By Bruce Tierney
Connectivity is at the heart of digital transformation. To build a new product, launch a new service, or reach customers in a new, compelling way, you need to connect people, data, and devices quickly, efficiently, and reliably. Which makes the choice of an integration platform a key part of any digital transformation strategy.
webMethods customers face decisions about how to achieve their integration goals for digital transformation going forward. They can stick with webMethods Integration Server, which was originally designed for on-premises based integration. Or they use webMethods.io platform, based on Software AG’s acquisition of built.io in 2018. They can purchase both products, even though the two product lines were originally developed with different codebases.
Alternatively, companies can switch to a modern, cloud-native integration platform as a service (iPaaS) like the Boomi AtomSphere Platform. Boomi has been named a Leader in the Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for iPaaS1 for eight straight years. Boomi supports low-code development with crowd-sourced intelligence to give businesses rapid, field-proven results. Boomi also provides support for EDI/B2B networks, workflow automation, and centralized data management — all important capabilities for digital transformation.
10 Reasons for Switching From webMethods to Boomi
Here are ten reasons why webMethods customers should migrate to the Boomi platform for integration.
1. Migration Expertise
Boomi has amassed over 10 years of experience in transitioning customers from webMethods to the Boomi AtomSphere Platform. Boomi professional services has codified this expertise into reusable Boomi Blueprints. In addition, Boomi partners leverage an equally impressive number of years of expertise to expedite modernization for digital transformation.
2. A Clear Path Forward
Instead of choosing between a company’s newer and older product lines, customers can switch to Boomi with the confidence that their integration platform is the sole focus of the company behind it. Boomi has been investing in its cloud-native platform since 2005. And Boomi has only made its platform more powerful and feature-rich since then. Start with the platform capabilities you need initially and then have peace of mind to know you can add other Boomi platform components, that leverage the Boomi skills you already know, over time to align with your digital transformation journey.
3. Ready-to-Use Processes, Templates, and Accelerators
In addition, Boomi and Boomi partners offer pre-built processes, templates, recipes developed by Boomi experts, and solution accelerators, further streamlining the work of building and managing integrations and workflows. Templates, recipes, and accelerators are available not only for traditional business applications such as SAP but also for modern cloud technologies such as Salesforce, NetSuite, Snowflake, and many more.
4. Integration Built for a Cloud-First World
Businesses are moving data and operations to the cloud. As of 2022, the average enterprise is running 1,295 cloud services, and already 60% of corporate data is stored in the cloud. It only makes sense to move integrations to the cloud, too. A cloud-native platform delivers the classic cloud benefits of flexibility and scalability and makes it easier for businesses to connect to whatever new applications and services best support their cloud-first strategies.
5. Rapid Development With Crowdsourced Guidance
According to a study by industry analyst Forrester, Boomi’s low-code development reduced development times by 65%. Boomi achieves this acceleration not just by providing a drag-and-drop development interface, but also by offering over a decade’s worth of crowdsourced intelligence from over 200 million integrations. And Boomi customers accept these suggestions over 70% of the time when building integrations.
6. Development That Bridges Both Business and IT
One of the more frequent requirements for businesses looking to move faster with the integration foundation of their digital transformation is to transform IT from being the sole creator of integrations into the enabler of IT and business collaboration. IT still creates and manages the more advanced, mission critical integrations, however, instead of creating all the remaining integrations, they create the templates and recipes for “citizen integrators” and other business technologists to assemble their own integrations.
On-premises integration platforms designed in the era of complicated design interfaces such as “Integrated Development Environments” (IDEs) are usually too complicated for IT and business collaboration, leaving the citizen integrator unsuccessful in creating integrations and overloading the IT staff with integration backlog.
In contrast, the Boomi platform with its low-code development environment is accessible to business users, enabling IT organizations to entrust some development and workflow automation to tech-savvy business users, confident that their work will comply with company policies and templates. Boomi reduces the need for hard-to-find, increasingly expensive developers, trained in decade-old technology, to build integrations. Those IT resources can now be applied to new projects.
7. Flexibility to Bring Functionality To Where Data Is
The Boomi platform also provides great flexibility in runtime deployments. Boomi customers can deploy Boomi runtimes wherever they are needed: in the cloud, on-premises, or at the edge where the action is happening, including retail locations, factory floors, and remote sites tied to energy production and distribution. Businesses can bring Boomi’s data processes right to where data is generated and collected, enabling businesses to respond with greater speed and flexibility than ever before.
8. Reducing Technical Debt
Transitioning to a modern business integration platform from an older on-premises platform provides an opportunity to reduce “technical debt”, which is a term used to describe legacy technology that is difficult to maintain but not quite ready to remove. Boomi customers have the option to continue running some of their existing on-premises style business processes for as long as they wish, while building all new business process with Boomi using a co-existence strategy. Over time, the technical debt of these legacy business processes can be rewritten in a modern and more easily maintainable cloud-based implementation.
9. Reduced Costs
Another important factor to consider when evaluating integration platforms is cost. Legacy middleware platforms are considerably more expensive than modern cloud-native alternatives. Legacy programming interfaces, which often require senior developers, increase labor costs for development and testing.
10. Faster Time to Market
Boomi is built for speed. The Boomi AtomSphere Platform’s drag and drop configuration-based environment helps organizations to bring new solutions to market far faster than they can with legacy integration platforms. Modern development takes less time than working in complex IDEs. And Boomi’s graphical development environment and crowd-sourced guidance enables Citizen Developers to contribute meaningfully to development efforts. The bottom line? More people working more effectively with powerful tools brings new products and services online faster.
To learn more about how webMethods customers can benefit from migrating to Boomi, read our webMethods Migration Solution Brief or contact our Boomi experts today.
[1] Gartner, Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Integration Platform as a Service, Eric Thoo, Keith Guttridge, Bindi Bhullar, Shameen Pillai, Abhishek Singh, September 29, 2021
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