Application integration is something that every company must eventually come to grips with. Maybe it’s pushing workloads to the cloud that brings integration to the top of the priority list. Sometimes it’s just the need to streamline internal processes and data flows. But one event is sure to create the need for integration — a merger or acquisition.
The 2010 union of Japan-based Renesas Technology and NEC created Renesas Electronics America. Based in Santa Clara, Calif., the wholly-owned subsidiary makes semiconductors and other circuitry.
Boomi was a natural fit for Renesas’ IT strategy. Renesas ran an on-premise, legacy integration system that required manual coding by an onsite expert. Integrations were expensive, complicated, and time-consuming — definitely not agile.
Joseph Coleman, a senior IT manager at Renesas, was juggling 27 racks of servers that had accumulated through mergers and acquisitions going back as far as 2003. When the opportunity arose to move to a new building, he decided it was time to get out of the data center business and migrate to the cloud.
A Mix of Cloud-Based and On-Premise Applications
Renesas needed to integrate several cloud-based and on-premise applications, including a custom human resources system and two instances of SAP enterprise resource planning software. One of the SAP instances served the Japanese headquarters and the other, the U.S. subsidiary. The applications held a lot of data that needed to be transformed and integrated to support various critical business tasks, particularly revenue forecasting.
The company evaluated technologies and vendors the find better approaches to their integration challenges. Intrigued by Boomi’s low-code, cloud-native integration platform as a service (iPaaS), Renesas put Boomi to the test in a proof-of-concept deployment.
Renesas used Boomi to integrate data from the U.S.-based instance of its HR system, its Japan-based SAP instance, and the company’s global directory management systems.
The Bake-Off
In a bake-off against another integration vendor, Boomi’s iPaaS proved far easier to use.
Plus, the ability to locate a Boomi Atom on-premise eased any lingering anxieties within the Renesas IT team about moving to the cloud. By placing a Atom within the company’s firewall, Renesas could keep any integrations under its complete control.
To help run the project, Renesas enlisted Menlo Technologies, a leading Boomi partner with deep expertise in application and data integration.
Renesas worked with Menlo Technologies to set up integration processes for its cloud-based HR system (Ultimate Software). Since then, it’s added several integrations — including integration between Salesforce.com Chatter and Zendesk for managing support tickets, and between Salesforce.com and SAP for exchanging sales information.
Menlo also developed a dashboard based on the Boomi API, which captures integration process activity — inbound and outbound.
The Pay Off: Dramatically Lower Costs
The security of its data and applications was a primary concern for Renesas. But with Boomi, the company improved its integration tasks across the board.
Running the Boomi Atom on-premise addressed security issues. And for cloud-to-cloud or cloud-to-ground connections, Boomi made it easy for Renesas to more efficiently run its legacy applications while it built out its cloud architecture.
Renesas is now saving significant budget and resources. The company estimates it needs 2.5 fewer employees involved with integration work, much of that time savings from eliminating the need for custom coding development and maintenance.
And Renesas is reducing expenses by 88 percent compared to previous maintenance, reporting, hardware and on-site support costs.
Productivity improvements include replacing manual processes with automated systems, driven by the Boomi platform.
And the Boomi cloud-native platform has made the IT department much more agile in responding to business needs. Renesas can quickly spin up a test for a new project.
It did just that for a major customer that needed serialized data from SAP. The integration was tested and in production in less than a month.
Coleman summarizes it this way: “Dell Boomi’s been able to handle the challenges. The Boomi platform is one of the best tools I’ve seen…”
Learn more about how Renesas benefited from the Boomi platform in the full case study.