API Management With Boomi

E3 Magazine: What key challenges do you currently see for companies working with SAP systems regarding API management?

Markus Müller, Boomi: The good thing the problems with API management are kind of universal, if you will. So they're not limited to SAP or NetSuite. But for SAP customers, traditionally, it has been a little bit problematic to share and to open up in regards with APIs. But the thing that they kind of like learned in the last few years is building APIs, offering APIs. And the challenge that we now have in API management is governance. So we have all these APIs. But how do we manage them? How do we govern them, how we make sure that consumers actually create value out of it? So these are the topics that we are now facing.

E3: What would you say is the biggest blind spot Boomi has when it comes to API management?

Muller: So the big blind spot that we had was essentially that in the past we saw API management as something that's added on to integration. The good thing is we realized that and we did these two acquisitions last year with APIIDA and Mashery, which addressed this blind spot. So now our new comprehensive offering that was released in February goes all the way. So we can do that governance. We can do that governance even on non-Boomi APIs. So that was the blind spot we had. But now that has been addressed. And right now we're in the process of telling the world that it has been addressed.

E3: And how does Boomi specifically support the integration of SAP solutions with other cloud and on prem systems?

Muller: Yeah. So we have Boomi for SAP is a product that plugs into a customer's SAP and is SAP certified. I think it's the only solution in the market that's actually certified and allows us to get a lot of data out and into SAP without a lot of fuss. And of course, we have the whole power of the web platform behind that. So we have our integration canvas. We have connectors to 600 different systems ready to use that we can just connect to SAP, to bring that together. And of course all of these integrations that we build, all of these endpoints, they can also be exposed as APIs. It can be exposed as tools for AI agents. So we kind of like open up all of the SAP data to whatever a customer is using.

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"There are still a lot of people who
have the mindset fom 20 or 30 years ago
when it comes to SAP."

Markus Müller,
Global CTO of API Management,
Boomi

E3: And in your view, what are the biggest hurdles when companies attempt to integrate SAP systems into modern cloud architectures?

Muller: I think one of the big hurdles is that SAP has a lot of, I wouldn't call it legacy, but a lot of history, right? So there are just things that have been done in SAP like that for the last 30 years. So that's the way to do it. So in contrary to other systems, maybe you have some more change management to do—you have some more convincing to do. Because modern SAP is not your old SAP from 20, 30 years ago. But there are still a lot of people that have the mindset from 20 or 30 years ago when it comes to SAP. So you have two battlegrounds, if you will. You have the technology, and you have the people. So first thing that you need to do is convince the people that our modern SAP is cloud based to a large degree. And then you need to open up and make all the integrations work with the outside world. And ideally by using standard technology and not something custom.

E3: So, keeping the core clean. Now, Boomi isn't the only player in the iPaaS space. Why should an SAP customer choose you over MuleSoft or Informatica, for example?

Muller: The easy answer is because we are ten times bigger. We have been named in the Gartner Leaders Quadrant ten times. We have been ranked highest in execution and in ability to execute, in the last one. That basically shows that we know what we are talking about. With Boomi in general, it's our point that it's not vaporware. Everything we tell customers we can do, we actually can do. Like that's just one of the prerequisites with us here. Apart from that, Boomi’s brand promises are that you keep control of your costs. So we have some different cost models that set us apart from the competition. And we put special emphasis on ease of use on citizen development of integration, citizen development of agents. So that is something that we highly value: making enterprise grade functionality available to non-experts as well. If you are an expert, of course you could go in deep, but with Boomi you always get ease of use, cost effectiveness, and just one of the best platforms that there is.

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