It Takes a Distributed Integration Platform to Harness the Potential of Your Data

by Boomi
Published Sep 20, 2018
Schematic of an integrated network

According to a recent IDG Cloud Computing Survey, the average IT environment is increasingly becoming cloud-based. Cloud is no longer seen primarily as a cost reduction strategy — now it’s become an enabler of the digital business model and is the foundation to digital transformation.

One of the most widely used cloud software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications is Salesforce — and for many companies, it is core to their business operations. However, in order for organizations to harness the full potential of their data and their investment in key apps like Salesforce, they need a cloud integration platform that can connect Salesforce to everything else in the IT landscape — from legacy systems to other cloud applications and even IoT devices and data lakes.

To integrate across all these disparate end points and support exponentially growing data volumes while ensuring low-latency and high performance across the enterprise, an integration cloud needs to have five critical characteristics — unifiedlow-codecloud-nativeopen and distributed.

In our previous posts, we’ve talked about four of the essential characteristics. Now, it’s time to talk about why it’s so important for the integration cloud to be distributed, how Boomi delivers the leading distributed integration platform, and why it matters to Salesforce customers.

Distributed Architecture: Key to Integration for Hybrid IT

In this era of hybrid IT, a distributed integration architecture is essential for providing the necessary flexibility in how you integrate all your applications and data while ensuring security and quality of service, irrespective of number and type of end points or data volume.

A distributed integration architecture is ideal for Salesforce customers or any company migrating to the cloud and driving towards digital transformation. The value of your investment in Salesforce applications increases as you harness the data across your organization, automating how it can move into and out a Salesforce cloud platform.

A true distributed architecture makes it easy to bridge across your cloud and legacy system and integrate any of your data with Salesforce. A distributed integration architecture can run your workloads wherever you want: behind your firewall, in the cloud, or out on the edge for IoT. Both new applications and on-premise systems gain all the advantages of the integration cloud while leaving you in full control of your data.

For example, companies that have strict data security requirements can easily connect applications in their data centers with next-generation cloud applications like Salesforce, with no security compromises.

So how does Boomi achieve this? With the power of the Atom.

The Boomi Atom is the fundamental building block of the Boomi platform. An Atom is our lightweight Java application (runtime engine) that can be deployed on any host with Internet access — be it in public or private clouds or on-premise behind a firewall.

Atoms can reside on mobile devices or sit on gateways that are out in the field, far out of the practical reach of any maintenance personnel. With Boomi’s cloud-native platform, Atoms are automatically maintained, ensuring it is always up-to-date.

Atoms have the ability to operate independently for long periods of time, they are also perfect for powering mobile experiences and IoT integrations, both offline and online. This way, you have full freedom to pull any and all data into Salesforce or push it out across your hybrid network.

Besides providing complete flexibility and control of where you run your integrations, the Boomi distributed architecture can also easily scale to support the growth of your data integrations with Salesforce. Boomi Atoms can be clustered together to form a Boomi Molecule, which can handle a higher volume of processes and be set up to provide load-balancing and failover.

As your data volumes and processing requirements increase, Boomi Molecules support high availability, faster processing and increased scalability. A sample use case is a Salesforce Sales Cloud/database ETL (extract, load, transfer) process with large data volumes. A Boomi Molecule can easily provide a bigger memory footprint to support those kinds of larger data loads.

With the Boomi distributed integration platform, you can rest assured that you can integrate all your data with Salesforce platforms, no matter how much or what kind of data you might have.

Connect Everything, Engage Everywhere, Run Anywhere

When Marc Benioff founded Salesforce in 1999, he had a vision of “making software easier to purchase, simpler to use, and more democratic without the complexities of installation, maintenance and constant upgrades.”

Boomi’s single-instance, multi-tenant integration cloud embodies those principles, making it a perfect match for Salesforce integrations. No installation is required, and no worries about software upgrades or version control. It is all done automatically.

Boomi helps Salesforce customers streamline business processes in every part of an organization, from foundational customer relationship management to marketing, ecommerce and community management.

For example, DocuSign uses Boomi to streamline its business processes and increase the speed of data sharing between its key business applications, including Salesforce Sales Cloud, ERP, finance, human resources and its own product. The automated, standardized and repeatable processes created through this integration have simplified the user experience and support real-time, data-driven decisions across the organization.

“Every time a new enterprise-related integration process was needed, Boomi has proven it could scale to meet the demand while maintaining the security our business requires,” says Long Lam, director of enterprise architecture for DocuSign Information Technology.

As DocuSign experienced, Boomi’s unified, distributed integration platform helps Salesforce customers connect everything together: applications, data, devices, processes and people. Boomi makes it far easier for your organization to engage across any channel, device or platform.

Boomi is also actively partnering with Salesforce in industries such as healthcare and financial services to help companies in those markets drive digital transformation by automating workflows connected to Salesforce’s innovative cloud platforms.

And we’re also applying our low-code integration platform to technology segments such as IoT and blockchain to join that data with Einstein and other Salesforce platforms, helping improve operations and deliver better business intelligence.

There are currently more than 45,000 Boomi Atoms running in a wide variety of locations. That number is rapidly increasing by the day, as new organizations discover the benefits of the Boomi Integration Cloud.

Driven by our commitment to our customers, Boomi’s 94-percent subscriber retention rate leads the industry, highlighting the dependability, extensibility, and enterprise quality of our open, cloud-native, low-code integration platform.

Want to learn more about the most important capabilities of an integration cloud? Read the Boomi ebook, “The Critical Characteristics of an Integration Cloud.”

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