My colleagues Josh Tabak and David Irecki have written recently about features and benefits of the Dell Boomi Platform that help organizations accelerate growth and digital transformation. In this post, I’ll continue that conversation, covering four more ways that Boomi delivers value and helps organizations move quickly to achieve their strategic goals.

Boomi has been the leader in the integration platform as a service (iPaaS) market since it pioneered the market in 2006. But what many people don’t realize is that Boomi is much more than an integration platform. Boomi also provides data governance, API lifecycle management, workflow automation, and support for B2B partner networks.

To address their most pressing application requirements, companies often need all these capabilities working in unison. And that’s the essence of Boomi. Our comprehensive, unified platform makes IT development and operations fast, efficient and cost effective.

Business Processes Are More Than Integration

To appreciate the benefit of using a unified platform for application development and workflow automation, consider a use case that’s critical for all successful companies: employee onboarding.

At any size, a growing company can benefit from automating its onboarding process so that new employees can quickly get access to the applications and services they need to quickly ramp up their productivity.

But onboarding is actually a complicated process. It requires access to multiple applications: not just HR applications and business applications, but also directory services and sign-on systems, IT security systems, physical security systems, mobile services — the list goes on. That access requires integration, obviously, but it requires other things, too.

For example, data governance is critical to onboarding. You certainly want information about new employees to be accurate and consistent.

Security is another vital feature. Employee records should be confidential. At the same time that an onboarding app is connecting to multiple applications and databases and sharing employee information, you want to ensure that data security and data privacy are never compromised.

And scalability is essential. If you’re a large company, and you’re growing quickly, you’re adding hundreds or thousands of employees per year. Your onboarding app needs to be able to scale to keep pace with your organization.

You also need different ways to connect with the Millennials joining your organization. A key demand for the always-on generation is answers delivered quickly – preferably in real-time. An onboarding app should provide modern messaging capabilities like a chatbot to engage in a conversation with employees to help them navigate your organization.

The unified Boomi Platform meets all those requirements, delivering not only best-in-class integration and low-code application development features but also data governance, data security, and scalability.

Boomi World 2019 will be held Oct. 1-3 in Washington, D.C. and we hope you’ll join us for an exciting lineup of keynotes, breakout sessions, networking activities and more! Register now to save your spot.

A Flexible Cloud Platform Built for the Enterprise

Boomi lets organizations of all sizes run processes wherever they’re needed: in the cloud, on-premise or on a myriad of IoT devices running at the network edge. Want to connect cloud applications and keep your data in the cloud? Boomi pioneered the platform to do that. Want to keep data behind a firewall in a data center? Deploy a Boomi Atom in your data center. And if you want to run processes at the network edge, such as on factory floors or at retail sites, Boomi can do that, too.

For example, a well-known restaurant chain is running over 13,000 Boomi Atoms across its locations to drive real-time integration, customer service and data analytics. That’s not cloud integration or on-premise data center integration: that’s edge integration (integration at the farthest edge of the enterprise network, in an environment not dedicated expressly for IT operations).

The Boomi Atom is small, fast, and nimble enough to run integration processes and other services in thousands of distributed locations where it would have been unviable to run integration processes five or ten years ago.

Boomi provides other key features for enterprises, too. For example, Boomi’s account and sub-account structure makes it easy for large enterprises to keep track of which divisions and departments are running which processes. They can implement a system of charge-backs, tying expenses to usage across a global enterprise with a single subscription to Boomi.

Handling Complex, On-Premise Integrations and Business Logic

A flexible, scalable cloud application itself, Boomi delivers enterprise-grade features and support for handing complex integration patterns not just for integrations in the cloud but also for integrations on-premise and at the network edge.

Ten or twenty years ago, many business applications were far less flexible than they are now. To handle complicated business logic, organizations built custom integrations between on-premise applications and implemented complex business logic in integration code. These integrations might span dozens of connections. They are difficult and costly to maintain, a major contributor to technical debt, and inhibitors to agility and digital transformation.

Many companies still rely on this old, brittle integration code to run their critical business applications. But now they need to integrate those old legacy applications with new best-of-breed cloud applications and data services. Can Boomi help? Of course. In fact, this is where Boomi shines.

Instead of having to manually code connections to applications, Boomi customers can use pre-built connectors. Instead of relying on complex scripting to implement business logic, they can build logic using out-of-the-box, drag-and-drop visual shapes. A huge array of process libraries provides templates to fast-track development of simple and complex integration and orchestration patterns.

Boomi seamlessly supports complex enterprise integration patterns out of the box, including:

• Reliable Messaging
• Protocol Bridging
• Asynchronous Messaging
• Service Orientation, Orchestration and Transaction Management
• Business Rules Processing
• Data Confidentiality and Encryption
• Service and API Management
• Event Driven Messaging and Processing

Today more organizations recognize the importance of replacing monolithic applications that depend on scripting for business logic with modern applications that provide superior operational agility and visibility. Boomi’s intelligent, unified platform helps fast-track application development and enhancements to existing integrations so that IT teams can continually meet the changing demands of the organization.

The world’s leading organizations “Win With Boomi.” Find out how. 

Boomi Delivers a High ROI

One other way that Boomi helps enterprises is by delivering a high return on investment — 400% on average, according to a Forrester Research study, commissioned by Boomi.

“The Total Economic Impact of the Dell Boomi Platform” study analyzed large enterprises across six industries, including consumer goods, construction and manufacturing. It found that Boomi on average:

• Helped organizations grow incremental revenue by $3.4 million.
• Helped organizations migrate to the cloud, saving $1.5 million.
• Freed organizations for maintaining expensive middleware, saving organizations $1.1 million in license fees.
• Increased IT staff productivity by 70%, saving another $388,568.

“The Dell Boomi platform enabled organizations to connect data from siloed systems, allowing different parts of the organization to interact with the data,” the Forrester study says. “This unlocked opportunities for additional revenue streams and innovation.”

These are substantial benefits. Thanks to the Boomi Platform’s scalability, organizations can continue to realize these benefits even as they grow their operations and migrate more data and applications to the cloud.

It’s important to keep these savings in mind when other iPaaS vendors promise low entry fees for their platforms. When evaluating vendors based on price, customers should be wary of accepting cost comparisons that don’t account for scalability and the breadth of a platform’s capabilities. It is important not to be tempted by cheap, pay-as-you-go entry prices that end up ballooning into astronomical costs once transaction volumes take off and integration services scale up.

It’s equally important to remember that the Boomi iPaaS has capabilities far beyond integration and supports broader, more strategic value propositions than pure-play integration vendors do. We could even call it a “multiPass”!

Low-cost platforms can’t scale to meet enterprise requirements for high-volume transactions. When these platforms run out of gas, they force organizations to switch vendors and restart business-critical integration projects, complicating IT maintenance and increasing capital and operational expenses dramatically.

Keep in mind that integration platforms requiring extensive custom coding become exponentially more expensive over time. One way that Boomi saves organizations money is by helping them build a majority of their integrations and data transformations in a low-code environment, accelerating development by as much as tenfold.

With Boomi, organizations only need to hire developers for the coding that is absolutely essential to supporting their business strategy or product development, helping focus IT resources where they matter most.

Conclusion

The pace of business keeps accelerating. To keep ahead of the competition, organizations need to move quickly and efficiently.

Boomi helps customers accelerate innovation and IT operations by:

• Providing a single, comprehensive low-code development platform for managing data integration, data governance, B2B partner networks, API lifecycle management and workflow automation.
• Leveraging the complex business logic that organizations rely on today for their on-premise IT operations.
• Supporting migration to best-of-breed cloud applications that manage business logic internally.
• Helping organizations at any point in their cloud journey deliver business value through integration and scale as their business and vision expands.
• Providing a substantial return on investment and reducing IT expenses for integration, data governance and other key areas of IT, freeing resources for strategic investments.