Cloud Integration Provides Major Returns for Leading for Tax Software Maker

Business Goals

As a SaaS vendor, Avalara provides tax automation applications that integrate with financial, billing, ecommerce and point-of-sale systems. While the company’s software is highly automated and efficient, its sales process was high-touch and high-cost.

Provisioning customers involved several time-consuming, manual steps. The company turned to Dell Boomi partner Slalom to build an ecommerce system that Avalara could maintain on its own, with the goal of speeding up onboarding and improving customer satisfaction.

Integration Challenges

Avalara wanted to create an API that allowed other areas of the company to create subscriptions and submit leads through Avalara.com and other web properties.

Avalara also needed to integrate billing and subscriptions between Zuora and the Salesforce Sales Cloud, as well as record sales in back-office systems for billing and renewals.

Normally, Avalara would rely on C+ programming and its experience in full-stack, middle-tier development to get job done. But the project was too time-consuming for in-house development.

How Boomi Helped

For integration and API management, Slalom recommended the Boomi integration platform. It was a paradigm shift from Avalara’s typical custom coding approach, but it worked — and quickly. Boomi became a strategic building block for the growth of Avalara’s business.

Boomi allows Avalara to deliver high-quality integrations rapidly with fewer moving parts and fewer places for problems to develop. Avalara chose to host a Boomi Atom onsite, allowing the company to use its existing hosting, security and monitoring infrastructure.

Results

After the success of the ecommerce system, Avalara concentrated on adding more features and extending its API. It moved to the Boomi platform’s enterprise edition, running two sets of Boomi Atoms and 22 connectors. Using Boomi helped Avalara to:

• Manage provisioning from Salesforce to Zuora for billing, including metered usage
• Deliver integration and API functionality faster than traditional middle-tier vendors
• Improve Avalara business speed and agility to quickly respond to market demands
• Sell its services in a “no-touch” environment