Anchr chooses Boomi as its new integration technology partner

Since the end of 2023, Anchr has officially become a partner of Boomi. In this article, we explain why we chose Boomi, alongside the integration solutions from IBM, Gravitee.io, and MS Azure, and discuss the capabilities and benefits of Boomi.

5 februari 2024

The need for integration

Today, organisations use a multitude of applications that support their daily activities. Think of CRM and ERP applications, but also customer-facing, HR-supporting applications or legacy backend systems. Some of these applications are modern cloud applications, while others are more legacy and are hosted in an on-premises data centre.

What they all have in common is that they very rarely operate in isolation from each other. Applications rely on the data and services of other applications. Often, these data flows are part of complex business processes. To achieve such integrations in a structured and efficient manner, we use an integration platform.

Additionally, we also see that organisations are increasingly looking to automate manual business processes. Sometimes these processes are complex, but at other times they are quite simple: for example, one wants a message to be posted on a Slack channel for every new registered deal in Salesforce. For these relatively simple processes, organisations do not want to have to rely on integration specialists but rather want to be able to implement those integrations themselves.

What is Boomi?

Boomi is an iPaaS integration platform; an integration platform as a service. So, a cloud-based integration platform. Boomi has all the functionalities to meet the integration needs as described in the previous paragraph. In the table below, you can discover the various components that Boomi offers.

More details about the Boomi integration platform

Application Integration

The main component of Boomi allows for low-code integration of various applications and data sources. It does not matter whether these are located on-premises or in a public or even private cloud. With a large number of built-in connectors, connections can be established quickly.

Boomi supports all major integration and communication patterns, such as application-to-application, pub-sub, real-time and event-driven web services, streaming, batch, ETL integrations, and more.

B2B/EDI management

This component allows you to manage your partner network interactions. You can easily implement, deploy, and manage both traditional EDI and newer Web Services. A visual low-code user interface enables you to build and manage complex B2B integrations in a simple manner. Boomi supports all known EDI standards such as X12, EDIFACT, HL7, RosettaNet, and Tradacoms, along with other partner communication options such as AS2, disk, FTP, SFTP, HTTP, and HTTPS.

Data synchronisation

Boomi Master Data Hub offers your data analysts the ability to model, compare, synchronise, cleanse, and enrich your data across various domains.

Event-driven integration

With Boomi Event Streams, you can achieve real-time event-driven integrations with guaranteed delivery & ordering. Use this component when dealing with a continuous and large volume of smaller messages (events) and when batch processing is not applicable. The platform supports various communication styles, such as first-in first-out, pub-sub, and queueing with guaranteed delivery, ordering & availability.

API Management

APIs are today an essential way to unlock data and functionality and are the driving force behind digital transformation, allowing applications to quickly deliver new features and a seamless experience across various channels. These APIs must be designed, made available, and managed in an efficient and secure manner. That is the purpose of the API Management component of Boomi. This allows APIs to be secured with the most commonly used standards (OIDC, OAuth), API consumers to register in a self-service manner, and administrators to track and analyse the usage of the APIs.

Workflow

With Boomi Flow, you can build workflow-based applications in a low-code manner. These applications contain the logic and screens that enable your users to navigate a business workflow in an automated way. Through the screens, the user can, for example, enter certain data, select options, or give approval.

Why iPaaS?

Anchr has been helping organisations with their integration challenges for many years. We use specialised software such as App Connect Enterprise, the Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) integration tool from IBM, a market leader in this field. ESBs and similar integration middleware are very suitable for integrating and exposing on-premises backend systems. They offer a wide range of connectors and routing & transformation capabilities and even allow for the implementation of integration logic in a programming language. As a result, virtually any integration scenario can be realised.

However, we see that more and more organisations are replacing their on-premises applications with cloud solutions for various reasons. New organisations such as start-ups often choose exclusively cloud solutions! Additionally, operating and managing an on-premises integration platform also takes a significant bite out of the IT budget. Therefore, organisations are increasingly opting to acquire their integration platform as a cloud service. These are the iPaaS platforms we are talking about.

Besides the fact that you do not need to manage them yourself, iPaaS platforms excel at integrating cloud applications. This is because they offer users a vast amount of connectors for the most commonly used cloud applications. Think of Salesforce, SAP, Oracle NetSuite, AWS, etc. Through these connectors, users can easily establish a connection with these systems, where they previously often had to set up extensive and complicated configurations. The connection with on-premises systems remains possible as well.

For these reasons, Anchr has decided to fully commit to this way of working and to partner with a leading iPaaS vendor.

Why Boomi?

For the ninth consecutive time, Gartner has placed Boomi in their Leaders quadrant in their iPaaS Magic Quadrant assessment. Boomi is therefore one of the most well-known and reputable products in that area. It can be hosted both in the cloud and on-premises and features a large number of built-in connectors.

In addition to the quality of the product itself, Boomi also has a large user base. On the internet, you can find numerous resources, articles, and discussion forums where you can find information, best practices, and solutions to your issues related to Boomi.