The integration platform landscape has seen a generational transformation in a short period of time. Traditionally, the space was seen as “plumbing infrastructure.” Legacy middleware was good enough. But those days are long gone. Connecting systems, data, processes, people, and things now differentiates businesses. Intelligent connectivity and automated workflows and processes are now critical competencies for success.
A perfect storm of an unprecedented number of market shifts and technological innovations has created an inflection point. The democratization of cloud infrastructure technologies leveled the playing field between young startups and mega-cloud platform players. Combined with the massive and ever increasing demand for connectivity, this has led to a recent spike of integration platforms emerging in the market, even from legacy middleware businesses that are trying to stay relevant in this new era.
The Shift to Cloud, Containerization, and DevOps
Today, organizations can get all the computing power they need, with consumption-based pricing, through a few infrastructure as a service (IaaS) API calls with any major cloud provider. Platform as a service (PaaS) offerings such as Kubernetes, Service Meshes, and API platforms have commoditized complex clustering technologies reliably at scale. DevOps has introduced the concept of extreme automation at all layers, from infrastructure to code delivery. And multi-tenancy provides the advantages of economies of scale and innovation in cloud delivery.
All of these innovations are profound. It’s truly an exciting time to be a developer! However, new technologies come with their own intricacies, nuances, quirks, and complexities. With every business now becoming a software business, organizations don’t want to become beta testers for every new invention or risk building non-value-added abstractions.
Boomi — an inventor of the integration platform as a service (iPaaS) market — realized the need to be cloud-native and support light weight containerization on Day 1.
We built the cloud-native iPaaS that pioneered this space. Customers don’t have to worry about infrastructure. They simply pay for the runtime capacity needed and enjoy all the benefits of the latest upgrades. Boomi’s lightweight containers, called “Atoms” (these were way before Docker), can be spun up anywhere, auto-updated, clustered into “Molecules” in a highly available (HA) and disaster recovery (DR) compliant manner, and orchestrated within the AtomSphere platform. This was pre-Docker, pre-Kubernetes, and way ahead of its time. Of course, we have now transitioned to these industry-standard technologies with ZERO impact on customers, in true SaaS spirit.
AtomSphere’s multi-tenancy was conceived and implemented in a modern, single-instance fashion instead of the single-tenant, cloud-washed legacy instances that many vendors continue to rely upon. And we have been incorporating concepts of DevOps right into the integration software development lifecycle, allowing for third-party integration with source control, testing, scanning tooling, and more. Being open and platform agnostic has been our way from the beginning, and we continue to leverage the best of open source tooling inspired by DevOps.
The Shift to Hybrid Multicloud and Microservices
Moving to the cloud is the story of business today. But it means something different for every organization. Most of our customers see the need to use multiple cloud services (like AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform.) Or they still have on-premises development (perhaps for data sovereignty or affinity reasons). For private or on-premises systems, innovations such as those we’ve seen in containerization, serverless, and microservices have recently led to a shift in how cloud-native applications are built.
Boomi realized the need for hybrid multicloud deployments on Day 1.
The runtime that we use on public clouds can also be deployed on any private cloud, or even on premises. Wherever you need it, Boomi can run there. We also support Docker, so customers can use Boomi with any orchestrator, such as Kubernetes. We continue to innovate to newer runtime workloads as well as server/serverless implementations while keeping with our ethos of quick time to value.
The design considerations for deploying integration processes on Atoms allow for flexibility in implementing microservices best practices. For example, you can dedicate a single integration process to run in a single-clustered Atom instance – effectively creating a low-code microservice. (I’ll share more on this in a separate blog post.) These design points were way ahead of their time and showcase how Boomi maintains its technological superiority in a fast-changing technology landscape.
The Shift to More (and More) Data and Systems
We’re witnessing a phenomenal increase in the number of cloud and on-premises systems, thousands of new SaaS services, IoT devices, etc. The amount of data generated and consumed is exploding. Whether you call it digital transformation or any other name, organizations find themselves needing to integrate hundreds or even thousands of silos together to automate essential business processes in order to stay relevant and compete.
For example, in the MarTech space alone, there are 8,000-plus SaaS/on-premises solutions, and typically companies have dozens of these technologies to solve specific business challenges. And that’s just for marketing. Even with modern, cloud-native tooling, attempting to hand-code integrations for these processes is extremely complex and a nightmare to maintain. Moreover, with all this data, it’s sometimes difficult to even know what data an organization possesses and how to begin.
Boomi realized the need for modern connectivity on Day 1.
We are the connectivity company. We have connected to 189,000+ unique data source endpoints, with drag-and-drop simplicity. Even with changes in the underlying application systems, connectivity to the application can be maintained with ease. There’s no need for complicated deployment changes or port number mappings that are commonplace with legacy integration vendors. You can think of AtomSphere as “set it and forget it.”
Realizing that we cannot build connectors fast enough to address the non-stop proliferation of new SaaS applications, we created a connector SDK to allow our partners and customers to create any connection easily. Boomi focuses on the quality of complex, and commonly used, connectors vs. trying to inflate the number of connectors by creating simple wrappers for every REST API endpoint.
Furthermore, to tackle the unknown data problem, we acquired Unifi in late 2019 and added data catalog and preparation capabilities to our platform. This allows our customers to find their “dark data” and, with a few clicks, create common data models across systems toward a vision of the Digital Integration Hub (DIH) – fully integrated with the rest of our platform’s capabilities.
The Shift to AI and ML
The use of artificial intelligence and machine learning has become mainstream today, with countless use cases to improve an organization’s business processes. One use eliminates a key problem that takes almost 75 percent of an integration’s development time and effort – intersystem mappings of processes, operations, and attributes. It’s only logical to leverage the existing tribal knowledge of systems domain and mapping information to give a head start. But generating intuitive and reliable intelligent inferences requires massive amounts of data to design and train the AI/ML data science models.
Boomi recognized the importance of crowd-sourced intelligence on Day 1.
Using true multi-tenancy allowed us to securely anonymize Boomi metadata (never the customer’s data) across tenants and create a curated data lake. We apply AI and ML algorithms to help suggest field-level mappings – called Boomi Suggest – which we have enhanced for operation-level mappings.
New features also tackle governance in cases where PII data is flowing in real time as the integrations are being developed. And since this metadata is a blueprint of how businesses are operated, it can help us find ways to optimize for better efficiencies. For example, customers can improve business processes to eliminate waste, or more tactically, schedule process executions at the most optimal times.
The Shift to APIs, Low Code, and Democratizing Integrations
The complexities of integration development are growing every day. Systems are becoming more complicated. Integration expertise is scarce and in high demand. Institutional knowledge is lost when people move on. Our approach to simplify this problem is threefold.
- Simplify integration development so non-expert “citizen integrators” within the lines of businesses can do work with minimal IT involvement through low-code integration development.
- Simplify process development using standardized integration artifacts for application developers – making it “API-first.”
- Simplify human workflow and application development in a quick, enterprise-scale manner – or “low-code application development.”
Boomi recognized the need for democratizing integrations on Day 1.
Boomi was “low code” before the term was coined. Integration projects that took months can be completed in weeks, days, or sometimes even hours. That’s ideal for everyone – IT, citizen integrators, and the overall organization. For example, at the start of the pandemic, a university in Australia needed to shift employees to work-from-home on just 10 hours’ notice. Using Boomi, new processes authenticating users using Microsoft Active Directory were implemented overnight within four hours, presented to the CIO next morning, and then rolled out into production. Now that’s the real-life benefit of low code!
For API-first, we recognized the move to open UX frameworks and introduced the ability to design, secure, and scale APIs with a view toward service mediation, governance, and quickly enabling integrations. In our view, the API gateway market is already commoditized and commercialized towards mega cloud vendors, and even those vendors are going towards the integration space – another future blog post topic.
For low-code application development, we acquired workflow automation company ManyWho in 2017 and launched Boomi Flow. We help customers to build seamless workflows between application extensions that enable a low-code composable application platform.
Summary
Even cutting-edge technologies cannot survive in a silo. That’s why we saw a flurry of M&A activity between iPaaS vendors and API management a few years ago, and are now seeing it with Robotic Process Automation (RPA). This is also true of the growing movement toward “hyperautomation,” which describes the collection of capabilities to automate business processes using intelligent connectivity and adjacent features.
At the heart of this and every other latest-and-greatest technology trend is the simple aim of meeting customers’ expectations to realize value and meet business goals. This requires understanding data, connecting applications and systems (via structured or unstructured or robotic connectivity interfaces), generating intelligent inferences, and consuming integrations by machines or human workflows. It requires an intelligent connectivity and automation platform.
Despite all of these market shifts, Boomi has done all of this since Day 1. It’s why we were just named a Leader in the Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Enterprise Integration as a Service for the eighth consecutive year. It’s also why we can provide, according to Forrester’s recent Total Economic Impact study, an ROI of 410 percent over a three-year period and reduce integration development times by 65 percent. And it’s why we’re earned the trust and partnership of more than 17,000 customers worldwide.
As Boomi once again becomes a standalone company with our recent acquisition by two premier private equity firms, I’m really excited to see the new investments in research and development. We’re driven to further our technological innovations, provide even greater value to our customers, and continue to set the industry standard.
To borrow from a popular TV show, it’s always sunny in Philadelphia. And when it comes to innovation in the iPaaS space, it’s always Day 1 at Boomi.