One of the best things about my job is seeing how companies use Boomi to solve complex problems connecting people, devices and data. The industries these companies work in vary from fast food and IT security to energy and healthcare.
What doesn’t change is the ability of the Boomi Platform to help customers realize their vision for accelerating better business outcomes through rapid implementation of data integration, data governance and workflow automation.
Here are four ways I’ve seen the Boomi Platform meet and exceed our customers’ expectations as they go about transforming their businesses.
Learn more about how the world’s leading organizations “Win With Boomi.”
Scaling Beyond Expectations
When some companies think of scalability, they still imagine vast data centers filled with high-performance hardware. That’s certainly one way to scale, but buying and provisioning all that hardware, setting up air conditioning and wiring, and installing and continually updating software takes a lot of time and money.
To avoid that expense and operational workload, more and more companies are turning to the cloud — as a result, every segment of the cloud market is experiencing double-digit growth. Companies are voting for cloud scalability with their pocketbooks.
Boomi’s scalability derives in part from its cloud-native architecture, built with scalability in mind. Companies can deploy as many Atoms — Boomi runtime engines — as they like, and they can deploy them anywhere they’re needed: in a public or private cloud, on-premise, even at the network edge to support IoT devices.
If Boomi customers need additional scalability, at any location they can combine Atoms into a Molecule, creating a single-tenant, clustered Atom that runs multiple Atom processes concurrently for ensuring high availability, supporting almost any performance need.
Another scalability feature: Most Boomi application connectors include built-in batch-mode settings tuned to deliver high performance for that particular application based on how other customers across the Boomi ecosystem run their applications. This type of fine-tuning helps Boomi deliver high performance even for very large deployments.
How scalable is Boomi? Here are two customer examples:
- A renowned Internet security company uses Boomi as part of its processes that analyze 12% of all internet traffic 24/7, 365 days a year. Obviously, if a company analyzes 12% of all Internet traffic, it’s operating at a vast scale.
- A famous restaurant chain has deployed Boomi Atoms in more than 13,000 locations to collect sales results and other data for analysis.
- A Fortune 100 multinational conglomerate uses Boomi across its many manufacturing divisions, operating at global scale.
Whether you analyze an eighth of all Internet traffic or tackle a smaller job, Boomi can scale to meet your needs.
Connecting Quickly and Guiding Data Transformations
Many customers ask us for help connecting to applications and data stores that matter to them. And the Boomi Platform makes it easy to quickly build those connections.
The Boomi Platform has connectivity to more than 1,500 unique endpoints and connectors for the most popular business applications, including Salesforce, NetSuite, Oracle, Workday and SAP. And we also have ready-to-use connectors for popular technologies such as databases, FTP, JMS, LDAP, MQTT, REST and SOAP.
So even if you rely on an older or specialized application that isn’t among the most popular software, we can still easily connect to it by using whatever protocol is most appropriate and quickly configuring the connection from there.
But a big differentiator with Boomi is how we go beyond the basic connection to do what I call “the stuff in the middle.”
What’s “the stuff in the middle”? It’s everything you want to do with data once you connect to it. That includes:
- Transforming data, using processes you created in Boomi’s rapid, low-code development environment
- Applying data quality and data governance rules to data being integrated and transformed
- Using that data to automate processes designed with Boomi Flow, our easy-to-use workflow automation environment
Connectivity is obviously essential, but there’s a lot of value to be derived from all the other work — data transformation, data governance, workflow automation — that can be done once the connection is made. And Boomi enables companies to quickly build processes that do this work efficiently, flexibly, and at scale.
“Whether you analyze an eighth of all Internet traffic or tackle a smaller job, Boomi can scale to meet your needs.”
Managing Data Complexity
Many companies are concerned about the complexity of their integration and data management requirements. They might wonder how any new integration will work with existing, hand-coded integrations they set up years ago for legacy systems. Or they might be building new, modern integrations and wondering if they can use a low-code development platform to meet their most demanding integration scenarios.
What we’ve seen with customer after customer is that low-code development can absolutely address even the most complex requirements for data integration, transformation and governance. The Boomi platform offers several ways of addressing IT complexity:
Building on complex IT systems already in place
If customers have created complex integration and business processes, we can often simply connect to them, leaving that complexity in place, while addressing whatever new integration, extension or process automation is needed.
Using scripting and other code
Low-code doesn’t mean no code. The Boomi Platform supports scripting in Java, JavaScript and Groovy, among other languages. If you need to write custom code for your integration, you can while taking advantage of the power, scalability and breadth of services offered on the Boomi Platform.
Relying on declarative no-code processes that get the job done
That said, customers are often surprised by how much they can do without writing code and, instead, rely solely on Boomi’s collection of connectors and other easily configured low-code and no-code components.
In many cases, projects that customers assumed would require custom coding and lengthy development cycles turned out to require neither. Boomi made the job easy and accelerated development and deployment times considerably.
Taking advantage of crowd-sourced intelligence
When building anything complex, it’s helpful to learn from experience — especially if that experience encompasses the work of hundreds or thousands of other companies.
Boomi Suggest, a crowd-sourced AI feature in the Boomi Platform, offers detailed guidance for how best to configure integrations and data transformations. Its intelligence is based on anonymized data from hundreds or thousands of other customers building the same type of integrations and transformations.
This type of intelligence is possible only because Boomi is a multi-tenant cloud platform. On-premise or single-tenant cloud applications cannot collect this kind of “wisdom of the crowds” information.
Some of the world’s largest organizations — including industry leaders in manufacturing, energy and healthcare — use Boomi to handle complex data integration and data management every day. One look at our customer list is the best proof of all that Boomi can handle in complex data management operations.
Find out how the world’s leading organizations “Win With Boomi.”
Continuous Improvement
Once a month, 11 months a year, something happens that takes less than a minute: Boomi gets better. We update the Boomi Platform, and those new features and optimizations are delivered to all our customers around the world.
We rigorously test all our updates to the highest software engineering standards. In fact, we even offer customers the opportunity to submit their Boomi processes to our test suite for testing with upcoming releases. Our customers enjoy the peace of mind that comes from knowing that updates will be quick and stable, and they continually get new features and performance improvements without having to do any work!
These monthly updates help us ensure that Boomi continues seamlessly with any new updates from other software vendors. When Salesforce, for example, rolls out an update, we’re already in sync with it, which means that our customers are, too.
Monthly updates simplify life for Boomi customers. Everybody is on the same version of Boomi. This helps our support staff be even more effective. We never have to ask which version someone is on at the beginning of a support call. And if a customer has built an integration delivering data to their partners, that entire network will be updated simultaneously and remain in sync.
For special cases, such as a customer running an Atom on a private cloud separate from the internet, we give them the option of controlling the exact timing of the update. Generally, even these customers are in sync with the rest of the Boomi community within two weeks.
Whether automated or manually controlled, updates are always quick and easy. For Boomi customers, the idea that business platform updates require six months of planning and three months of integration and testing — well, that’s the Dark Ages.
We’re in a different age, and business platforms can be upgraded in about the time required to install a mobile app on your smartphone. This is just one more way we accelerate business operations and business results for our customers.
Conclusion
In this post, I’ve summarized four ways that Boomi empowers its customers and helps them accelerate development, deployment and operations of business IT.
Key takeways about the Boomi Platform include:
- Scales to meet the needs of even the largest IT project with enterprise-grade features and global reach
- Provides pervasive connectivity to any kind of business system or service, while also providing data transformation, data management and data governance capabilities – “the stuff in the middle” – needed for business IT
- Manages complex requirements for both legacy and new cloud deployments
- Delivers 11 updates per year guided by Boomi Assure to continuously improve the features and performance of the Boomi Platform
To learn more about how Boomi can help your organization modernize its integration architecture and drive digital transformation, contact a Boomi integration expert today.