(Pictured above: Boomi CEO Chris McNabb addresses attendees during his keynote at last week’s Boomi World in Washington, D.C.)

Boomi, the Dell Technologies subsidiary that provides application integration middleware and tools, is lining up partners — with Accenture taking the lead — to build chatbots into their clients’ solutions based on the company’s new Bot framework.

Chatbots that use conversational AI represent an expanding opportunity for partners and customers to tap the Boomi iPaaS integration platform, company officials emphasized at last week’s annual Boomi World conference, held in Washington, D.C. The gathering, which included the Boomi Partner Summit, provided the company’s annual road map and vision.

Boomi’s top executives and technologists outlined some notable deliverables including the conversational AI enhancements, the company’s API gateway and support for event-driven architectures such as those that process large data streams from IoT-based devices, mobile apps and social networks. The company also gave an early preview of forthcoming capability called Boomi Insights that will provide improved views of the relationship between different forms of metadata.

Chris McNabb, Boomi’s CEO, underscored an expanded focus on helping partners tap the conversational AI capabilities already available in its iPaaS integration platform using Flow, the company’s new SaaS-based workflow automation offering.

Flow, which rolled out last year, is built on with the assets from the company’s acquisition of ManyWho in early 2017. In May, the company quietly released its new Boomi Bot Framework as a low-code tool for developers to build chatbots using Flow that can use any combination of business rules and AI.

Now the company is working with partners to enable them to use the new Boomi Bot framework and Flow to create chatbots in their own solutions. “We’re building an ecosystem here,” McNabb told attendees during the opening Boomi World keynote. “The ecosystem is the key to everything that goes on and how we are combining our capabilities.”

Accenture’s Laetitia Cailleteau

Boomi’s first announced partner in this effort, Accenture, has 300 solutions deployed that use AI to improve customer service, according to the company’s managing director Laetitia Cailleteau, who joined McNabe on stage. “This is going to be truly revolutionary,” she, said. Cailleteau cited an Accenture survey that found 56% of C-level execs believe that conversational AI will have a significant impact on their business.

“One of the key things of conversational AI is to be much more human driven and customer driven,” Cailleteau said. “And with the power of our anthropologists and sociologists, we ca

n understand what people want and how they want it. We can craft some of those most beautiful experiences. And with the power of Boomi in the background making the time to value much faster, that mix of knowledge together is going to change the world.”

While there’s no shortage of established bot and AI frameworks from the likes of Amazon, Microsoft, Google, IBM, SAP, Salesforce and numerous others, Boomi characterizes itself as point of connection for disparate platforms, though the company is not alone in that field either.

In addition to its partnership with Accenture to extend its new conversational AI capabilities, Boomi announced that it is partnering with Deloitte, Intel and SAP to…

…integrate SAP S4/HANA and SAP Leonardo within its own applications and third-party apps.

Boomi’s effort to collaborate with partners on simplifying the process of enhancing apps with conversational AI or chatbots should be a welcome extension to the SaaS-based iPaaS middleware connectivity platform, which now integrates with 1,500 applications.

Slalom’s Oliver Asmus

“I really think that’s going to open up a whole realm of possibilities not only for customers and what they’re looking for, but also for developers and engineers to better deliver the solutions on the platform,” said Oliver Asmus, practice area lead at Slalom, during an interview with Channel Futures. Asmus said Slalom has 150 certified Boomi professional services consultants, among its largest partners, and said the business has grown 13x over the past five years.

API Management Updates

Also during Boomi World and the partner summit, the company outlined how it will seek to broaden its ecosystem with the expansion of its API management offering, introduced at last year’s event. Boomi said it is fleshing out its fledgling Connected Enteprise  API Management portfolio with three important new capabilities: API Proxy, API Gateway and an expansion of the API Developer Portal that the company released last year. The new functions will provide more complete security and improved scalability through the gateway and integration with third-party APIs.

Boomi’s Div Manickam

“We see an opportunity where our ability to actually enable every application, every device and every business is huge,” said Boomi product evangelist Div Manickam, in an interview with Channel Futures. “And we can do that, because of our distribution architecture. Our runtime allows you to actually do that throughout the platform and then it’s also providing seamless, easy management of APIs. A lot of our partners are starting to see more and more of those capabilities.”

The company, which rolled out an early adopter program earlier this year, has customers and partners that are tapping the proxy, gateway and developer portal capabilities. Until now, it was limited to applications and data behind the firewall. The new capabilities will allow for external data connectivity.

“We added the API proxy and gateway to support externalization,” Manickam said. “In prior releases you could create an API catalog, but it would be behind the firewall. The new proxy acts as a DMZ, and it actually lets customers now allow those APIs to be consumed outside of their firewall.”

EDA Architecture Extensions

With new requirements for streaming data driven by interchange of IoT sensor data and content from social feeds, the expansion of Boomi’s EDA ecosystem includes collaboration with sister company Dell EMC around its Pravega project, as well as with Solace to integrate with its PubSub+ platform. Boomi already has partnerships with various providers of message brokers, event meshes and streaming data and publish and subscribe platforms. Including Amazon SQS, Microsoft’s Azure Service Bus services and Pivotal’s RabbitMQ.