By Boomi
Maximizing the payback from digital transformation depends on speed and scale.
Projects need to be implemented swiftly, with the ability to scale across multiple systems amid fast-changing business and IT requirements. Fall short, and your organization can’t fully achieve goals such as superior customer experiences and greater operational efficiency.
Venugopal Taritla, principal architect at systems integrator Cognizant, used the Boomi AtomSphere Platform to help Pentair, a global manufacturer of water-related products for consumer and commercial use, overcome those challenges.
“Integration with partners and the third-party applications is a key aspect of digital transformation,” Taritla says. “We need to make sure that we are communicating with those systems in a fast and agile manner, as opposed to multi-month or multi-year implementation schedules.”
In a session at the recent Boomi Out of This World digital event, Taritla and Mike Lewis, director of ecommerce at Pentair, spoke about their experience in more depth.
Pentair Nails Its Transformation Goals
Pentair, a $3 billion public company doing business in more than 150 countries, has digitally transformed a complex IT environment with Boomi and Cognizant implementation and optimization services.
“Boomi is the middle integration layer that allows us to more easily and seamlessly integrate our platforms,” Lewis says. “We have the ability to move quickly to integrate new applications, and systems due to acquisitions.”
Lewis says that Pentair is improving customer experiences by leveraging the capabilities of Boomi and Cognizant, a Boomi Global Elite Partner with more than 250 consultants actively involved in Boomi implementations.
With Boomi at the center of large-scale transformation focused on ecommerce, Pentair is:
- Realizing a 360-degree view of customer, order, and product data
- Optimizing order fulfillment and routing through real-time data synchronization
- Scaling to high volumes of daily transactions on a modern platform
- Harmonizing business processes and data to unlock value
- Standardizing data integration across dozens of different platforms
- Streamlining the IT landscape and reduced costs
- Accelerating application replacement, and integration of systems acquired in M&A
“Having a common integration platform helps us accelerate decision making through integrated customer product and order analytics, to create a composable backend to accommodate changes in the business, and increase efficiencies by finding opportunities for automation,” Lewis says.
Eliminating Delays and Downtime
By standardizing integration on the Boomi AtomSphere Platform, Lewis says, Pentair has eliminated multiple challenges to gain the speed and agility the business needs.
- Long project lead times with multiple integration methods
- Long downtimes of mission-critical ecommerce platforms
- Inability to quickly adapt to changing business requirements
- Lack of an API ecosystem to support growing omnichannel needs
Boomi’s wide array of prebuilt connectors has helped Pentair quickly connect across a complex landscape of multiple ERP and CRM systems, as well as systems for ecommerce, order management, payment processing, marketing, and product information management (PIM).
Lewis says Boomi’s automated retry framework has reduced operational and support overhead.
Plus, Boomi capabilities to ingest and convert data of various types result in a uniform data format across the company.
“Boomi also supports our hybrid IT model,” Lewis adds. “We have some on-premise and also cloud-based platforms, so Boomi provides a hybrid integration platform that allows them to communicate with each other.”
Integration “No Longer on the Sidelines”
For Cognizant, Pentair’s success underscores the pivotal role of a cloud-native integration platform as a service (iPaaS) in digital transformation. Integration is “no longer on the sidelines,” Taritla says — instead, it’s a catalyst for digital transformation.
Boomi and Cognizant professional services helped Pentair transform its environment in just one year. The Boomi and Cognizant solution helps Pentair and other organizations ensure the vital elements of data veracity and data velocity, Taritla says.
That’s essential for organizations that need, for example, to quickly create and execute multichannel promotions, or adjust pricing on the fly in response to changing demand or competitive pressures, notes Taritla.
“One thing that’s consistent across our customers is tying together data flows across myriad systems and creating reusable assets across the organization, which in turn support more nimble business models,” Taritla says.
Value of the Joint Boomi/Cognizant Solution
At Pentair, Cognizant got started with an ideal ecommerce architecture based on its experience with other client organizations. It accounted for key technology components including shopping carts, payment gateways, tax engines, and fulfillment systems.
Boomi’s “tremendous” set of pre-built connectors is one reason why Cognizant has recommended and deployed Boomi for Pentair and other customers. Other considerations include API connectivity, support for SOAP and REST protocols, and flexibility across hybrid systems.
The combination of Boomi’s market-leading technology and Cognizant’s IT and industry expertise make for a powerful joint solution, Taritla notes.
“While Boomi provides a very rich set of tools for interacting with various systems and applications, both cloud and on-premises, the functional knowledge and the business process-related knowledge that our associates have accumulated over the years is really key to the success of an initiative,” Taritla says.