do, however, is ensure that this happens, which helps you maintain a level of data management. Because this happens within the integration canvas, you're essentially doing data management on the fly. This makes it much easier to accept new data, ensure its accuracy, and then, when you feed it to AI systems, you know you can trust that data.
EM360Tech: How are you exploring AI power tools?
We have a platform, a unified intelligent integration platform that currently has eight embedded agents. And these agents are all there, free of charge, for our customers to really ease the path to integration.
We pioneered low code about 15 years ago or so. We also pioneered machine learning, methods of being able to optimise integration processes. We were way ahead of that 12 years ago. Fast forward to today we've now taken that extra leap to say we're taking a lot of the hard work out of creating integration.
Now we've taken all the work out of it. Essentially, you can have a conversation with our platform, and our design agent will design an integration for you. For example, you can say, “I would like to integrate my ERP system with my CRM system.” It might respond, “I've identified you have Salesforce, and you have NetSuite. Would you like me to integrate those?” When you say “yes,” it will integrate, and you can observe it and say, “Hey, I think I'd like to add a try catch in there.” Then it can add a try catch in there. A different agent we have will integrate the catch.
Once it's in, it's created, you can go straight into the Boomi canvas and see, make changes if needed. You can also instigate a Boomi scribe agent to document that integration.
We've really looked at changing that idea of coding into being able to listen to the intention and create. It's a superior user experience now. So yes, we have embraced AI within our platform, and we also use AI every day from our marketing to our sales to our engineers.
EM360Tech: What's the one key takeaway you'd like CIOs and CEOs to remember from our conversation today?
Remember that AI is a force multiplier. At the very core of AI is data. You have to feed it data. Ensure that you've solved the problems of yesterday before you start to tackle the innovations of tomorrow.
That means ensuring the safety of your data. Secure that you have a good handle on it and you understand where it is. If you create a solid data foundation that represents your business, your customers and more, that becomes the context that grounds AI. This then becomes a fantastic weapon that you have to differentiate yourself in this modern world.
