Fast-growth technology companies can hit speed bumps if back-office processes are uncoordinated and force staff into labor-intensive manual workarounds. That can drive up costs, impact customer experiences, and undermine business agility.
It’s a scenario that ThoughtSpot, a search and AI-driven analytics software vendor on the Forbes Cloud 100 list in 2020 for the third consecutive year, is avoiding with enterprise-caliber integration through the Boomi AtomSphere Platform.
ThoughtSpot uses Boomi to orchestrate processes and data exchange across key pieces in its best-of-breed cloud IT environment. Boomi has quickly become ThoughtSpot’s de facto integration solution as the company moves towards an expected IPO.
“We’re not facing the hurdles of the past since moving to the Boomi AtomSphere Platform, and we can easily change our business use cases and expand integration,” says Neetu Jackeeray, senior business systems manager and integrations. “Our vision is to use Boomi as our infrastructure integration platform because it provides flexibility for whatever you want to do.”
An Upgrade From Celigo Integration
ThoughtSpot, founded in 2012 and based in Sunnyvale, Calif., turned to Boomi in 2020 to automate order-to-cash processes across an Oracle NetSuite financial management platform, Salesforce Sales Cloud for CRM, and a FinancialForce application for professional services automation.
The company selected the Boomi AtomSphere Platform after outgrowing Celigo, a NetSuite-centric integration tool, as outlined in our ThoughtSpot customer case study.
Inflexibility and functional limitations in the script-based Celigo tool forced developers into complex workarounds as use cases changed, Jackeeray says. If ThoughtSpot refreshed its Celigo testing and development sandboxes, it could take up to two weeks to get new integrations into production.
“It became a huge issue to accommodate new business use case changes in our environment, and that was the trigger,” Jackeeray says. “We definitely needed an integration platform that could bring us to full automation as we grow.”
In addition, Celigo maintenance and customizations were time-consuming, and in some cases required Celigo professional services at additional cost, Jackeeray adds.
“Celigo is a good platform if you’re a very small company with a very straightforward use case,” Jackeeray says. “But as the business grows, it’s a challenge to scale Celigo – you grow out of it. We encountered a lot of limitations in functionality and had to do a lot of workarounds. That’s why we turned to Boomi.”
A 10-Hour Savings in Order-to-Cash
The results have been remarkable. Jade Global, a six-year Boomi Elite partner that has implemented the Boomi AtomSphere Platform for more than 55 customers, had Boomi integrations live in just six weeks across NetSuite, Salesforce, and FinancialForce.
That’s roughly 7X faster than the 10 months it took to build similar integrations across the same apps with Celigo, Jackeeray says.
“Jade Global did a very good job for us,” Jackeeray says. “Their approach to the project and their project management was great. When we needed to change our architecture a little bit to accommodate new business needs, they were happy to work with those changes.”
With Boomi, ThoughtSpot had streamlined its order-to-cash processes and improved visibility for its finance, sales, and professional services teams. The company has eliminated at least 10 hours each month of manually entering data into systems, with Boomi orchestrating real-time updates.
Enhancing the Customer Experience
Boomi uses Salesforce data to automatically create a sales order in NetSuite, and creates a reference in the FinancialForce PSA for customers buying professional services. Boomi also ensures accurate and timely data across systems for sales involving hardware components that are shipped to customers.
“Boomi is critical in automating order, bill, and ship from end to end and keeping customers in the loop on their orders through provisioning emails from NetSuite,” Jackeeray says. “That has a very direct impact on the customer experience.”
The customer experience is also enhanced because Boomi ensures that invoice data, stored in NetSuite, is available to ThoughtSpot account managers through the Salesforce application they use every day.
So if a customer inquires about an invoice, a manager has the data needed to reply immediately without reaching out to finance for a copy of the invoice.
High Flexibility and Ease of Use
Building on success, ThoughtSpot’s two-person integration team has also used Boomi to quickly integrate Salesforce Sales Cloud with a cloud lifecycle management tool for customer provisioning.
Another project connects a BambooHR system with a Reflektive performance application, while additional projects to streamline employee onboarding, and connect Salesforce with a marketing application, are in the pipeline.
Brent Paterson, ThoughtSpot integration specialist and a recent college graduate, says he’s found Boomi to be highly flexible and easy to use.
“Boomi has been able to do anything I need it to,” Paterson says. “If I don’t know how to do something, I’ve been able to figure it out every time fairly quickly and easily with Boomi.”
Scalability To lnnovate and Grow
For implementation partner Jade Global, it’s been gratifying to see ThoughtSpot capitalize on Boomi’s capabilities to bring new agility to the business, says Vinit Verma, Jade Global’s associate vice president, integration and cloud data services.
“ThoughtSpot is a great example of a company that’s using Boomi to scale complex transformations and utilize real-time data to accelerate the business and help their customers,” says Verma. “They now have scalability with Boomi to integrate many more applications. They don’t have to start from scratch, and instead can quickly add new integrations on top of the platform.”
See our ThoughtSpot customer success story to learn more about how the fast-growth software company is transforming business processes with the Boomi AtomSphere Platform.