The Dell Boomi Blog

Register for our next live Dell Boomi webinar: Salesforce.com Integration in 30 Minutes or Less

Date: Wednesday, February 1, 2012
Time: 10:00 am PT / 1:00 pm ET
Duration: 60 minutes
Register: https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/308887185

Integration frustration? Join Dell Boomi General Manager Rick Nucci and Dell Boomi Sales Engineer Wes Manning as they prove the days of painful, never-ending integration projects are gone forever with the latest cloud technology.

Watch as Nucci and Manning build and deploy a live integration between Salesforce Sales Cloud and Twilio Cloud Communications in 30 minutes or less. Don't believe it? Attendees can test the integration using their own mobile devices! This session first appeared live at Dreamforce 2011, and is back by popular demand.

Click here to register now.

How cloud decentralizes our world (in a good way)

Recently I signed up for an online music matching service. If you aren’t familiar, these services basically make your entire music library available from the cloud, and sync it across all of your devices as well. One of the really useful things about such services is that they let you selectively download artists/albums/songs onto your computers/devices vs. automatically adding them.

This selective download capability got me thinking — why is it actually needed? The answer is obvious; you need to download your music so you can listen to it in places where you don’t have internet access. Planes, trains, and cars are some examples of places where you don’t get reliable, consistent, internet access. My home, however, is another story. I have excellent internet access. Despite this, prior to music matching, I was forced into an "on premise" music management process. Everything had to be stored on my home computer, and I had to manually plug each of my devices into the computer and manually choose what I wanted to sync over. The continued growth of my digital music and movies will very quickly fill up a 500GB hard drive, forcing me to play the "do I really watch/listen to this?" game over and over.

So after I setup music matching, I ran a few tests. I quickly realized that I could "delete" anything I wanted off my home computer, but when I did my music service would ask me if I wanted to keep it in the cloud. If I said yes, then it just meant that it would be streamed from the cloud vs. played locally, which is fine because I can stream from home as much as I want. But it was removed from my home computer storage, forever solving my ongoing need for local storage.

This is a great example of how the cloud decentralizes our worlds. In the pre-cloud days I had to think of my music library as one big centrally stored collection. It was up to me to back it up, buy more and more storage, move it around when I upgrade PC’s, you get the idea. Now with the cloud, all of that goes away, and the idea of "storage" means something totally different. Storage is now decentralized; downloaded fragments of my music library are scattered across my devices so that I can listen to them from places where I can’t get to the cloud.

There is a very similar phenomenon going on in the integration world. Old integration middleware applications that were built before the cloud existed were built with a centralized mindset. You would create these huge stacks of hardware/databases/queues/servers and run massive amounts of data through them. And they worked well, in the pre-cloud days, because the applications being integrated were within the same network. The cloud has now completely changed this paradigm. There is no one central place for IT anymore.

Between traditional data centers, private clouds, public clouds, PaaS, and SaaS, your IT landscape if officially decentralized. So then, must your integration strategy. While the centralization of development tools, administrative consoles, deployment and change management is more critical than ever, your integration "stack" must now be portable so that you can address integrations in all of the different environments you will contend with. By following this strategy, you will be approaching integration with a strategy that scales as your cloud adoption does.

Dell Boomi announces master data management (MDM) solution that unites data across applications in the cloud

The Dell Boomi team recently wrapped up our Fall 11 launch and while we were very excited to share those advances with you, we also want to reveal something new we are working on that’s going to change the way business applications work together in the cloud: Dell Boomi master data management (MDM).

Building on our innovative AtomSphere offering, the world’s largest integration cloud that lets businesses connect applications, Dell Boomi is developing a cloud-based MDM platform. Our MDM platform enables companies of all sizes to ensure their master customer, item/product, vendor and employee data is clean, accurate and consistent; all within an adaptable, cloud-based environment.

Why do you need an MDM platform? For starters, poor data quality costs enterprises billions of dollars annually. Without clean, consistent, and accurate master data, a business integration initiative can result in inaccurate or incomplete data, forcing users to turn to less-reliable products to get reliable business information. Historically, this problem has been addressed with multi-year, multi-million dollar engagements with limited results and return on investment. Building on this issue, the adoption of the cloud is proliferating the data quality challenge because now your master data fundamentally exists in more applications, sometimes even without IT’s knowledge.

Enter Dell Boomi development of an MDM product: a cloud-based MDM solution. To understand what Dell Boomi’s MDM is, let’s also be clear about what it is not: Dell Boomi MDM is not simply a ‘technology’. It is a program that ensures consistent, standard, high-quality data across an organization. As mentioned already, Dell Boomi MDM is also a pure cloud approach, meaning that all setup, configuration and management is done from a Web browser, in a single instance, multi-tenant environment. It also features a portable master data store that provides a variety of setup options and enables MDM for any combination of SaaS and on-premise applications.

Now that we know what it is, let’s talk about what it will do. Dell Boomi MDM will provide the following:

• Modeling: The ability to define and model all of your master data to your needs.
• Storage:  Long term, secure storage of all master data. Dell Boomi will provide cloud storage or enable customers to set up their own master data store.
• Synchronization: Working with Dell Boomi AtomSphere, Boomi’s MDM solution will have the ability to synchronize the relevant changes made to master data across applications as needed, with intelligence that identifies what is the system of record for corresponding sets of data.
• Validation: Dell Boomi’s MDM will provide a means to discover and reconcile duplicate records, while also enriching data as it is being managed to fill in missing or incomplete information.

In addition to these core benefits, Dell Boomi’s MDM solution will also leverage the power of Dell Boomi’s other technologies, including the popular Dell Boomi Suggest, making this MDM solution not only powerful, but also easy to set up and use.

So now you know a little about Dell Boomi’s new MDM solution. We are incredibly excited about what it’s going to mean for data management and can’t wait for you to test it out in the coming months. Stay tuned for more information on Boomi.com.

Channels in the Cloud

Dell Boomi recently sponsored the Cloud Channel Summit in Santa Clara, California. This one-day event allowed vendors, channel partners and other cloud professionals to learn and network together.

We were pleased to have the opportunity for Rick Nucci, CTO, and Diane Ruth, Executive Director of Business Development to co-present the keynote, The Cloud Era of Channel Success: Is Your Organization Partner-Ready?

During their 30-minute presentation Rick and Diane used their experience of successfully building, managing and growing the Dell Boomi channel to provide summit attendees with soup-to-nuts information to help them do the same. The topics were targeted at vendors and channel partners, with the goal of empowering both to be successful in a cloud channel environment.

They discussed:

• The value of the channel
• Channel readiness
• Cloud technology & architecture
• Go-to-market & business model  alignment
• Partner framework & infrastructure
  • Pitfalls to partnering
  • Partner success stories

Dell Boomi is proud of its channel partner community, which includes Systems Integrators (SIs), Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) and PaaS Providers. We’re proof-positive that a product built in the cloud can be successfully marketed and sold via a cloud channel. If your company would like to partner with Dell Boomi, please complete the Boomi Partnership Application, located here.

Watch a video of the keynote:

CCS_Rick Nucci & Diane Ruth Keynote from Marc Sternberg on Vimeo.

Boomi Suggest: taking the guesswork out of data mapping

The Boomi team just wrapped up our Fall 11 launch, and we’re very excited about every new and updated feature that helps simplify customers’ move to the cloud. There’s one feature, however, that deserves a little extra recognition and remains a standout achievement in my mind. This capability, known as Boomi Suggest, is one I’m most enthusiastic to share with our customers.

Originally launched in June of 2010, Boomi Suggest was the industry’s first and only suggestion wizard for data mapping. This feature allows customers to tap into the knowledge of the entire user community here at Dell Boomi for proven best practices in data mapping. By anonymously indexing over 50,000 data maps and 13,000 map functions created on the AtomSphere platform, Boomi Suggest leverages previously built maps to recommend and automatically generate mappings for new integrations that have worked for other customers with similar application integrations.

As medium and large enterprises continue to implement cloud integrations, data mapping and map function creation remain a time consuming step of integration configuration. In order to simplify our customers’ move to the cloud and take out the complexity associated with data mapping, we have continued to build upon the success of Boomi Suggest to ensure our users that they are following best practices for integration.

As users build and deploy integrations, AtomSphere will anonymously index data maps and map functions. When new integrations are built, Boomi Suggest recommends mappings based on powerful ranking algorithms that weight suggestions
based on similarity and relationships of data fields. With this tool, users are averaging 68 suggested mappings per map with 85% of these suggestions accepted, leading to much shorter time to value.

Boomi Suggest is one more piece of evidence that both AtomSphere Fall 11 and Dell Boomi as a whole are being vastly influenced by our community. It’s a testament, as well, to the commitment we feel to our customers, as we continually look for ways to connect people and simplify their paths to the cloud.

 

The #1 Integration Cloud Just Got Better - Dell Boomi Fall 11

It’s been almost a year since Boomi became part of the Dell family, and it’s with great excitement that we announce our second seasonal launch since the acquisition. Back in April of this year, we announced new features that would enable our customers to leverage existing middleware and on-premise application investments, while adopting cloud and SaaS applications in the enterprise. This Fall, Dell Boomi is focusing on helping our customers harnesses the power of the world’s largest integration cloud and our AtomSphere user community to simplify SaaS integration complexity.

This launch is designed for and influenced by the Boomi community, and helps simplify the move to cloud computing with easy integration via customer-proven pathways and user- and partner-friendly tools for monitoring and maintenance. The updates and improvements made to Dell Boomi AtomSphere Fall 11 aim to simplify the introduction of cloud and SaaS applications into a customer’s IT environment.

You can read more about our Fall 11 release on our Fall 11 information page.

For a descriptive customer-use story, check out how Dell Boomi’s new features have helped Enterprise BP continue to innovate and grow their business through the use of our tools (and save over $100,000, too).

Connecting People, Not Just Applications

As cloud computing vendors continue to develop solutions that help customers take advantage of new solutions, the theme of “community” becomes more readily apparent. Here at Dell Boomi, we look to help our customers take advantage of cloud computing and Software as a Service (SaaS) to help achieve greater efficiency, as well as give them the power to start using new cloud and SaaS applications while connecting them to existing ones. By exploring new capabilities, we’re learning more by connecting people than by simply connecting applications. It is by harnessing the collective intelligence and experiences of global adopters of SaaS that we are able to help simplify other’s paths to the cloud and accelerate adoption.

While it’s vital to provide customers with solutions and products that exceed their needs and expectations, we also want to provide them with the tools they need to help their own businesses grow and thrive. I have to believe that many businesses have benefitted from shared experiences, and heeded advice from others who have blazed the trail before them. That’s what we’re seeing here with customers using cloud integration services; those that built data maps to applications before are sharing these maps with their peers.

As cloud computing continues to evolve, we’re constantly searching for opportunities to better the integration experience for our customers. That’s why I’m so proud of the way we’re connecting our customers through the Boomi Suggest tool, which gives them the ability to share previous integrations with each other. Boomi Suggest is unique in that, as users build and deploy integrations, our tools will suggest previous data mappings that have worked for users in similar situations. So our customers’ successes become blueprints for future integrations, simplifying the next person’s path to the cloud. Dell Boomi has helped foster this sense of community, enabling customers to harness the collective intelligence and experiences of adopters of SaaS.

This aspect of community has become an important factor in growing the adoption of cloud computing, and Boomi Suggest has created such a community that allows developers to build a platform, ISVs to contribute to it, and businesses to employ it. When I look at the various tools that are available to cloud computing users, I can’t help but realize: one of the major advantages of cloud computing lies in the power of community.

Moving to a Service Cloud

We invited Kimberly Gress — Director, Client Services — as a guest blogger for "Moving to a Service Cloud", to speak about how Dell Boomi uses the cloud for better customer service.

At Dell Boomi, we’ve always viewed our ability to provide exceptional customer support as a top priority. Even though our cloud-based integration platform dramatically simplifies the data integration process, every customer’s situation is unique. There will always be a need to answer product questions, offer assistance with best practices, or provide general training and technical support.

In the summer of 2010, as a company experiencing rapid growth, we had a traditional support model in place that was heavily dependent on people and manual processes. Under this model, supporting our growing customer base meant scaling service resources linearly with the number of our customers—potentially risking lowering our service levels if we couldn’t hire fast enough.

We realized the time had come to upgrade to a more efficient service and support system—one that reflected our core values as a company. Why not deliver service and support as, well…a service? We believe in the value of cloud computing to increase capacity or add capabilities on demand, so it only makes sense that we leverage this ability to better respond to support requests.

Enter the Dell Boomi Service and Support Customer Portal, which we introduced in June. Based on Salesforce.com Service Cloud, the new Customer Portal features several enhancements specifically requested by our customers to better support their development on the AtomSphere platform. Among the new features, the new Customer Portal offers:

• Seamless integration via a single sign-on from your AtomSphere account
• A searchable knowledge base to help you find resolutions quickly and easily
• A 360-degree view of your support cases, with the simplified ability to track the current status and actions taken on your requests
• Access to Boomi's user community for idea and solution exchange

The idea behind these enhancements is two-pronged. On one, we aimed to deliver an array of services and support options through the Customer Portal so that we could dramatically streamline support requests and track responses. On the other, we wanted to tap into the value of collaboration and the wisdom of the crowd so that our customers could capture the best answers and most innovative ideas from the experienced Boomi user community.

Already, we’ve seen the benefits of the new Customer Portal. For example, in Sept 2010, 80 percent of Dell Boomi service requests came through chat. Early results have shown about 23 percent of customer requests are now addressed via the portal for self-service support, while requests originating through chat has decreased to 43 percent. Likewise, we’ve seen a significant improvement in problem resolution. Our original goal was to reduce the average time to close service requests by 15% by end of December 2011. We’ve actually surpassed that goal and, as of July, the average time to close service requests had fallen 18%. 

Taken together, these new features are a big leap forward in ensuring the success of our clients’ integration processes. If you’re a customer and you haven’t already seen the changes to our support services, take a peek at a brief demo or visit our frequently asked questions for more information.

 

Cloud Expo: Boomi case study — Enterprise Community Housing

Barton George is Dell's Cloud Computing Evangelist. This post is from his blog at http://bartongeorge.net/

Earlier today at Cloud Computing Expo here in New York, Boomi CTORick Nucci conducted a session entitled “Cloud Integration: Best practices for IT Executives.”  Rick did a great job sketching out the issues to consider and what to take into account with regards to integration.  The most compelling part of the talk, however came fromPradip Sitaram, CIO of Enterprise Business Partners and Boomi customer.  Enterprise is a not-for-profit that builds affordable housing across the U.S.

After Pradip got off stage I sat down with him and got him to give a condensed version of his talk:

Some of the ground Pradip covers:

• Enterprise homes house over 1 million people and every 55 minutes somebody moves into an enterprise home.
• Dealing with the financial and occupancy reports that come from over 1600 properties, on a daily, monthly and yearly basis.  How Boomi provided a solution to dealing with and managing these reports that was a fraction of the quote from the other vendor, and could be implemented in weeks instead of months.
• Their longer term issue of dealing with over 70 databases that are out dated and need to be modernized.  The answer is to go to the cloud and Boomi will act as their strategic integration platform making sure that all the pieces old and new work together.

Pau for now…

Cloud Expo: Talking to Rick Nucci, Boomi CTO

Barton George is Dell's Cloud Computing Evangelist. This post is from his blog at http://bartongeorge.net/

Today, day one of the Cloud Computing Expo kicked off here at the Javits center in New York city.  The event began with a keynote delivered by Steve Schuckenbrock, president of Dell Services.  Dell is the Diamond sponsor at the event and Steve talked about finding the real business value in cloud computing and the business of “Yes, now“.

 

Some of the ground Rick covers:

• What Boomi is and how it got started in the integration space back in 2000.
• [01:05] How Boomi’s integration offering evolved from a traditional middleware approach to cloud-based.
• [02:51] How being acquired by Dell has changed how Boomi run’s its business and serves its customers.

Pau for now…