Companies such as Facebook, Amazon, Google and Uber are renowned for pioneering digital transformation. These companies have revolutionized the ways billions of people share, shop, communicate, and move about.
Less recognized is the role of integration in such innovation. The ability to connect applications and seamlessly share their data is now the cornerstone for any business working in the digital economy.
Uber, for instance, connects and coordinates its passenger and driver databases, payment systems, and GPS mapping into a mobile app that makes hitching a ride simple and affordable. And Amazon built its success in personalized marketing, inventory management, and fulfillment through a sophisticated integration strategy, implemented at unprecedented speed and scale.
Such sophisticated integrations, however, are now required not just for pioneering companies but for any organization that wants to stay
competitive. Capabilities such as pervasive mobility, customer-centricity, and data-driven business improvements depend fundamentally on connecting diverse information and applications. As the analyst firm Gartner put it, “Digital transformation is intensifying demands for seamless integration across application and information infrastructures.”
The Fast Track to Digital Transformation
Yet integration is often overlooked — especially on the business side — as “an IT thing” that will take care of itself. After all, organizations have invested in ETL, ESB and other on-premises integration technologies for years. But traditional integration is often too slow, resource-intensive, and costly for a fast track to digital transformation.
For digital transformation to live up to its potential, integration needs to be faster and more agile than what legacy technologies have been able to provide. That’s especially important in today’s norm of hybrid IT environments of legacy on-premises applications and new cloud services, as described in a new Dell Boomi Executive Brief, Integration: The Catalyst for Digital Transformation.
Fortunately for companies looking to move faster and be more agile, new cloud-based integration platform as a service (iPaaS) technologies help put digital transformation on the fast track.
Organization can deploy iPaaS far more quickly and cost-effectively than traditional technologies while delivering enterprise-grade integration for cloud-to-cloud, cloud-to-on-premises, and on-premises-to-on-premises scenarios.
iPaaS fuels digital transformation with several distinct benefits:
Faster deployment. Compared to weeks or months of building connectivity, iPaaS provides a point-and-click interface, a library of prebuilt connections, and an intuitive development environment to greatly shrink project timelines.
Business and IT agility. With any-to-any integration capabilities, iPaaS makes it much easier for organizations to roll out IT projects for supporting mobility, customer service, supply chain optimization, operational efficiency, or any number of business innovations.
Scalability for growth. Because iPaaS is cloud-based, organizations can add or modify connectors and functionality they need at any time, without additional complexity or costs. And development teams across the global can access the same code and share the same tools without the expenses or overhead of deploying additional development environments.
Digital transformation is still in its early days. The coming years will see more innovations and disruptive business models as organizations embrace a digitized global future. Some startups and established players will excel with a brilliant, well-executed idea while others are “Uberized” — bested by a faster, more agile rival.
Ensure your organization can compete by making data and application integration a central part of your digital transformation strategy. Learn more in the new Dell Boomi Executive Brief.
For organization looking to tap into iPaaS to drive their digital transformation, Dell Boomi is your source of knowledge and guidance. We pioneered iPaaS and have been recognized as the industry’s leader by Gartner and other leading research organizations. Please visit our website to learn more about Dell Boomi’s iPaaS.