By Ed Macosky
We’re all familiar with this sink-or-swim scenario. Your team gets handed a complicated, critical project that must go out the door in just a few days. You’re asked: Can you do this?
The IT team at Union Bank & Trust faced that question last spring. The federal government had just enacted the $349 billion Paycheck Protection Program for small businesses struggling to survive because of the pandemic. Customers desperately needed help. The CIO of the family-owned Nebraska bank wanted assurances that they could quickly create a loan application process to provide that lifeline.
The answer was yes.
“We knew we could do it because we had Boomi,” said Senior Development Manager Brian Monaghan.
Starting on a Wednesday night, an IT team of five went to work. Using Boomi as the integration layer, they created a process to handle online applications by Saturday. Within the first 72 hours of the program’s launch, Union Bank & Trust ranked second in the nation for the number of loans approved – far ahead of the country’s major financial players.
“If we wouldn’t have had Boomi, we wouldn’t have gotten it done,” added Monaghan at a recent customer event.
Now that’s a fantastic story of IT heroes. And we’re so proud that Boomi was the life preserver. (If you want to learn more, the Washington Post wrote a great article about the achievement.)
Monaghan shared this at a recent Forrester Analyst and Tech Talk event hosted by Boomi. It showcases the growing importance of time-to-value for projects involving IT. Monaghan and four other IT leaders talked about the need to complete tasks as fast as possible and move their businesses forward. That’s always mattered, of course. But at a time when the world is changing every day (thank you, Covid), the agility to pivot fast carries even greater weight.
Our featured guest, Forrester Senior Analyst David Mooter, explained that two interconnected trends are occurring that are both driving and enabling that need for speed.
1) “We’re dealing with the most demanding customers ever,” Mooter said. “They expect what they want – now. And that puts great pressure than ever on IT.”
2) That’s led to the emphasis on low-code integration to cut down on the costs of time, labor, and money. Mooter said 94 percent of respondents in a Forrester survey indicated that low-code development addressed their needs. It created self-service models and empowered employees who don’t have IT backgrounds to deliver apps more quickly. “IT just can’t keep up with all the demands of the business,” he added. “That’s why we have the trend toward low-code.”
That’s where Boomi shines. Our unified platform builds a fabric of connectivity that allows businesses to give their customers, employees, and partners what they want – instantly. We call that creating Integrated Experiences. Our customers call that success.
But don’t just take my word for it. The Union Bank & Trust story is captivating. But every customer who spoke at our event had a similar message. They use Boomi to move faster, adapt to changing circumstances, and ease the burden on IT.
Here are some other highlights of what they shared:
Suffolk Construction: Director of IT Jon Loring said his goal is innovating the company’s operations in an industry that still relies on paper processes on job sites. Boomi enables them to balance costs and resources while giving them the ability to deliver.
“Boomi helps us with a big industry push to integrate applications,” Loring said. “We were looking for a short time-to-value where you don’t need a deep technical staff that knows how to code. There are only a few of us, and we move pretty fast. We’ve made Boomi the chief underpinning for all of the data movements going on throughout the organization.”
GE Healthcare: Boomi facilities nearly 400 integrations, including critical business functions such as the ERP system, said Sandeep Singh, senior staff data and information architect.
“One of the things that we’ve really liked about Boomi is the speed it offers,” Singh said. “It’s enabled us to prioritize the way we help the business teams. It’s allowed us to take a fail-fast approach and adjust processes when something isn’t meeting the business needs.”
IMAX: Boomi connects SAP to other applications in its digital landscape, said Jose Luis Tovar, director of business applications and integrations. That breaks down silos, so the right data flows smoothly to the right people. That way, they can make the best decisions for the business.
“The first use case of us is time-to-market,” Tovar said. “I have some experience with some other integration platforms. One end-to-end process seemed to take forever and cost a lot of money. With Boomi, the value is we can deploy faster and easier without spending a lot. That’s the biggest benefit for us.”
Qlik: The company has scaled up Boomi to handle more than 300 integrations that connect about 50 different systems and process 25 million documents a day. As Qlik added cloud platforms like Snowflake and EventBridge, “the Boomi AtomSphere Platform has been almost seamless,” said Brian Brinley, senior technical lead for integration and technology. “It was literally five minutes to make the connections.”
Brinley, who is one of our Boomi Community Champions, noted that he has a coding background. But Boomi has made the integration process much more streamlined and efficient.
“Switching to a low-code environment, which is where the future is heading, greatly reduced our cost for connections, maintaining libraries, and ensuring security compliance,” added Brinley. “It’s a huge relief from the general costs of maintaining an integration platform and allows us to just focus on the business side.”
Several speakers mentioned that even though they turned to Boomi to solve a specific problem, they soon realized the platform is an integration “Swiss Army Knife.” It’s versatile.
“We added Boomi to handle integration for our online experience,” added Monaghan of the Union Bank & Trust. “Very quickly, we realized that we had a lot more uses for Boomi.”
That’s important because the business has so many more requests for IT today. Our platform helps those teams simplify the growing complexity they face in their digital ecosystems. They become the cavalry riding over the hill to save the day for their businesses and customers.
And sometimes, the rescue might even get national media attention.