Beyond ROI: The Top 10 ‘Soft’ Benefits of the Boomi Platform

5 minute read | 12 Mar 2019

By Boomi

In the IT world, a ROI analysis zeroes in on the cost savings, revenue increases and other hard-dollar gains that a company realizes after it changes software or processes. But the ROI exercise will often unearth qualitative or “soft” benefits that can’t be readily quantified.

That’s the case with Boomi enterprise customers interviewed by Forrester Consulting for an in-depth study, “The Total Economic Impact™ of the Boomi Platform,” commissioned by Boomi. Forrester identified far-reaching qualitative benefits that are making both IT and business more effective, productive, collaborative and connected.

In an earlier blog post, we summarized Forrester’s findings of 307 percent ROI over three years after adopting Boomi, for a net present value payback of $4.8 million. Other blog posts have drilled down into how customers see $3.4 million in new revenue and gross profit, and how they eliminate $2.6 million in legacy integration costs.

In this post, we take a close look at the qualitative benefits experienced by six Boomi customers in different industries interviewed by Forrester. From those customers, Forrester created a composite organization with $10 billion in revenue and 30,000 employees.

Download the full Forrester study for an in-depth look at the benefits that organizations achieve with Boomi.

The top 10 “soft” benefits of adopting Boomi’s unified platform as identified in the Forrester study are:

1. Improved data quality and decisions

Solving the challenge of poor quality data from multiple legacy systems, Boomi lets IT teams improve the consistency and quality of information, supporting smart, data-driven decisions by business stakeholders.

One interviewee told Forrester that thanks to Boomi, his IT team “got to consistently capture quality data to create reusable assets that could be leveraged by an entire organization for informed decision-making.”

2. Accelerate speed of business

With an easy-to-use yet powerful Boomi platform, IT teams are able to complete integration projects much faster to drive improvements, operational efficiencies and innovations across the business.

One interviewee explained to Forrester, “My internal customers are happier because instead of having a four-week project, I just crashed it down to three or four days. I’m not reinventing the wheel, and I have a very flexible platform that allows me to do it.”

3. Elimination of silos

Before Boomi, organizations faced a “chaos” of integration tools and data silos. Boomi’s single, unified platform allows organizations to transition from that siloed environment to become a connected business.

As one Forrester interviewee put it, “We use Boomi as glue for all the different data sources. What I get is an elegant solution, and more importantly, a smooth customer experience.”

4. A cultural shift in IT

Integration developers previously worked in silos with no visibility into the broader impact of their work. Adopting Boomi’s centralized platform gave them new insights into other initiatives and the broader impact on the business.

As an interviewee told Forrester, “Boomi gave the developers a common language. They now operate under one set of parameters and are more collaborative. They’re more curious about data and think about the impact on downstream and upstream systems.”

5. Improve IT efficiencies

Boomi’s low-code technology helps enterprise customers reduce the number of contractors and offshore teams supporting integrations. Internal IT teams gained capacity for new initiatives, such as API management and workflow improvements.

6. Readiness for growth and digital transformation

Enterprise customers found that Boomi provided the agile integration they need to grow the business, execute on digital transformation initiatives, onboard new customers and partners, and provide new services.

7. Multi-skilled developers

Ease of use throughout Boomi’s unified platform means that integration developers don’t need specialized skills to utilize additional Boomi capabilities for API management, workflow automation or master data management.

8. Less time troubleshooting

Previously, IT teams could spend several hours to several weeks troubleshooting errors or failures across hundreds of disparate integrations. With Boomi, any needed troubleshooting is quickly resolved, usually in minutes.

9. Citizen developer empowerment

Boomi provides the toolkit and necessary governance for business users to build their own integrations. These “citizen developers” can apply deep business knowledge while IT can focus on other tasks.

10. Preparation for emerging tech

Forrester found that customers are looking to Boomi for integration as they pursue Internet of Things (IoT), artificial intelligence (AI), robotic process automation (RPA), blockchain and other emerging technologies.

For an in-depth look at the benefits that organizations achieve with Boomi, download the full Forrester study. Want to know more about how the Boomi integration cloud can help your business? Please contact Boomi today!