As you may have already seen, there are several exciting announcements happening at Boomi lately. One in particular that I wanted to highlight is part of our AtomSphere announcement. Effective today, we have released in beta our Connector SDK to enable anyone to connect an application to the AtomSphere platform. Once connected that application can now integrate with any of the hundreds of applications we now support. This is key to Boomi’s unique “Connect once, integrate everywhere” approach to integration.
What is a Connector?
Key to understanding this new capability is to briefly explain what exactly a Connector is. Simply put, a Connector is a small application module that wraps and “describes” an applications’ programming interface (API) so that is can be utilized without requiring programming skills. Things like how to login securely to the application, which business objects are exposed through the API, what calls does the API make available, how are customizations enabled, etc. The Boomi Atom then invokes the Connector at runtime to interact with a particular application, such as to add new data or read data from the application.
Once created, this Connector completely abstracts the technical details described above from the end user. The end user simply logs in to Boomi AtomSphere, specifies the application they wish to connect, and walks through a wizard that prompts them for information on how to connect to said application, what exactly they want to integrate, etc.
Perhaps most importantly is the maintenance of these Connectors. SaaS ISV’s make changes to their applications very often compared to on-premise ISV’s. This is one of the strengths of SaaS; these ISV’s can innovate very rapidly and upgrade all of the customers each step of the way in a cost effective model thanks to things like multi-tenant architectures. As these upgrades happen so do changes to the SaaS ISV’s API; it is therefore paramount that such API changes are handled and made invisible to the end customer. This is another big value add of Boomi’s Connector architecture; because we are ourselves a SaaS architecture, changes made to a SaaS ISV’s API are made once in the Connector, and then automatically propagated to all customers using it.
Now Open for Integration
By opening our platform and allowing our partners to now build these connectors, we are enabling an exponential increase in the number of applications that we can provide connectivity to. Rather than leveraging Boomi resources, application experts can now build connectors themselves, leveraging the knowledge they already have about their applications. As that application changes the Connector publisher now has complete control of exactly when they rollout upgrades to their Connector. Besides continuing to build connectors ourselves, Boomi also now takes on the additional responsibility of governance. We conduct a thorough security review of all connectors added to our platform, ensuring that connectors built on the Boomi platform meet the same guidelines we uphold ourselves during internal development.
Where can I learn more?
You can find the SDK and the documentation here, along with technical documentation and code samples. Login to your Boomi account or create one here to start building Connectors today.
