LV Podcast_SteveLucas_Boomi 0:00 Good morning and welcome back to SAP Insider 2025. 0:04 We are honored this morning to have the CEO of Boomi with us today, Steve Lucas. 0:10 Steve was part of our opening keynote and really set the tone for Hein Wagner today, who gave a compelling speech on overcoming adversity and turning adversity into opportunity. 0:21 Steve, not a lot of our members may know that you started your career early on. 0:26 You've forged your way at SAPI did you were the president of the Enterprise Platform and Analytics and you spent a very successful tenure there and went on to multiple different software companies before landing at Boomi. 0:40 Yeah. 0:40 Tell us a little bit about that journey, if you would. 0:43 What took you there and how the how the time at SAP has really helped inform now Boomi's position in working with SAP. 0:50 Yeah, well, SAP, the formative years. 0:54 So I was at SAP for about a decade, worked with amazing people as whom you all know, right, Hassel Plotner, Bill McDermott, amazing humans, Vishal Sika. 1:05 During an incredible time of innovation, I had the opportunity to launch SAP HANA with that group. 1:10 So that was, that was education also, but what an exciting time to rethink an entire company that was, that was really what kind of gave me the foundation and the confidence by the way, we all need that. 1:24 And then I, I got the opportunity to go be the CEO of a company named Marketo. 1:29 And there was a marketing automation company that was, I think all of our all of our members know that one too. 1:34 Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. 1:35 And, and Adobe came in, swooped in and and acquired. 1:38 It was the largest acquisition Adobe had ever done at the time. 1:41 It was pretty cool, but I attribute a lot of the opportunities that I have to the network of people like you that I got to know at SAP. 1:49 And to this day, I rely on my SAP brothers and sisters all the time. 1:55 Fantastic. 1:56 Well, you know, I've always believed in every company that I've been associated with that culture. 2:00 It really matters. 2:01 And the culture that you guys are formulating at Bhumi is second to none. 2:05 The whole concept of be bold, be you, be booming, it really jumps out. 2:10 Tell me a little bit about where that came and how that translates into day-to-day for the Boomi family moving forward. 2:15 Well, the the values that we carry and Boomi is A at our, at our simplest level, our job why we exist is to literally connect everything for people. 2:26 That's our job. 2:28 Our name Boomi comes from the Sanskrit word boomi. 2:31 That means foundation or earth. 2:33 It's connect everything through the earth. 2:36 So that's what our job is, is help people connect everything. 2:39 And in this case, like in the world of SAP is connect SAP to everything. 2:43 This is what we do and we believe we do it better than anybody else. 2:46 We obsess over it every single day, you know, but but for us, the, the, the, the values, be bold, be you, be boomy. 2:53 I believe that innovation cannot exist without boldness. 2:58 You have to be bold first as individuals, as a company. 3:01 Yesterday, I had a chat with 150 new hires that we had hired in the last month. 3:07 And when I talked about being bold, what I said was think about Amazon 20 years ago. 3:13 Amazon 20 years ago did one thing. 3:14 They sold books. 3:15 But when I say Amazon today, you don't think of books. 3:18 I mean, that's a thing amongst millions of things. 3:21 They're one of the, the, the, the global tech powerhouses. 3:24 AWS is a case in point. 3:26 The point is they did not let who they were at that moment in time define who they were going to be. 3:31 And being bold is about not letting who you are define who you're going to be, much like what Hein talked about as well. 3:38 It's it that's right. 3:39 So that that's being bold. 3:41 Being you really means whoever you are, wherever you're from, we want that best first rate version of yourself, not a second rate version of somebody else. 3:50 That's what we want and be booming. 3:51 As simple as that. 3:52 We, we're a constantly evolving unique culture and we want new people, new blood to come in and, and help us evolve. 3:59 Wow, what a fantastic, simply stated, but just impactful mission for every member of the Boomi family. 4:06 And it transcends. 4:07 You can see it in the market when, when I think about our SAP insider community right now, and I think you talked about it a little bit, 1.6 million members by 1.6 million amazing achievement and and growing mightily. 4:19 And it's all to the testament of the members themselves because they are self recruit, they're bringing folks to us. 4:26 So when I think of them and I listen to their stories about what they're doing, one of the things that transcends is complexity that they are now in the process of do espohana over. 4:37 Our research shows over half of our members have yet to make that journey and are still embarking upon that. 4:43 And yet there's the advent of process orchestration, data quality and data in the cloud, cloud options and solutions. 4:52 There is now AI and soon to be the emergent magentic AI and how I deal with all of this. 5:00 How do you inform the SAP community about the role Boomi can play in simplifying that complexity, allowing them to connect everything to everything? 5:11 Right, right. 5:11 Well, first and foremost is before you make that take, take the leap. 5:16 There's AI, mean look, the vast majority of organizations, they want to get to something like an S4. 5:21 It's innovative, it's compelling, it's powerful. 5:23 We want to get there, but getting there is hard. 5:26 What Boomi does is bridge those worlds between the the data, the custom code, the applications that you've built today in your existing environment, irrespective of where it runs. 5:35 It could be running in the cloud, it could run on premise or in AWS, it doesn't matter. 5:40 We can run Boomi right by that existing source. 5:43 And as you migrate or prepare to migrate, we can bridge those two worlds. 5:47 Data flows seamlessly. 5:48 Applications integrate seamlessly. 5:50 That's what we do. 5:51 And we do that today for 1000 SAP customers all over the world. 5:55 But that's step one, right? 5:57 Step 2 is how do I start to modernize my workflows, my processes? 6:02 How do I incorporate AAI to your question, right? 6:05 We've built today Boomi inside of the, our, our platform, we have an AI agent builder technology. 6:12 It's a no code agent builder. 6:13 So I can add AI agents. 6:16 We're talking autonomous decision making capability to my existing SAP processes with no code. 6:23 Well, that's going to be extraordinarily critical. 6:25 And I think we've talked about this in the past that we had this a decade ago layer semantically down of all of the integration complexity that was there. 6:34 And then AI emerged and, and now every application brings an AI agent with it. 6:39 And now you've got the battle of the agents that they're all trying to have interoperability orchestration amongst them. 6:45 And how do the rules get established to connect them and drive them. 6:49 And and I think it's just raised that level of complexity up one more companies like Boomi are starting to address that. 6:56 And I think you've just made that major release with a new AI agentic platform. 7:01 Give the group here a little bit of a sense of what to look for. 7:04 What's coming next from Boomi. 7:06 Well, so first of all, what you mentioned, which I think is super compelling, Jensen yesterday at Nvidia's conference said, and and he's right, there will be billions with AB, billions of AI agents in a few short years. 7:20 How will we understand, track, manage, govern, control these agents? 7:26 We launched an AI agent control tower is what we call it, that allows an organization to track, manage, govern, understand and orchestrate all of those agents, thousands, millions running inside of an organization. 7:39 So we can do that today. 7:41 My belief is that as these agents blood into the workplace, they're going to want to start communicating with each other more efficiently. 7:50 So workflow orchestration for agents, which is another innovation that we've delivered here at Boomi that is here, but also more to come to a theater near you soon. 7:59 I also believe that we as humans, we're going to have to have a a digital version of you Jamie that can interact with these agents more frequently. 8:07 We speak in 8 bit right? 8:09 We're kind of as humans, we're slow communicators, right Agents, they talk fast, but so we're literally going to give organizations the ability to create digital versions of yourself to interact with these agents more quickly than you would. 8:22 You'll control it. 8:23 You Jamie will tune it, but you'll communicate at lightspeed. 8:28 That's powerful, That's powerful. 8:29 And that's where this it's a logical conclusion. 8:32 A digital twin of you see now that's that's really taking that abstraction up a level to something that's very practical, really makes a lot of sense. 8:40 What else is Boomi going to deliver as we go forward? 8:43 Well, I mean, obviously, so we have our single platform today for integration and automation, API management, data management for volume, velocity movement and then this AI management that you mentioned. 8:54 But for us, we believe if you look at the the great decomposition of the enterprise, what that means is look, SAP is a brilliant organization, amazing company. 9:06 If you think about the the experience that you and I crave today, think about ChatGPT. 9:11 If you have a question, do you go to Google anymore and just search for four hours and you just ask ChatGPT or fill in the blank, generate a pre training transfer for the answer you want the answer. 9:24 In the not too distant future, Boomi's going to deliver a, a technology we call Boomi GPT that allows you to communicate and connect with every application in your company, but never leave the GPT experience. 9:35 I can just say approve that expense report and concur it will just happen or approve that hire it. 9:42 It doesn't retrieve a retrieve a, a, a dashboard, a workflow, whatever that may be. 9:48 So your ability to sit in one place and control an enterprise is what not just an obviously SAP is building amazing technology as well. 9:57 We're delivering that. 9:59 How do you see the partnership with SAP emerging for all of our SAP Insider members? 10:05 And SAP starts to bring its own with Jewel and, and it has its own tool suite. 10:11 How do you see the complementarity between the two companies starting to go? 10:14 And how should SAP Insider members think about the role each can play where 1 + 1 is three? 10:19 Well, I think first of all, I think there's amazing compliments the the challenge that we have. 10:24 I'll, I'll answer your question with just a short 10 second walk around the block here today. 10:29 We solve integration challenges, IE how do I connect SAP to everything? 10:34 We solve the integration challenge companies do with an integration challenge, which is let's go get a whole bunch of disconnected middleware that also doesn't talk to each other. 10:43 It doesn't make any sense. 10:44 You don't solve an integration problem with an integration problem. 10:47 Bhumi has a single platform. 10:48 That single platform natively integrates with SAP. 10:52 So we have a certified native integration today. 10:55 Number one, that's critical. 10:57 That's very important. 10:58 It's critical. 10:58 Good SAP friends #1 then #2 is our complementary solutions. 11:04 You may be using BTP, but BTP is focused on SAP primarily for Boomi. 11:10 Boomi is, as you said, many to many. 11:13 This is the whole point. 11:14 We can connect SAP to everything. 11:16 So bringing rich information to your SAP environment, that's what we're all about. 11:21 Then lastly, Boomi as a platform to govern AI is something that we can integrate with SAP today and it look every company on this show floor here, I walked around, I did my little tour. 11:34 I'm pretty sure AI is at every booth like that's that. 11:36 I have heard the term over the last couple of days. 11:39 It feels like it, right? 11:40 So, but again, how are you going to govern and manage all this stuff connected to your SAP environment? 11:46 Bhumi perfectly complements SAP there. 11:49 So in that spirit, as you walk around and we've got upwards of 100 of the major sponsors and technology companies on the floor today, how do you think about forging partnerships with many of them? 12:00 What is the role that partners will play for Boomi as you go forward? 12:03 I think it's how do we, how do we in a more deep and compelling fashion, solve business problems for customers? 12:09 I'm acutely aware of the problems that Boomi solves, right? 12:12 Integration, automation, we solve those problems. 12:16 There are so many amazing organizations here. 12:18 And by the way, if you're not here and you're within earshot, you, you should get a booth here. 12:21 It's pretty amazing. 12:23 But for me, I think about how do we solve deeper, wider, more valuable business problems for the customer. 12:29 I'm walking around here looking at a few companies we should buy. 12:32 OK, all right, more to come on that one. 12:34 We'll do that in a future podcast, I'm sure, but that is the nature of the technology business. 12:39 You come together, you put things together, and you get bigger and stronger together. 12:43 Yeah. 12:44 Yeah. 12:44 So let's switch gears for a second because a lot of people will want to learn who's Steve Lucas. 12:49 They want to know the guy. 12:50 All right, so we talked a little bit about your professional ascension, but what they might not know is you're a hell of a car enthusiast. 12:57 I do like cars. 12:57 Yeah. 12:58 And, And last night at dinner, I heard this amazing story about driving a Formula One circuit and getting out and something that, you know, I'll never probably you get the opportunity to tell me a little bit about what forged your passion for cars and maybe give an anecdote on that Formula One traffic. 13:15 I love looking at a car and understanding how all the components come together to perform at, at the maximum capability to push it to the absolute edge. 13:28 It's not odd that I run an integration company that helps organizations, you know, bring all their components together to perform at their maximum level. 13:36 I'm fascinated by that and I'm fascinated by the tuning and the tweaking that goes into just ringing that absolute last bit of performance out driving on a Formula One track. 13:44 Like certainly America's, we were talking about that. 13:47 I will say it's not often that I go 100 and 7000 and 80 miles an hour on a, on a Formula One track. 13:54 But the the amazing thing to me is when you you get out on that track, you very quickly appreciate how good the professional drivers are and how quickly you realize you're not that. 14:04 Yeah, I can. 14:05 I can readily appreciate that. 14:07 170 sounds to me like pretty doggone fast. 14:10 And it is. 14:11 And I'm sure the pros look at that and go, why are we walking around the track? 14:14 Exactly, Exactly. 14:15 Well, that was the thing. 14:16 I had a pro in the passenger seat coaching me. 14:18 I'm driving. 14:19 And I think you thought it was a cute effort as I went around around the track. 14:22 Yeah. 14:23 Yeah. 14:23 Very good, Very good. 14:24 Hey, I hear you've got a book in the making and the books coming out. 14:27 And I know our insider members are going to want to get a copy of that and, and really make it part of their fundamental understanding. 14:33 Tell us a little bit about the book you got coming out and how they're going to be able to get their hands on it. 14:38 The the title is digital impact awesome. 14:41 And the the subtitle is the human element of AI driven transformation. 14:47 The whole point is this technology exists to enrich our lives, not not be burdensome, right? 14:54 But the people behind the technology as well as the people that benefit from the technology, I wanted to tell those stories, the people that are identifying new solutions and new opportunities. 15:05 Take the Australian Red Cross as a case in point. 15:09 They used in this case Boomi technology to be able to scale their emergency response capability from 30 responses a day to 300,000. 15:18 Say that again, 30 to 300,000 emergency responses in 24 hours. 15:26 But that's what you have to do, right? 15:27 And you don't know when an emergency strikes. 15:29 So yesterday can be fine, but tomorrow it could be a tsunami, it could be a natural disaster that that strains an organization. 15:37 And we gave them that scale capability. 15:39 But even beautiful examples, the American Cancer Society, which uses again, the the Boomi platform to schedule rides for cancer patients when they go get chemotherapy. 15:49 My mom went through that and used it. 15:51 It's just there's something human about that. 15:55 So the book is about those stories, but how we can use and harness AI to transform our lives for the better. 16:01 And I will tell you this, Jamie, I believe that AI, it is here to to give us time back in our lives like technology has really never done before. 16:13 And as we get that time back, what will we as humans do to become more human? 16:17 No, I think that's a great, a great segue here to the my closing discussion. 16:22 If you had one or two bits of advice to give from ISAP insider members, what should they take away and really focus on as they start the next phase of their journey? 16:33 Well, as our name Boomi implies, you need a foundation. 16:38 You need something that brings together all of the the, the digital sprawl that we're experiencing, the apps, the data databases, the API's, and now the AI agents. 16:50 It's so hard to to make the leap to that next platform like S4 HANA, for example, without a foundation that allows you to get your arms around all that digital sprawl. 17:01 We can deliver that, that's one thing. 17:03 But then 2, we're all preparing for the, the agentic era, you, as you said, the agentic era coming as we prepare for that. 17:10 Are you ready? 17:11 Is your data ready? 17:13 Is is it of the right quality? 17:15 Do do you have the, the accessibility for your data that AI is going to need? 17:20 Because here's the bottom line. 17:21 All of these things that have come and gone, all these amazing technologies, the one thing that holds true garbage in garbage out, right. 17:28 And that's been an age-old problem for as long as you and I have been in our professional career. 17:31 You're not going to change with AI. 17:33 Are you ready? 17:34 Really good. 17:35 And I think that's sage advice for every one of our members. 17:38 Are you ready? 17:39 Look yourself in the mirror where you see that ***** in the armor. 17:43 Let's focus on it together. 17:45 Steve, it is really a pleasure to have you here. 17:47 Hopefully, we'll have you back at many more. 17:49 We'd love to have a constant conversation and keep in tune with where Boomi's taking us. 17:54 No other place I'd want to be. 17:55 All right. 17:56 Thank you so much, Sir. 17:56 Thank you. 17:57 Pleasure. 17:58 Thank you.