The CIO Perspective on How Integration and Automation Help Businesses Navigate Challenging Times

by Neil Kole
Published Apr 20, 2023

We set an audacious goal when two top-flight private equity firms purchased Boomi from Dell Technologies in 2021. Our newly independent company would have fully functional, standalone systems in just six months.

The “carve out” from Dell’s business processes meant implementing our own financial, payroll, HR, and sales systems. We had to set up all the tools our employees depend on daily, from Slack to email, to accomplish their work. In fact, we needed dozens of applications to function seamlessly.

My CIO peers thought it was crazy how we planned to squeeze years’ worth of IT effort into a 180-day timeline. But we had an advantage.

We leveraged our platform.

Boomi’s low-code integration and automation platform allowed us to easily migrate, synchronize, and connect our data and systems. And at the six-month mark, we were truly independent, with all our systems talking to one another. Simply put, we could not have done it without that “Boomi on Boomi” mentality.

I love telling this story because it highlights the power of connectivity and our core value proposition for customers. We help companies meet any challenge – seen and unforeseen – and achieve remarkable outcomes that keep them one step ahead of the competition.

For CIOs, reaching business objectives is more complicated with each passing day. The reality is that every company continues to confront strong headwinds. The uncertain macroeconomic environment means we’re all coping with a steady stream of obstacles we must overcome.I believe it amplifies something I’ve always felt about the CIO role. Regardless of industry, whether you’re making booster rockets or toilet paper, every CIO cares about the same four things.
  • Security
  • Operational Excellence
  • Innovation
  • Shareholder Value

The fun part of being at Boomi is that our platform helps my CIO peers achieve all these. Here’s what I mean.

Integration Security

It’s common today to read stories about companies dealing with reputation-crushing security breaches like ransomware or compromised personally identifiable information (PII). When that happens, a CIO quickly becomes a former CIO. So, above all else, we’re tasked with ensuring the enterprise is secure. It’s my No. 1 priority internally, and our product’s high level of security maintains the trust we’ve earned with our customers.

Think about all the foundational systems and best-of-breed applications you must integrate. If you don’t use an integration platform like Boomi, you hand-code all those interfaces. Each one increases the surface area for a possible security risk. Even with a stellar IT team, your people might create five, 10, or even 50 connectors while juggling numerous other tasks. It’s a lot, and they’re probably not integration development experts.

But Boomi processes billions of integrations monthly, connecting more than 300,000 unique endpoints. This is what we do all day, every day, with a security compliance record that is the industry standard.

Operational Excellence

Everything should work when you log in to start work each day. Period. End of story. That’s operational excellence in a nutshell from a CIO perspective. As I mentioned, our team supports a broad range of systems at Boomi, and we need them all up and running so our people can be their best.

Yes, our colleagues have patience for the occasional technology hiccup. But there are limits to that patience and no tolerance for repeated issues where things aren’t working. That negatively impacts the productivity of your people and their ability to deliver for your customers.

We’re fortunate at Boomi that everything is in the cloud. We don’t have to worry about all the headaches – and the potential for additional downtime – associated with data centers. Because we work with gold-standard companies like Google, Microsoft, and Workday, our internal systems are always up.

Because our stuff just works, the downstream effect of that operational excellence directly impacts our customers. It helps explains why we’re so proud of our service-level agreement with customers, which is “four 9’s” – or 99.99% availability.

Innovation

CIOs want to be known as innovative leaders and seen as transforming the business. They’re looking for feathers in their cap. They want to present during quarterly board meetings how they’re using cutting-edge technologies to drive better performance.

One typical example involves cloud migration. It’s at the heart of digital transformation efforts at any business. We’re all looking to take advantage of the speed, agility, and resilience offered by cloud computing. Boomi enables you to migrate processes to the cloud more thoughtfully, faster, and cost-efficiently.

That’s the kind of innovation story a CIO likes to tell the board.

Shareholder Value

This is just another way of saying that we’re good stewards of money. We run a cost-effective operation and save the business on unnecessary costs. CIOs are always looking for ways to add automation to our processes because we want to remove the burden of mundane, manual tasks from the shoulders of our people.

It’s not about “doing more with less.” It’s about working smarter. Our best people should be free to focus on the unique projects that tap into their talents, feed their creative juices, and ultimately push the business forward.

That’s precisely why you don’t need a team of developers distracted by writing, deploying, and testing code for integrating systems. Boomi takes that off their plate, so your people are working on cool stuff worthy of their skills.

That’s the value of Boomi. And it’s how we help businesses stay on top of leading technology trends.

Want to experience Boomi in action? Check out our interactive demo!

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