To ensure business agility while keeping operational risk in check, integration remains a necessity. At the most basic level, integration is the process of connecting disparate data sources — whether cloud-based, on-premise or a hybrid — to allow data to flow to exactly where it needs to be.
A recent Vanson Bourne survey of 900 IT decision-makers worldwide shows a clear focus on integration. According to the report, eight of 10 IT leaders believe that greater connectivity should be their number one priority.
The Challenges of Hybrid IT
IT teams face an ever-expanding array of cloud-native applications, cloud platforms and smart devices that require integration — both with other clouds and with existing on-premise systems.
Data growth is rapidly accelerating. As the volume and variety of data sources continue to increase, so does the complexity of integrations.
At the same time, the relationship between IT and business owners is shifting. In many companies, budgets and decision-making that used to reside exclusively with IT teams have been distributed to business groups such as sales and marketing. This has led to the emergence of an unsupported bring-your-own-application (shadow IT) model where business users operate outside the direct control of an IT department.
To ensure business agility while keeping operational risk in check, integration is a necessity.
Integration Alone Is Not Enough
As the integration landscape becomes increasingly complex, another critical challenge is emerging: determining which data is correct. Is it the data in Salesforce? In Zendesk? In another application or customer relationship management (CRM) system? Where do your “golden records” live?
This data explosion also creates another challenge — how does your organization provide its data to internal and external constituents, including vendors and partners?
These changing dynamics demand that organizations adopt a holistic long-term integration strategy designed around connecting everything.
In order to succeed, organizations need an agile mindset and a bigger toolkit. It’s important to put the right technology in place to meet the needs of your organization today and allow for future growth. The integration tool of choice should support end-to-end connectivity and collaboration with business users. Piecemeal approaches and project-centric planning simply can’t scale.
A Unified Platform for Building the Connected Business
The end goal of integration is to streamline and automate workflows to empower employees, deepen collaboration, and provide superior customer experiences.
A unified integration platform can help break down data and organizational silos while building workflow connections.
To achieve these business improvements, connecting data, applications and devices is only the beginning. As more and more application and data get integrated, it is critical to ensure that data is clean, comprehensive and up-to-date. Organizations must be able to trust their data to accurately inform business decisions.
With trustworthy data at hand, organizations can engage with partner and customers using both traditional EDI and newer API-based protocols in a secure and scalable way, by exposing the right data to the right stakeholders at the right time on the devices of their choice.
To achieve this, organizations need a unified integration platform that drives pervasive connectivity while providing the efficiencies and “economies of skill” that come from bringing all integration tasks onto one platform.
The Unified Boomi Platform
Boomi helps organizations integrate everything: people, processes, applications, data, devices and things — the parts of the Connected Business. With its flexibility, scalability, and ease-of-use, our open, low-code, cloud-native integration platform delivers the speed and agility needed to achieve digital transformation.
With Boomi, organizations can:
- Connect Everything – Help people, processes, applications, data and devices all work together.
- Engage Everywhere – Gain a complete understanding of customers and interact with them across any channel, device or platform.
- Run Anywhere – Eliminate barriers to your business. Support customers, partners and employees how they want, wherever they might be.
Eight of 10 IT leaders believe that greater connectivity should be their number one priority.
Boomi Platform Components
The Boomi platform comprises five components, designed to meet dynamic business needs. Boomi provides an integration infrastructure that is designed to support the ever-increasing volume of connection points and data and transform connections into business value.
Boomi Application and Data Integration helps you to break down data silos by quickly and easily integrating all your application and data sources. Boomi seamlessly supports all of your integration patterns — real-time, event-based, batch, ETL, asynchronous processes and more.
Boomi B2B/EDI Management provides an easy-to-use, agile, cloud-based system to manage your trading partner network. You can rapidly onboard trading partners, support traditional EDI standards (as well as newer web services), and monitor all your partner interactions in real time through a centralized portal.
Boomi Master Data Hub is a data quality hub as a service, making it possible for you to collect operational insights from across your business to drive data-driven decisions. Since connecting multiple source systems is easy with Boomi, you can quickly consolidate master data from all parts of your business and enforce quality standards that your organization can trust.
Boomi API Management provides a unified and scalable cloud-based platform to centrally manage and enrich API interactions through their entire lifecycle. With Boomi, you can rapidly create and publish any endpoint as an API on-premise or in the cloud, as well as manage and control APIs.
Boomi Flow provides a low-code development platform to create customer journeys and automate simple and sophisticated workflows to efficiently drive your business. Boomi customers can extend their application and data integration capabilities from workflow-based business applications to online/offline mobile apps and web portals.
Helping IT Say “Yes” To the Business
Boomi addresses the integration challenges organizations face every day when dealing with the complexities of dynamic hybrid IT environments.
The platform is built with a distributed architecture, which is both flexible and scalable to support your integration needs both today and in future. Boomi’s open platform also ensures the widest range of connectivity possible for continuous innovation, ruling out potentially costly vendor lock-in. With the industry’s best uptime, Boomi handles all your toughest technical challenges — including upgrades, security and compliance.
Boomi is designed to accelerate productivity for all users of the platform. Our drag-and-drop interfaces, libraries of prebuilt connectors, ready to use components, and support for custom scripting help accelerate integration projects for technical and non-technical users. And Boomi’s unified platform delivers a 360-degree view of your business, helping you to identify patterns and unlock the power of artificial intelligence and machine learning.
Boomi’s unified platform provides a foundation for organizations around the globe to drive digital transformation. Effectively, Boomi helps IT say “yes” to the business.
Do you want to learn more about how the Boomi integration cloud can make integration a competitive advantage for your business? Contact our integration experts today.