Salesforce integration remains a key challenge for most organizations. With more than 150,000 mid-sized businesses and larger corporations using Salesforce, the cloud-based customer relationship management platform is both a treasure trove of useful data and a keystone for daily operations.

Because it is so critical, Salesforce data and application integration is always a business priority for users across an organization – from line-of-business managers to field technicians.

With the right architecture and tools, Salesforce integration can be an opportunity for improving and activating your customer data.

4 Ways iPaaS Simplifies Salesforce Integration

The Boomi integration platform as a service (iPaaS) is a 100% cloud-native technology, with an intuitive drag-and-drop interface for creating integrations. It supports citizen integration so that business users with little technical skill can connect their data and applications. Organizations don’t have to hire senior developers to craft custom code from scratch. In fact, with Boomi iPaaS they can start accessing Salesforce data within minutes.

Here are the ways in which Boomi simplifies Salesforce integration.

1. Salesforce API Integration and Management

Boomi provides Salesforce customers the ability to extend and enhance the functionality they are building in their CRM and extend it to their full software ecosystem.

Whether you want to host REST and SOAP endpoints for Apex, support integration for Salesforce Connect with multiple endpoints, or extend the Event API with external systems, Boomi helps you to get more out of your Salesforce environment.

Salesforce API Use Cases

Salesforce administrators and developers often need a way to create, publish, and manage APIs, whether they are interacting with internal business groups or with external parties such as customers, partners or vendors. Both types of APIs require an API discovery service to share data across various groups.

APIs for internal systems typically facilitate interactions with legacy systems. By connecting these systems and accessing their data, the APIs enable enterprises to easily optimize a process or create some other IT service addressing a critical need.

For example, suppose an enterprise has created an internal order-taking app with an API to disseminate order data. When a user enters a purchase order, the app invokes APIs to share customer information with a CRM like Salesforce and to update inventory in an enterprise resource planning system like SAP or NetSuite.

By exposing inventory data from SAP to the app, an API spares the user the trouble of having to log in to a different system to view inventory details. An API can also enter the new customer information directly into Salesforce, ensuring that the order is recorded correctly.

Salesforce API Management

Centralizing API management makes managing API integrations like this easier and more secure. Boomi API Management provides a single, scalable platform to manage all your APIs through their entire lifecycle. It also provides a centralized online environment to control the creation, deployment and management of APIs.

It also handles APIs for external use. For example, imagine a company has set up a partner portal that enables partners to submit quotes and referrals. The partners need current pricing for their quotes, but most companies don’t want partners logging into Salesforce to get pricing. Using Boomi, the company can expose its price list via APIs securely to partners, so they can create quotes that are accurate.

In this example, an Order-to-Cash process might include vendor APIs providing customer and pricing data from Salesforce, and product availability data from Oracle. Boomi API Management makes all these interactions seamless for the portal and the portal’s developers.

2. Enhancing Salesforce with Data Management

Master Data is a foundation for data governance. It’s the practice of establishing a critical reference point — a set of “golden records” — that preserve data quality and provide an ultimate authority for resolving differences in application data across an organization.

Are you running multiple instances of Salesforce? Maybe your company is going through a series of mergers and acquisitions? Traditionally, MDM projects can take 18 to 24 months to implement. Boomi Data Hub makes it possible to create and deploy data management models in 18 to 24 weeks.

Because organizations want their customer and sales data to be accurate and consistent, Salesforce and MDM are a perfect combination.

Boomi Data Hub represents data consistently across an organization, helping data stewards model, match, synchronize, cleanse and enrich data from all the organization’s domains. Any data source, including Salesforce, that is connected to Boomi Data Hub can contribute data to the hub or consume data from the hub.

Let’s say an organization wants to ensure that data updates from Salesforce are also delivered to NetSuite and to a MySQL database. As part of the data flow, enrichment rules enforced by Boomi Data Hub will correct and standardize customer address information obtained from Salesforce.

Boomi Data Hub ensures the data is correct, fields are validated, data rules are enforced, and that updates are passed to NetSuite and the database, so that all systems with CRM data have matching address records for the customer.

Like other Boomi offerings, Boomi Data Hub enables users to define rules and configurations with a low-code interface. Boomi Data Hub also enables data stewards and others to create rules for alerting the data steward team and assisting with resolving duplicates, fixing data entry issues, and correcting erroneous data.

3. Build Multi-App Automation Flows with Salesforce

Boomi Flow provides low-code, cloud-native workflow automation. Combined with Boomi integration and APIs, Boomi Flow brings even greater value to Salesforce customers by extending the workflow capabilities inside your organization.

Boomi Flow makes it easy to create simple as well as complex workflows and collaborate across software tools. These workflows extend the existing functionality of Salesforce by adding capabilities such as offline support, access to external applications, event-driven integration, agentic workflows, and more.

Why use iPaaS Instead of Built-in Automation?

Salesforce certainly provides a nice set of workflow tools, but they all focus on addressing very specific issues within Salesforce:

• If you need to approve an opportunity, there are processes to approve records in Salesforce.
• If you need to update a record, there are workflow rules to kick off a workflow.
• If you need a highly structured process, you can use Visual Workflow.

The trouble is that when you want to use the tools together, it can be quite challenging. Also, they are not effective if you need to connect to best of breed applications, such as Box, Slack, Twilio, Sharepoint, DocuSign, a database, or a Heroku application.

With Boomi Flow, you have an agnostic, unified workflow system to drive all your integrations within and outside of Salesforce.

The ability to speak to other cloud applications is a critical part of what we do to drive end-to-end workflows throughout all steps in your business processes.

4. Activate AI Agents – From Any Vendor

Now, organizations are looking beyond integration and automation. They’re exploring AI Agents and might be using Agentforce within their Salesforce ecosystem. This is another opportunity for iPaaS to create new opportunities to find value in data with intelligent automation.

With Boomi Agentstudio, you are able to govern and manage AI Agents similar to the way you can manage and govern your APIs, no matter the vendor. Expand your agentic ecosystem without sacrificing security and visibility.

Make your Salesforce data available to a deal summary agent so that salespeople can get an opportunity summary in Slack or Microsoft Teams shortly before their next meeting with a lead.

With tools like Agent Step, you can add agentic functionality to workflows and execute agents within your automations, using a low-code interface.

Getting the Most out of Salesforce

While my objective was to show three (plus one) ways of making Salesforce integration a breeze, the reality is these are four ways to get the most out of your Salesforce investment. Ultimately, this is what you really want from a ROI perspective. Here’s how it works:

• Connecting to Salesforce integrates CRM and other Salesforce data with your other IT systems, creating efficiency and increasing business agility.
• Publishing APIs and creating custom integrations enables your organization to build on Salesforce, adapting its wealth of data and features to the use cases that matter to your organization.
• Incorporating Salesforce into your organization’s MDM program ensures that Salesforce is always working with the most accurate and up-to-date data in the enterprise, helping avoid redundant data entry work and inconsistent, conflicting data.

To learn more about the Boomi cloud-native integration platform and its benefits for Salesforce, get the Ultimate Guide to Salesforce Integration

About the Author David Irecki manages the Solution Consulting team for Boomi in the Asia-Pacific Japan region.