Not every day does an IT consulting opportunity get sourced after a hot yoga workout. But that did happen for NITCO’s Lance Shealy.
His wife teaches at a Houston-area studio, and after a grueling session, Lance was talking over a frosty beverage with another exhausted class member. That fellow yoga practitioner turned out to be the chief operating officer of a near-billion-dollar construction equipment company.
When the man learned that Lance is the sales director of a technology firm specializing in data integration and API management, he asked, “What can you tell me about MuleSoft?”
“I said, ‘It’s going to eat you up in consulting fees long term,” Lance recalled. “He said, ‘It’s funny you say that because I’ve got a consultant group spending a lot of time now, and it’s getting very expensive.’ He talked about how they were approaching a breaking point because they were switching over to a new ERP system.”
Lance suggested it might be a perfect time to consider transitioning from MuleSoft to Boomi for integrating systems and processes. Two months later, after another yoga class, the COO mentioned that his company was starting a project with Boomi the following week. The business soon brought in NITCO to manage its growing portfolio of Boomi integrations.
We sat down with Lance and Brian Heck, a NITCO business development manager, to discuss how the firm assists global companies with a broad range of digital transformation initiatives, the limitations of MuleSoft’s code-heavy approach processes, and Boomi’s low-code/no-code advantages. We’ve condensed portions of our interview for length and clarity.
Could you please tell us more about the value NITCO offers?
Lance Shealy: We’re based in Houston and have between 150 and 200 consultants. Over a hundred of those consultants are offshore in Hyderabad (India), and we have a little over 50 here in the US. We’re very good at putting together project teams with a combination of offshore and onshore, which makes our rates very reasonable from an expense standpoint.
Brian Heck: We’ve been around since 2008, and since then, 99.8% of our projects have been on time and on budget, which is very different from the results seen by most consultants. Another big differentiator is that we only use W2 employees. We don’t use temporary workers because there’s often no loyalty to the project or the customer. If they’re not really invested, they might leave mid-job. Then you have knowledge loss, which increases the time and cost to complete the project. It allows us to deliver more efficiently than most consulting companies.
You both are also Boomi alumni — does that help with NITCO projects?
Lance Shealy: I was an enterprise account rep at Boomi for about five years, and Brian was there for three years. We know the product so well that we often finish projects so fast that clients will say, “You guys have that done already?” We also have a lot of experience explaining the differences between Boomi and MuleSoft. When I was a rep and was competing directly against MuleSoft, and I could persuade the prospect to ask for a head-to-head proof of concept, I never lost because MuleSoft couldn’t do that. For instance, we were doing some UiPath consulting for a client, and they mentioned they needed an iPaaS (integration platform as a service) and had boiled it down to MuleSoft and Boomi. I told them my story with the products and how MuleSoft won’t do proofs of concept. So, NITCO went in and did a free PoC with Boomi, and the client absolutely fell in love with the Boomi platform.
What are the common challenges businesses have with MuleSoft?
Brian Heck: With the growth of AI, low-code/no-code capabilities have become mainstream across every application because businesses all care about agility and speed. MuleSoft is an old-world tech tool of hand-coding. People don’t need to spend a hundred hours coding an integration when you could have a low-code or no-code solution and do it in an hour. Also, as coding becomes less prevalent, when people switch jobs, it’s very difficult for someone else to go in and unravel all of that custom script when something needs to be fixed. But when someone leaves who uses Boomi, it’s a lot easier to learn and make changes as business requirements change.
Lance Shealy: When something is tech-heavy and requires a lot of code, you’re using consultants. They start getting more and more expensive, and you end up getting into tech debt. Even if you wanted to get off of MuleSoft, a business might feel like they’ve gone too far down the path, and it’s hard for them to leave without a major expense. That’s why some businesses end up just sticking with it. They say, “Well, we hear you. It might cost a little bit more. But we’re going to stay with it because we use Salesforce, and it’s in the Salesforce family.”
What do you see as the major differences between Boomi and MuleSoft?
Brian Heck: The time to value is exponentially faster with Boomi. So, looking at it from a strictly price standpoint, the implementation cost with MuleSoft is going to be more expensive. MuleSoft is more expensive for subscriptions. Maintenance and support are going to be more expensive. Boomi also has automated updates six times a year. Because it’s a single-instance, multi-tenant platform, everyone gets updates. It’s synchronized. MuleSoft’s not like that. It’s extremely expensive to upgrade and maintain. So, from a scalability and maintenance perspective, it’s far more expensive and time-consuming.
Lance Shealy: If you’re looking at these two products, Boomi is a lower risk.
What has the equipment company’s experience been like with NITCO and Boomi?
Brian Heck: We leveraged Boomi AI features like Boomi DesignGen and Boomi Scribe to help develop and design a seamless integration process between all the systems. We’ve configured 65 data flows. There are 1,200 workflow executions done per day, and the operation volume is 250,000 transactions per day. The client is extremely happy with Boomi and with NITCO’s work. They were blown away by how quickly the migration was completed and how seamless the transition was compared to their previous experience with MuleSoft.
What trends are you seeing in the market?
Lance Shealy: Everyone is now talking about AI. They’re trying to sort out the difference between real AI and made-up AI.
Brian Heck: I agree that the biggest issue we’re seeing is that people want to come and figure out how AI can solve something. But people want something to solve with AI when maybe the product isn’t ready to solve with AI. They don’t really think through the business problem and whether AI can solve it. Maybe it can be solved with integration or something else. There’s this whole idea that everything needs to be AI and automated. That will be true eventually. But people get ahead of themselves. They’re not even ready to put AI into their company yet.
Lance Shealy: We try to get them to slow down and say, “What are the real business outcomes you’re trying to solve as opposed to solving them with AI? What’s the value of the business outcome you’re trying to achieve?” Our goal is to get them to a use case first.
You probably haven’t scoped out many other projects at yoga.
Lance Shealy: Not many IT managers come into our classes.
Up Close With NITCO
Headquarters: Houston
Founded: 2008
Employees: 150+
Services: More than 100 enterprise solutions across areas including AI, machine learning, RPA (robotic process automation), application development and integration, cloud services, and more. NITCO specializes in aligning clients’ organizational and technology goals.
Boomi-NITCO Partnership: The combination of the Boomi Enterprise Platform and NITCO’s implementation expertise accelerates digital transformation. NITCO and Boomi currently work together with about 30 customers, supporting a range of integration, EDI, and automation initiatives. The collaboration continues to expand as the Boomi platform and NITCO’s implementation expertise make it easier for clients to accelerate digital transformation.
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