By Boomi
Companies like Uber, Netflix, Amazon, Expedia and many others bring products to market very quickly, capturing market share and disrupting their respective industries. How do they do it? By getting software out the door faster.
With a modern enterprise architecture and no legacy systems holding them back, these companies can outmaneuver competitors and tap adjacent markets before most traditional CEOs have opened their morning Wall Street Journal. And this is happening across industries: transportation, healthcare, financial services, manufacturing (Industry 4.0 anyone?), publishing, entertainment — you name it.
So, if you’re a marketplace incumbent what do you do? Call Pivotal Software and Boomi.
Becoming a Cloud-Native Enterprise
Pivotal was founded on the premise of helping big enterprises build better software, with a combination of agile development, best practices, processes, tooling, and the underlying platform and data services required to create modern cloud-native applications.
Most enterprises face consumers whose expectations of products and services have far outpaced what these companies can deliver. Their back-end systems are legacy and mainframe oriented — difficult to upgrade and nearly impossible to replace. So, they’re stuck delivering the same products and level of service while their competition streaks by.
Pivotal helps Global 2000 enterprises understand how to become modern cloud-native businesses by building better software faster, with more visibility and transparency. And it has an open-source, cloud-native application platform on which to do it: Pivotal Cloud Foundry.
Boomi helps Pivotal bridge the gap between deeply rooted legacy applications and modern applications, while helping all those cloud-native apps easily exchange data. Within hours of installing Cloud Foundry and Boomi, you can start implementations, building applications and interconnecting them before they’ve even launched.
Building a Mobile, In-Store Shopping Experience
Let’s say you’re a large retailer and you want to build a new, in-store mobile shopping experience. You want customers to be able to walk around the store and point at items with their smart phones. The mobile app identifies the garments and puts them in a virtual shopping cart.
You can build this app in a mobile development environment, with a good backend system supporting it and an attractive web front end. But what about your legacy inventory management system? That’s the most important piece because it contains all the quantities, prices and SKUs.
With Boomi, you could build a connector to the legacy system as part of the overall application design, connecting to the source where all this inventory data resides. You could also overlay a point-of-sale (POS) system, so your shoppers can complete their transaction through their mobile device.
Boomi is the linchpin in this scenario. This application cannot function without a connection to an inventory management system. The legacy way to do it would be to beg your database administrators for access to the system. But you couldn’t build a connector without knowing the application code and business logic, so you would end up with a brittle, custom interface that still needed to be maintained by IT. It’s literally a software archaeology experiment.
And that’s the barrier Pivotal and Boomi can remove.