DXC, Boomi Partner On Agentic AI Automation

‘If you want to take some action on one of the systems in this complex estate that's on the other side of the world, and you're not interconnecting all those systems to make it feasible, agentic AI is worthless. It's just another buzzword. With Boomi, you can actually begin to see the power of agentic AI come to life if we make this partnership work,’ says T.R. Newcomb, DXC’s chief revenue officer.

Global technology services provider DXC Technology and automation technology developer Boomi Tuesday unveiled a new strategic relationship under which the two look to redefine how enterprises automate and integrate operations with AI, streamline their application modernization, and accelerate their agentic AI adoption at scale.

The two companies are also working together to build a Boomi Center of Excellence to specifically tackle issues around agentic AI at scale.

Agentic AI is everywhere in the news today, but there's tremendous potential for the folks who figure it out and get it right, said T.R. Newcomb, chief revenue officer for Ashburn, Va.-based DXC.

[Related: DXC Is Pressure Testing AI As ‘Client Zero’: CEO Raul Fernandez]

“These agents are going to require access to lots and lots of real data that's sequestered in silos across lots of different systems,” Newcomb told CRN. “And one of the things that we got so excited about when we first started talking to Boomi is we manage a lot of the world's most complex IT estates for Fortune 500 companies and public sector clients who are suffering from exactly that problem. They've got dozens of systems with data that's siloed across a lot of different functions. And if you want to unleash an agent to respond to a ticket and you don't have all the relevant data across the entire organization, with agentic AI, it will be garbage in and garbage out.”

Boomi can unlock the power of agentic AI not just to get a quality response from the agent, but also to affect the agent's recommendations, Newcomb said.

“If you want to take some action on one of the systems in this complex estate that's on the other side of the world, and you're not interconnecting all those systems to make it feasible, agentic AI is worthless,” he said. “It's just another buzzword. With Boomi, you can actually begin to see the power of agentic AI come to life if we make this partnership work.”

DXC’s customer bases are the perfect proving ground to show the power of Boomi’s automation and interconnection platform, Newcomb said. “We can really start to spin up agents that add real value,” he said.

DXC has already been bringing agentic AI to its clients, Newcomb said. For instance, the company earlier this month unveiled a partnership with agentic AI-focused security technology developer 7AI to launch a new DXC Agentic Security Operations Center.

“We are increasingly spinning up partnerships with third parties like 7AI to deliver very specific use cases,” he said. “In the case of 7AI, it's security focused. And we're making ourselves ‘customer zero’ for a lot of these tools that we're using. We're beginning to roll out more formal partnerships with best-in-class vendors. Boomi and 7AI are the first two we’ve announced publicly. We hope to unveil a slew of others shortly”

Newcomb said DXC recognizes there is still a lot of hype around agentic AI.

“We're still very early in terms of actually being able to affect meaningful business outcomes,” he said. “That said, we are seeing some really strong proof points in terms of being able to reduce the amount of human beings that are required to deliver the outcomes customers want. You are never, in our opinion, going to remove humans from the loop completely. You're going to need an expert pair of hands and eyes monitoring the entire process. But we've seen, based on several internal use cases, some very successful applications of agentic AI in increasing efficiency, and by that, I mean the number of people you need to run a system or process.”

DXC is taking a very bold position on driving application modernization and enterprise AI readiness to market, said McAllister, Boomi’s senior vice president of global alliances and channels.

“We think DXC’s approach is unique and more convicted than we're seeing with other global systems integrators of their size,” McAllister told CRN. “They are choosing to lead with Boomi to be that common platform for enterprise application integration and automation in getting their customers and prospects ready for the advent of AI.”

The DXC-Boomi relationship is focused on a few key areas, said McAllister said.

“One is application modernization, which DXC is very committed to bringing to market,” McAllister told CRN. “Part of that is cleaning up the application integration layer, which most organizations have not done right. If you think about all the clients that we, respectively, have in the market, all the companies that exist, most have 300 to 1,000 different applications across their enterprise. Most systems integrators’ approach is, ‘We are very happy to continue to proliferate those for you, add new ones, modernize old ones.’ DXC is saying that's not as interesting as making all of those work together, modernizing them, to get customers ready for the onslaught coming with agentic AI. Without great data, without a common foundation layer around all of those systems for the data, companies just aren't going to succeed.”

What's unique in the partnership is the level of commitment Boomi is making with DXC, McAllister said. Boomi has multiple relationships with channel partners who understand clients’ business and technology problems and integrate Boomi to solve them, he said.

“What's unique here is that mutually, we are making a very strong commitment to each other to build a Boomi Center of Excellence to specifically tackle these problems at scale,” he said. “We are focused on helping DXC develop this world-class Boomi Center of Excellence and to specifically apply the best practices and knowledge and integrations and capabilities that Boomi has towards customer situations.”

For example, McAllister said, the two have common partners such as ServiceNow where Boomi has very strong, well-documented preferred relationships, as does DXC.

“Determining where we can create accelerators to help drive value across global enterprises using Boomi, ServiceNow, and DXC capabilities together is something we are mutually invested in,” he said.

McAllister said this is the first time Boomi has built a Boomi Center of Excellence

at this size and scale.

“Certainly, there are centers of excellence and commitments around Boomi practices in the market, but the level of commitment we're making together is well above and beyond what we're seeing with others in the market,” he said.

The new Boomi Center of Excellence being built by DXC already has a sizable number of employees trained and certified in integrating Boomi on behalf of shared customers and doing so in a way that ensures all security concerns are addressed, Newcomb said.

“We’re making sure customers get the full benefit of Boomi, and we'll have a very sizable team,” he said. “We're not disclosing how large it is yet. We've got a fairly sizable team that we're going to continue to invest in and grow as more and more of our customers ask for this. We’ll bring in the people and train them on the platform to deliver the value of Boomi inside the tech estates we manage.”

The mandate of the Boomi Center of Excellence is to unlock the power of the Boomi platform for DXC’s and Boomi’s shared customers, Newcomb said.

“We want to make sure they are able to experience exactly what we articulated at the top of this call, which is interconnecting all their systems to stand up agentic AI and make processes more efficient across the entire enterprise,” he said. “If we drive that outcome for our shared customers, that would be tremendous success.”