Dreamforce is just two weeks away, and one thing is for sure. Integration will be a much-discussed topic at Salesforce’s premier technology conference in San Francisco September 25-28.
The company’s purchase of MuleSoft has brought integration into the spotlight and raised awareness of the critical importance of how an integration cloud can make it far faster and easier to connect your enterprise data with Salesforce’s revolutionary business platform.
With more joint Salesforce customers (1,500+ and counting) than any other integration platform provider, we know the importance of Salesforce integration better than anyone (for perspective, more companies are using Boomi to connect Salesforce than the total number of MuleSoft customers — just over 1,200).
In our role as the pioneering leader of the integration cloud — what Gartner defines as the integration platform as a service (iPaaS) market — Boomi has learned that a true iPaaS integration cloud needs five capabilities to deliver the full potential of the cloud — the same benefits that Salesforce brought to the market with its revolutionary cloud-based CRM platform almost 20 years ago.
These characteristics include cloud-native, distributed, low-code, unified and open.
Today we’ll look at cloud-native: what it means, why it’s important and how Boomi delivers the best cloud-native integration platform for helping any Salesforce customer drive automation and provide richer customer insights to its employees.
Defining the Integration Cloud: Cloud-Native
The vast majority of IT is moving to the cloud. The economic reasons for this are clear. The cloud eliminates massive capital costs and all the complexities of maintaining software on your own.
On-premise software that is plopped onto a hosted service — commonly known as a “cloud-washed” offering — simply won’t do. That approach falls short. Built from the ground up to be cloud-native, a true integration cloud provides benefits like elasticity and scalability, which cloud-washed products cannot.
“Cloud-native” describes any app or platform that is designed and built to leverage the advantages of the cloud computing delivery model. Faster delivery, lower costs and minimizing IT complexity are all benefits of the cloud.
A cloud-native integration cloud eliminates the need for customers to purchase, implement, manage and maintain the underlying hardware and software, no matter where they process their integrations — in the cloud, on-premise or at the network edge.
This is how you deliver the full benefits of the cloud. But running a true cloud-native platform that is both highly reliable and highly scalable is no simple task. And, critically, the vendor must provide essential performance and security to support enterprise-grade integrations.
As the pioneer of the integration cloud, Boomi has been evolving and refining its cloud-native platform for more than a decade, providing all the essential capabilities required for integrating your enterprise data efficiently and quickly.
A cloud-native approach allows businesses to respond to customer demands more quickly and to bring ideas to market faster. Using a cloud-native integration platform like Boomi’s allows for continuous innovation, plus offers the option for almost unlimited scalability.
Want to learn more about the most important capabilities of an integration cloud? Please read the Boomi ebook, “The Critical Characteristics of an Integration Cloud.”
Productivity and Innovation From the Cloud
Boomi helps customers harness the potential of data through application integration, data quality management, B2B/EDI management, API design and management, workflow automation and app development. This breadth of services would not be possible without a cloud-native foundation.
Boomi’s integration cloud runs on a single instance, multi-tenant architecture. All clients run on the same platform version, maintained by Boomi, with assured uptime and performance. We designed every element of the Boomi platform for ease of use, leveraging all of the advantages of the cloud.
“Boomi has revitalized our e-commerce channel — and it’s allowing us to go to market faster.”
— Mike Brown, Director of Platform Services, Avalara
High productivity is a key component of the Boomi iPaaS. New users can be up in running in hours instead of days, weeks or months. There is no installation necessary, and integrations can be configured rapidly with Boomi’s intuitive, low-code model.
In a hybrid IT environment, the Boomi platform can be deployed wherever it makes sense to support integration: in the cloud, on-premise or both. Runtimes can be centrally managed regardless of where they exist — for example, they could be on-premise to support more secure integration requirements but controlled from a central cloud-based system to support governance.
Boomi’s agile deployment model means that product updates are pushed out frequently (once a month) and clients are always running the latest version of the Boomi platform. This is particularly useful for customers who are administering an environment with multiple tenants, as it avoids any potential concerns around versioning.
New Technology Powers Innovation
Artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning are helping Boomi deliver even better product functionality that would not be possible without cloud-native architecture. For example, the complex task of data mapping is simplified with Boomi Suggest, an intelligent development tool that harnesses the power of the cloud and the collective intelligence of the global Boomi community.
As users deploy integrations, those data maps are indexed. Boomi Suggest uses algorithms to recommend mappings — eliminating the need to design your connections from scratch.
Also, Boomi Resolve provides recommendations for resolution of common errors. And Boomi Assure delivers crowd-sourced regression testing to customers, providing the confidence that platform updates will not break existing integration processes.
Tax automation software-as-a-service (SaaS) provider Avalara uses Boomi to integrate Salesforce with Zuora, ecommerce pages, and shopping cart experiences, as well as for API management. Mike Brown, Avalara’s director of platform services Mike Brown, credits Boomi Suggest with helping the team’s quality assurance engineer learn how to use the platform and build implementations quickly.
“Boomi has revitalized our ecommerce channel — and it’s allowing us to go to market faster,” Brown says.
By providing a true cloud-native platform, Boomi removes the hardware and software challenges for any organization. The easy-to-use, low-code nature of Boomi’s iPaaS helps businesses be more productive. IT staff no longer need to be called in for every integration point that must be built. Instead, business users can create their own connections with drag-and-drop ease.
“Many customers come to Salesforce because they are migrating away from their on-premise environments and want to move to the cloud,” says Iain Falconer, chief integration architect for Davanti Consulting in Auckland, New Zealand. “Boomi’s pure cloud architecture eliminates any data center infrastructure investments or software management overhead, providing massive efficiencies and cost-savings.”
Want to learn more about the most important capabilities of an integration cloud? Please read the Boomi ebook, “The Critical Characteristics of an Integration Cloud.”
Salesforce Integration for Today and Tomorrow
By integrating Salesforce with other applications, you can harness the full potential of data throughout your organization to improve operational efficiencies, automate workflows and drive digital transformation so your organization can survive and thrive in this digital era.
In 2006 Boomi pioneered the integration cloud market. For years, the Boomi Integration Cloud has been helping organization around the globe and across industries respond to the increasingly complex integration demands of hybrid IT infrastructures.
We are consistently ranked at the top of key industry market assessments. And we are adding more than seven customers a day while recording one of the industry’s lowest churn rates. Clearly, the market is telling us we are on the right path.
We now work with thousands of organizations from around the globe and across industries. More than a few of them use Salesforce :-).
The Boomi Integration Cloud helps our customers quickly and easily connect their enterprise data with Salesforce, greatly speeding and simplifying their their move to the cloud.