Most people don’t realize that before the integration platform as a service category even existed, Boomi was a B2B integration vendor. Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) is in our DNA. So, it should come as no surprise that Boomi was named a Leader — one of only five vendors — in the IDC MarketScape Worldwide Business-to-Business Middleware Vendor Assessment.¹

The 2024 IDC MarketScape covers pure-play B2B vendors, enterprise resource planning (ERP) vendors with strong B2B offerings, and integration platform vendors with strong B2B capabilities. In this blog, we take a look at what the study as a whole covers and drill down into the details of the study’s excerpt on Boomi.

Business-to-Business Middleware Is the Backbone of Trade

Exchanging data with business partners has always been important. But before the development and adoption of the EDI format in the 1960s, businesses used the mail, fax, or email to exchange documents like invoices and purchase orders. These methods were prone to errors, such as missing or incorrect documents, which often resulted in delayed payments.

Those days are thankfully gone for most businesses, but the data businesses need to exchange has become more complex. As the IDC MarketScape study points out, “Transaction data, and data from a wide range of adjacent solutions, such as enterprise resource planning, customer relationship management (CRM), and supply chain management (SCM), all flow through B2B middleware to connect these high-value data streams with stakeholders across organizations.”

Why Boomi Was Recognized

Boomi’s B2B offering has several strengths that helped place it in the Leaders Category of the IDC MarketScape. According to the report, Boomi’s strengths are as follows:

“Multi-persona support: Boomi B2B/EDI provides no-code, low-code, and code-friendly options, making it more applicable to an expanded set of users. Boomi B2B/EDI emphasizes usability with a simplified graphical mapping interface and a consolidated control plane. The ease of understandability within this graphical user interface as well as the included low-code and no-code capabilities make the Boomi B2B/EDI product more accessible to new users.”

“Monitoring capabilities: Boomi B2B/EDI has a high degree of built-in visibility for customers to monitor interactions more easily with trading partners to ensure the efficient movement of messages. Boomi’s process monitoring provides a single-view experience for visibility across partners, customers, suppliers, and internal applications, allowing users to create custom filters and queries using a tracked fields feature. In addition, Boomi’s EDI Dashboard offers human-readable access to all the relevant underlying data, such as purchasing, invoicing, and shipping.”

Where Is B2B Middleware Headed?

Where is B2B middleware headed? To the cloud, apparently. The study reported that as the overall B2B integration market grew by 3.6% in 2023, cloud-based deployments grew at the rate of 8.9%. Nevertheless, 54% of revenue still comes from on-premises deployments.

It is also noteworthy, especially to long-time Boomi customers, that the 2024 IDC MarketScape found 54% of companies have implemented their primary B2B solutions in the past two years. And 33% maintain multiple B2B solutions due to solution preference and legacy technology. There’s always technical debt to be rooted out it seems.

There’s also a move toward modernized B2B middleware solutions that integrate both unstructured and structured data to avoid manual or brittle processes.

To learn more, read the IDC MarketScape Worldwide Business-to-Business Middleware Vendor Assessment excerpt and check out the Boomi B2B/EDI Management product page.

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IDC MarketScape: Worldwide Business-to-Business Middleware 2024 Vendor Assessment, Doc #US51811124, December 2024