So, you’re ready to start a driving trip to somewhere you’ve never been. You know where you want to go. But you only have a vague idea of how to get there.
If you’re like me, you’ll probably consult with GPS software like Waze before hitting the road. That way, there’s a digital guide to help you confidently arrive at your destination quickly, safely, and with minimal frustration. You avoid any unexpected traffic delays on your journey and maybe get a heads-up about any hidden speed traps!
Now, let’s say you’re an integration developer. You’re dealing with new systems on a connectivity project that you don’t know very well. You understand the ultimate goal but not precisely how to make it happen.
If you’re a Boomi customer, you can take advantage of Boomi Suggest mapping functionality that acts as a GPS-like guide to help you build your integration and avoid any unseen pitfalls. You’re essentially tapping into the knowledge of every developer who came before you, as we offer suggestions based on their experiences connecting the systems together – which can save you time and makes your integration journey a lot easier.
Guidance and Future-Proofing
People exploring integration vendors sometimes say they get confused because they all can sound similar. Well, they aren’t. There are many reasons why Boomi is different from other solutions. Boomi Suggest and Boomi Assure are two great examples of features that demonstrate the Boomi AtomSphere Platform’s market-leading capabilities.
If Boomi Suggest acts as a map, think of Boomi Assure as providing peace of mind by future-proofing your existing integrations. We ensure that every time we update our platform – and that happens 11 times a year – your integrations will continue to work properly without any unexpected interruptions. Together, they’re a powerful combination for a developer.
Intrigued? Let’s take a closer look at both.
Boomi Suggest
Building out integrations will always take longer when you’re connecting unfamiliar systems. Criteria like naming conventions, hierarchies, and API documentation are different. That’s why having an expert guide is so valuable. Boomi Suggest shows you how others have done similar integrations, and you can decide if you want to do it the same way.
How It Works
You’re essentially using crowd-sourced knowledge from developers who performed previous integrations. Boomi can do this because we anonymized metadata from customers on their integrations. (Let me stress that again: All data is anonymous because Boomi never stores customer information and adheres to strict privacy requirements. Also, customers can always opt out of the program if they wish.) The benefit of being the connectivity leader is we currently have nearly 207 million integration mappings indexed by Boomi Suggest. And the number is always growing.
When building integrations, deciding what connects where is the most time-consuming and tedious part of the process. Boomi will automatically offer suggestions in three confidence categories – high, medium, and low – of how you could complete the integration. Boomi is saying, “This is what we think you want to map based on what we’ve seen others do. Want to try these?”
How we make it easy to map SAP integrations is a common use case. SAP is a remarkable tool, but it can be complicated when it comes to integrating systems to move data. For instance, among the quirks are that SAP internal field names have a limited number of characters, and most of them are in German. (Might as well be Greek to me!). Those make it hard to decipher your ideal data flow. Well, Boomi Suggest navigates those challenges for you.
Why It Matters
Boomi Suggest saves massive amounts of time for developers – and prevents needless headaches. You don’t have to keep reinventing the integration wheel. Instead, you’re leaning on the experience of the larger developer community as Boomi uses that knowledge to map the connective lines for you.
Customers use our suggestions about 70% of the time. If you’re building an integration with nuances like naming conventions we haven’t seen, we can’t offer guidance because it’s not part of our existing knowledge graph. But once you build that integration, it will feed into the engine that helps the next person who is solving a similar connectivity problem. That’s the benefit of being part of the Boomi community. We harness the collective intelligence of Boomi users so that we’re stronger together.
The Bottom Line
You get more done faster. And when Boomi handles those manual, in-the-weeds tasks, you can focus on the creative part of enhancing what your integration can accomplish to help the business. No other integration solution has this kind of functionality. Legacy vendors, for example, don’t have a central environment where they can consolidate and present all that information to users.
Boomi Suggest also highlights the magic of our low-code model. When I show a demo, I can connect Salesforce to a database without ever touching the keyboard because it’s all drag-and-drop. With Boomi Suggest, I just click the mouse once and instantly map 30 different fields.
It doesn’t get any easier for a developer.
Boomi Assure
The beauty of software as a service (SaaS) is the continuous upgrading of the product. There’s no massive update you have to manage – including the multi-month testing process. Boomi releases are automatically implemented into your Boomi environment almost every month. (You’re welcome!)
But you’ve likely had unfortunate experiences with other vendors where they issue an update, and then something mysteriously no longer works. While unintentional, it’s always frustrating when you have to drop everything else and solve a problem you didn’t create.
That’s never an issue with our platform, thanks to Boomi Assure.
How It Works
You can submit your integrations to Boomi, and we’ll ensure that they won’t break with any future releases. We do the regression testing for you so that it’s, well, assured that your integrations won’t stop working. That drastically reduces the chances of unexpected downtime for you while improving the quality of our releases. It’s a win-win. And because privacy is paramount with Boomi, you only submit sample data to test the integrations – mitigating security concerns.
Why It Matters
We eliminate the post-upgrade testing that most development environments require when you’re dealing with a significant system update. It allows you to focus valuable IT resources on more essential projects because you’re not dealing with routine maintenance or unexpected fire drills.
The Bottom Line
You have greater confidence that your integrations will always perform as you intended – connecting critical data and getting information into the hands of the people who need it.
Boomi Suggest and Boomi Assure in tandem save time, reduce frustration, and enable your team to focus on value-added projects and not become bogged down in tiresome tasks. And just like GPS, Boomi ensures developers always reach their destination without any surprises.
For more information on how Boomi can help you, contact our integration experts today.