By Mark Emmons
In this webinar recap you’ll learn:
- Why Riverbed Technology upgraded to Boomi’s integration platform from TIBCO’s legacy middleware to take advantage of the cloud’s speed and scalability.
- What consulting firm Jade recommends businesses consider when embarking upon cloud migration initiatives.
- How Riverbed “moved the dial in the right direction” across the business by adopting the Boomi AtomSphere Platform, including faster onboarding of partners.
In 2019, Riverbed Technology decided to fully embrace a cloud-first digital strategy to gain the flexibility and scalability offered by SaaS applications – and keep pace with modern business.
But there was a big challenge. Riverbed’s existing integration platform, an on-premises TIBCO system, wasn’t built for the cloud.
“We immediately realized that for us to move applications to SaaS successfully, we needed our integration platform to be scalable in the cloud and easy to manage,” said Bhishma Jani, vice president of information systems, in a recent webinar. “That’s because every time we make a change to applications or the overall landscape, the integration platform needs to enable that quickly.”
Boomi partner Jade advised Riverbed to switch to Boomi’s cloud-native, low-code integration platform. Today, nearly 70% of Riverbed’s technology stack is either in SaaS or the cloud – greatly reducing maintenance and operations costs while setting up the business for the future.
“Boomi was very important to create the right mixture, the right recipe, and the right outcome for us,” he added.
Jani and Vinit Verma, Jade’s vice president and head of integration services, spoke about Riverbed’s benefits and offered guidance for other businesses as they consider migrating essential operations to the cloud.
Why Riverbed Wanted To Move to the Cloud
Riverbed, a nearly 50-year-old company with 30,000 global customers, is a perennial leader in Gartner’s Network Performance Monitoring and Diagnostics Magic Quadrant. The company maintains a broad landscape of popular applications to run its business, including an HR management system (Workday), an enterprise ERP (Oracle Service Bus), a NetSuite instance, Salesforce, and other core systems.
“Our focus is to ensure we provide a seamless experience to our partners, customers, and employees,” Jani said. “We want an operationally optimized experience across the company. As we all know, SaaS solutions have built-in benefits. The configurations are all available. It’s a no-code experience, and updates are easy. It’s subscription-based, so you can flex in and flex out. All of those good things led to us accelerating this transformation.”
When it became clear the existing TIBCO middleware didn’t meet the connectivity needs of a cloud-first approach, Riverbed began exploring options with help from Jade.
A Typical Challenge Businesses Face
Jade is a Boomi platinum implementation partner that has helped more than 100 global customers adopt the platform – including migrations from legacy middleware systems. The integration challenges Riverbed encountered are pretty typical, Verma said. He noted that on-premises platforms:
- Are a struggle because they are code-based or require the setup of significant infrastructure
- Won’t support the long-term needs of hybrid IT environments
- Require longer development cycles due to hand-coding, causing project delays and overwhelming IT teams
- Create additional costs in money and resources for managing integrations
- Have fewer updates and an uncertain road forward for businesses when they reach their end of life
Verma said Boomi was a “perfect fit” for Riverbed because the platform handles end-to-end integrations in a low-code, drag-and-drop manner.
“If you compare the development cycle of Boomi with on-premises platforms, you can speed up your integrations by five to seven times,” he added. “You eliminate extensive manual data work by automating processes. Boomi is taking care of everything. Developers can easily and quickly build a new integration for the business team whenever there is a new request.”
Key Results for Riverbed
The business uses Boomi to manage more than 130 integrations, consisting of about 80 internal applications and 50 EDI partner connections.
“We literally have changed the fabric of our integration framework,” Jani said. “It’s completely net new. It’s meant to be flexible and stretchable. And it’s ready to take on the challenges Riverbed will embark on as we roll off more exciting products.”
The range of improvements includes:
- Lowering the total cost of ownership
- Shortening development time and enabling IT talent to focus on other projects
- Increasing data quality through automation
- Scaling and evolving with business growth
- Reducing time to onboard new partners
“Over 90% of our business is partner-sourced,” Jani said. “Imagine how valuable it is to seamlessly integrate partners into our ecosystem so that they become our engines to sell. By cutting that time, we are enabling go-to-market speed. Now, more of our products will reach more customers through these partners.”
Integration Is Critical to Cloud Success
Jani said when launching a cloud initiative, think about the ultimate goals and how to work through the process. The simple act of migrating systems – and connecting them with other applications – requires robust integration capabilities.
“If your end state is to adopt SaaS and the cloud, you need to make sure you can orchestrate every change,” he added. “That’s why you need to pay attention to integration. Having a flexible integration framework helps facilitate every other migration you do. Don’t let it be on the side. Integration needs to be a prerequisite.”
One last thought from Jani: Don’t settle. He said Riverbed could have opted for an updated system from their previous middleware vendor. But that would have been short-sighted.
“It’s easy to upgrade and stay on the same technology,” he said. “Change is a little bit hard. But it’s also an opportunity to make sure you’re aligned with business partners, customers, and your company’s strategy, so you build something that can work efficiently for the next five to 10 years. Don’t take the easy path. Take the path that is in line with your company’s goals.”
View the free, on-demand version of “Modernize Legacy Middleware with Boomi: How Riverbed Reduced Integration Time 2X” to hear more from Riverbed Technology’s Bhishma Jani and Jade’s Vinit Verma about the benefits of using Boomi as the foundation of a cloud migration strategy.