June 12, 2025
Speakers:
Leon Gelderblom: Director of IT Apps and Platforms, DS Smith
Ann Maya: CTO, EMEA, Boomi
Paulo Valerio: Head of Delivery, EMEA, Hitachi Digital Services
Shashank Jain: Head of Manufacturing EMEA Hitachi Digital Services
Event Introduction
In today’s digitally connected world, integration has become the backbone of business transformation. To explore this critical topic, leaders from Hitachi Digital Services, Boomi, and DS Smith came together for a thought-provoking roundtable hosted by Hitachi. The event focused on the evolution of integration platforms, the cultural and technical shifts they demand, and the real-world business value they unlock.
Held as part of Hitachi’s thought leadership series, the session brought together technology strategists, enterprise architects, and business leaders to share insights, lessons learned, and forward-looking strategies. With a strong emphasis on collaboration, agility, and innovation, the discussion offered a rare behind-the-scenes look at how global enterprises are overcoming legacy complexity and accelerating digital transformation through modern integration.
Whether you’re a CTO, a digital architect, or a business leader shaping transformation initiatives, this themes from this event will help you better understand what it takes to succeed with modern integration platforms.
Understanding Modern Integration and Its Challenges
Modern integration is more than a technology shift—it represents a foundational transformation in how businesses connect systems, data, and processes across the enterprise. At its core, modern integration replaces rigid, legacy systems with flexible, scalable platforms that support continuous innovation and adaptability. It enables companies to move beyond static, monolithic architectures toward agile ecosystems where information flows seamlessly.
One of the most pressing challenges businesses face today is the continued reliance on legacy systems. These aging platforms are often difficult to evolve, expensive to maintain, and fundamentally limit the pace of transformation. Their architecture typically fosters data silos and fragmented workflows, leading to inefficiencies, slower time-to-market, and reduced responsiveness to market demands. Custom-built legacy systems, such as Microsoft BizTalk, are particularly hard to upgrade or integrate with newer technologies, creating a major roadblock to progress.
Application and API sprawl further complicate this landscape. As organisations adopt more software tools and expose more endpoints, they risk losing control over their data and security posture. Fragmented toolsets not only create governance challenges but also introduce vulnerabilities that can compromise entire systems. This underscores the need for centralised integration strategies that are secure by design and able to scale alongside the business.
In this context, the role of integration platforms becomes critical. These platforms act as the connective tissue across an organisation’s digital ecosystem, enabling real-time data exchange, automated workflows, and secure interoperability between systems. When well-implemented, they unlock faster innovation, reduce costs, and enhance operational efficiency. Teams are empowered to build, connect, and innovate faster—with modern platforms often delivering over 40% development cost savings and cutting application management services (AMS) costs by more than half.
Driving Business Value Through Modern Integration
The benefits of adopting a modern integration platform are far-reaching. For starters, businesses gain the ability to deliver products and services more quickly, respond to customer needs with agility, and adapt to market changes without major technical overhauls. Integration also provides a strong foundation for automation, data governance, and analytics, which are critical for scaling AI and other emerging technologies.
Moreover, modern integration supports a broader cultural shift within organisations. By enabling low-code and no-code development, it empowers citizen developers—non-technical users who can create their own solutions—thereby fostering a more innovative and inclusive digital culture. This democratisation of technology accelerates delivery cycles, reduces IT bottlenecks, and enhances employee engagement.
Security and privacy are also enhanced when integration platforms are built with governance in mind. Rather than retrofitting compliance measures, modern solutions embed these controls at the architectural level, ensuring data flows are traceable, secure, and in line with regulatory requirements. Additionally, observability and resilience become built-in features, making it easier to detect issues, optimise performance, and maintain uptime.
AI plays a growing role in integration, not just by automating tasks but also by intelligently recommending, testing, and managing integration flows. Agentic AI—the use of autonomous AI systems that act on goals—enables organisations to go beyond automation into orchestration and optimisation. This is increasingly vital as companies scale digital services and adopt more third-party tools, such as cloud-native applications, ERPs, and collaboration platforms.
Voices from the Field: Hitachi, Boomi, and DS Smith
The journey to modern integration was vividly illustrated during a roundtable discussion featuring leaders from Hitachi Digital Services, Boomi, and DS Smith. Their insights provide a practical view of how organisations are navigating integration challenges and achieving transformational outcomes.
Hitachi Digital Services, represented by Shashank and Paulo, emphasised the importance of viewing integration not just through a technical lens but as a driver of long-term business change. They advocate for co-creation with clients, encouraging an engineering mindset and culture of continuous improvement. For Hitachi, success is measured not just in delivery, but in the sustainability of transformation—how well integration supports broader business goals, empowers talent, and enables agility.
Boomi, a leading integration platform provider, offers a composable, cloud-native solution that is both vendor-agnostic and rich in functionality. As explained by Ann, Boomi’s CTO for EMEA, the platform focuses on delivering value through integration automation, API management, and data orchestration. Boomi’s acquisition of Thru has enhanced its data integration capabilities, and its use of AI helps customers accelerate everything from testing to documentation. The platform’s strength lies in its ability to balance technical robustness with user accessibility—enabling both IT teams and business users to build powerful workflows.
DS Smith, a multinational packaging company, shared their experience transitioning from a heavily customised BizTalk system to a modern integration architecture powered by Boomi on AWS. According to Leon, their IT Director, the decision to “buy” rather than “build” stemmed from the need to overcome legacy complexity and reduce operational risk. Building internally was no longer viable, especially given the deep customisation and unsupported legacy components.
By moving to Boomi, DS Smith gained a more resilient and scalable platform that supports faster onboarding and innovation. The results speak for themselves: they’ve reduced development costs by 40%, cut AMS expenses by over 50%, and migrated nearly half of their 12,000 integration flows. AI significantly streamlined their testing and UAT processes, reducing user testing effort by as much as 50%. Perhaps most importantly, their integration journey was supported by a comprehensive change management approach that included early engagement, strong internal branding, and continuous communication.
Strategic Considerations for Implementation
The shift to modern integration is not without its challenges, but with the right strategy, the transition can deliver outsised returns. A key element is aligning integration initiatives with broader business objectives. This means defining clear success metrics, translating technical features into business value, and ensuring executive sponsorship from the outset.
Cultural change is often as significant as the technical transformation. Teams must adopt a new mindset—one that values cross-functional collaboration, iterative development, and empowerment at all levels. Citizen development plays a crucial role here, allowing non-technical stakeholders to take part in building and optimizing workflows.
Overcoming resistance requires visible, early wins and a strong communication plan. It’s essential to clearly articulate the benefits of integration—not just in terms of cost or efficiency, but in how it enables better decision-making, improves customer experience, and reduces risk. Maintaining this momentum means building platforms that are not only powerful, but also sustainable and adaptable for future innovation.
Successful implementation depends on a few core principles: build with security and resilience from day one; prioritise maintainability to avoid accumulating tech debt; ensure integration is vendor-neutral to preserve flexibility; and above all, focus on delivering real, measurable value to the business.
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