Salesforce’s hallmark annual conference, Dreamforce, is fast approaching and integration will be front and center.
Integration has always been critical for Salesforce customers. And that importance was highlighted earlier this year when Salesforce acquired MuleSoft.
Salesforce founder and co-chief executive officer Marc Benioff has publicly stated that his company will use Mulesoft’s on-premise, developer-centric platform to expand its market share of the world’s largest companies by addressing integration scenarios needing extensive, laborious customization and code development.
That is great for helping Salesforce meet its business goals. But that raises a question. Where does this leave the vast majority of Salesforce customers?
Right where they have always been. With Boomi.
As a leading Salesforce’s integration partner for the past decade, we have more Salesforce customers (1,500+ and counting) than any other integration platform provider. For perspective, more companies are using Boomi to connect Salesforce than the total number of MuleSoft customers (just over 1,200).
In our role as the pioneering leader of the integration cloud — what Gartner defines as the integration platform as a service (iPaaS) market — Boomi has learned that a true iPaaS integration cloud needs five capabilities to deliver the full potential of the cloud — the same benefits that Salesforce brought to the market with its revolutionary cloud-based CRM platform almost 20 years ago.
The critical characteristics of an integration cloud include low-code, cloud-native, distributed, unified and open.
Defining the Integration Cloud: Low-Code
In this post, we’ll look at low-code: what it means, why it’s important and how Boomi delivers the best low-code integration platform for helping any Salesforce customer move faster with far greater efficiency and agility. (To learn about the importance of a unified platform for bringing speed and flexibility to your integration projects, please read our previous post, “The Foundation of the Connected Business Is a Unified Integration Platform.”)
In many regards, low-code is perhaps the essential capability of a modern integration cloud.
The key value of low-code is SPEED. This is the core requirement of today’s digital businesses. If you can’t move fast, you will fail.
At the dawn of integration, there was no question that coding was the right way to go about it. Coding was always the right answer because it offered both flexibility and customization. It wasn’t fast, but it worked. There also wasn’t any better approach.
“It was literally a couple of weeks for a non-Boomi expert to come up to speed with the technology and to be able to build a production-ready system.”
— Robert Van Tuyl, Chief Innovation Officer, Easterseals Bay Area
But business needs today are in a constant state of change. A low-code approach to integration helps organizations react faster to meet those dynamic needs. It also strengthens business and IT alignment.
Lines of business have always been concerned about agility and speed to bring products and services to market more rapidly. But IT teams typically have had neither the budget nor the bandwidth to complete integration projects quickly. The result? Frustration from both parties.
Writing integration code requires specialized, expensive developers and can take up a significant amount of their time. Many companies simply don’t have the bandwidth, staff or budget to support extensive integration coding.
In contrast, a low-code platform allows IT to be much more responsive and help the business quickly bring innovations to market. Integrations that used to take months and years can be done in weeks or days.
More than a decade ago, Boomi focused on how the cloud could help integration projects move much faster to give business users the speed and agility they craved. This meant drastically reducing the need for IT involvement in integration development. Boomi saw that the path forward was to create a low-code integration development platform.
Code, or Don’t Code. Your Choice.
Low-code is all about the integration vendor doing the majority of the hard work, so the customer can build integrations as quickly and cost-effectively as possible.
But unlike stripped-down “no-code” tools that hide all complexity but limit flexibility and development options, Boomi’s low-code capabilities provide a structured approach to addressing the widest range of integration projects.
You can use out-of-the-box, drag-and-drop Boomi development for the bulk of your integration work, or you can use Boomi’s advanced tools for managing custom coding and building specialized integration processes.
You gain all the speed of no-code approaches without compromising your ability to support complex or uncommon integration scenarios.
Boomi’s low-code integration cloud provides all the capabilities you need for rapidly connecting data and applications, automating workflows, connecting with partners and managing APIs.
With a low-code platform, most projects don’t require development resources at all: business analysts are empowered to create configurations through a “clicks, not code” model. Drag-and-drop capabilities allow non-technical users to visually map integration processes and workflows. And prepackaged templates simplify the work and shorten the time to build and deploy.
Digital Transformation: Balancing Control and Productivity
Boomi helps organizations achieve digital transformation through integration. While IT needs to look out for security, compliance and governance, business users are focused on increasing productivity. By working more closely together, both IT and business users benefit, and, ultimately, so does the customer.
Unlike many no-code integration tools, the Boomi platform provides a full set of capabilities for IT to have the control they need on any given project, making it easy to manage citizen developers to avoid the downsides of shadow IT. The centralized management capabilities of the Boomi platform also provide the ideal foundation for an integration center of excellence (ICoE).
Boomi’s administrator-centric management model embodies the same philosophy Salesforce brought to building its cloud platform. Certainly, IT needs to be involved, but once set up, an organization has far greater flexibility in who can develop on the Boomi platform or manage integrations.
Low-code development helps make this possible. With low-code, integration projects are increasingly more aligned with digital business needs.
For example, Easterseals Bay Area (ESBA) turned to Boomi to integrate Salesforce Health Cloud, AthenaHealth, and NetSuite to rapidly create a state-of-the-art digital healthcare information system and a behavioral health provider network, achieving the visibility, flexibility, control and automation the company required. Certainly, as a healthcare provider, control and security are essential for any of its integrations. Easterseals got that with Boomi.
“It was literally a couple of weeks for a non-Boomi expert to come up to speed with the technology and to be able to build a production-ready system,” says Robert Van Tuyl, chief innovation officer, Easterseals Bay Area. “Boomi quickly and easily scaled our network capacity from a trickle of data to millions of transactions.”
As the pioneer of the iPaaS market, Boomi believes that organizations are most effective when IT and business users work together. Our mission is to integrate people, processes, applications, data and devices to help build the connected business.
Boomi’s low-code iPaaS brings business and IT together to provide rapid integration for Salesforce customers or any organization looking to survive and thrive in today’s digital marketplace.
Want to learn more about the most important capabilities of an integration cloud? Please read the Boomi ebook, “The Critical Characteristics of an Integration Cloud.”