In this article, we will explore the top 10 reasons why businesses should choose Boomi as their enterprise iPaaS versus other iPaaS alternatives in 2023, and why in my opinion, Boomi is the best enterprise iPaaS today. But before we go there, let’s start with “Why do you need an iPaaS” and “What is Boomi”.
Why Choose Boomi Over Other iPaaS Competitors and Alternatives—Table of Contents
- What is an iPaaS?
- Why do I need an Enterprise iPaaS?
- What is Boomi?
- Reason #1 to Choose Boomi: Low(est) Total Cost of Ownership
- Reason #2 to Choose Boomi: A Complete, Unified Platform
- Reason #3 to Choose Boomi: True Cloud Native Platform
- Reason #4 to Choose Boomi: Developer Productivity
- Reason #5 to Choose Boomi: Market Adoption & Experience
- Reason #6 to Choose Boomi: Deployment Flexibility
- Reason #7 to Choose Boomi: Pervasive Intelligence
- Reason #8 to Choose Boomi: Connectivity
- Reason #9 to Choose Boomi: Support Citizen Integrators
- Reason #10 to Choose Boomi: Security
- Bonus Reasons to Choose Boomi
- Bottom Line: Why Boomi is the best Enterprise iPaaS Today
What is an iPaaS?
An enterprise iPaaS (Integration Platform as a Service) is a cloud-based platform that helps organizations integrate various cloud-based and on-premise applications, data sources, processes and services making it easier to automate business processes and share data across applications.
Another iPaaS definition, this time quoting Gartner, “Integration Platform as a Service (iPaaS) is a suite of cloud services enabling development, execution and governance of integration flows connecting any combination of on premises and cloud-based processes, services, applications and data within individual or across multiple organizations.”
Why Do I need an Enterprise iPaaS?
The challenges of integration today are very different from the integration challenges that enterprises faced a decade ago. The rapid growth of cloud-based SaaS (Software as a Service) applications that solve “point needs” well has led to an explosion in the number of applications in use at a typical enterprise. This has, in turn, led to creation of data silos which make it difficult to see how individual data elements and processes fit within the overall enterprise, and overall business processes such as quote-to-cash, procure-to-pay and others. To work around the problem of data silos, enterprises need to “integrate” these applications, many of which are cloud-based.
Enter an iPaaS that is built to handle the integration challenges of today!
Integrating various applications and data into company-wide business processes using a modern integration platform (iPaaS) makes sense for enterprises that are growing and changing rapidly. Companies can quickly integrate new applications into their business operations, without having to build integration functionality from scratch. With the right iPaaS platform, you can ensure consistency across your entire organization on how you develop, monitor and maintain your integrations. You can empower both line-of-business users or “citizen integrators” and technical users or “integration professionals” to effectively manage and maintain integrations.
Bottom line, an enterprise iPaaS can help organizations improve efficiency, enhance data accessibility, become more agile, reduce the burden on IT, and lower costs.
What is Boomi?
Boomi is the leading cloud-based integration platform as a service (iPaaS) solution in the market today. Boomi offers a range of integration tools and services, including data integration, application integration, API management, EDI, and more. Boomi is designed to be easy to use and offers a range of features to help organizations streamline their integration processes and automate their workflows. Some of the key features of Boomi include pre-built connectors for popular applications and data sources, drag-and-drop integration mapping, and real-time data integration capabilities.
Now let’s dive into the reasons why in my opinion, Boomi is the best enterprise iPaaS today.
Reason #1 to Choose Boomi Over Other iPaaS Alternatives: Low(est) Total Cost of Ownership
Boomi offers a lower total cost of ownership compared to its competition. This lower TCO starts with its simple subscription-based pricing model that offers cost savings for businesses. Instead of paying a large upfront cost for an on-premises integration solution, businesses can pay for Boomi on a monthly or annual basis. This can make it easier for businesses to budget for their integration needs and allows them to scale their usage up or down as needed.
In addition to its subscription-based pricing, Boomi also offers flexible pricing options based on the number of connectors used. This means that businesses only pay for the integration capabilities that they need, rather than being locked into a one-size-fits-all pricing model. This can help businesses save money on their integration efforts and only pay for the features they need.
Additionally, Boomi subscriptions include unlimited users that can use the Boomi iPaaS platform to build, deploy, and manage your integrations.
Boomi’s cloud-based platform also offers cost savings in terms of IT resources needed for integration development and operations. By using Boomi, businesses can reduce the need for IT staff to manage their integration efforts, as the platform is easy to use and requires minimal training. This can help businesses save money on labor costs and allow them to redirect their IT resources to other areas of the business.
Overall, Boomi’s cloud-based platform and flexible pricing options make it a cost-effective solution for businesses looking to integrate their applications, data, and processes. Its ability to reduce the need for IT infrastructure and personnel resources, as well as offering flexible pricing options, can help businesses save money on their integration efforts and improve their bottom line.
Reason #2 to Choose Boomi Over Other iPaaS Alternatives: A Complete, Unified Platform
Boomi is the most complete iPaaS platform in the market, and it gives you all the key integration services you need in an integrated, cohesive manner so that you can look holistically across your disparate systems, applications, and data sources.
The Boomi AtomSphere Platform iPaaS offers you multiple capabilities:
- Integration is the heart of the Boomi platform—it helps you break down data silos by integrating on-premise and cloud applications, data, and devices. Boomi Integration provides all capabilities of legacy integration tools while keeping development streamlined and easy with a drag-and-drop interface.
- Boomi Master Data Hub—a cloud-native master data management (MDM) platform solution that sits at the center of the various data silos within your business and helps you keep the data used to track the “nouns” of your company’s business (customers, products, orders, vendors, employees) clean, accurate, and consistent.
- Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) capabilities to help organizations exchange data electronically with their B2B trading partners. Boomi supports a range of EDI standards, including ANSI X12, EDIFACT, TRADACOMS, and VDA.
- API Management—Boomi API Management supports the full lifecycle of APIs starting with the rapid development and publication of any on-premise or cloud endpoint (database, application, file system …) as an API for real-time integrations. It also supports centralized controls and monitoring over your endpoints.
- Flow—a low-code development tool that allows you to build applications and automate workflows. Flow allows you to observe and respond to data flowing through your systems and integration processes. It enables you to build UI apps with workflows and human approval steps, and extend your connectivity from system-to-system to system-to-human.
- Data Catalog and Preparation—Boomi DCP allows you to quickly discover, interpret, prepare, and govern your data, ensuring it is ready to drive data insights (or simply put, business intelligence).
Quoting Boomi, you can quickly and easily discover and catalog your data; ensure agile data mastering and data synchronization; integrate myriad applications, databases, devices within your enterprise; extend connectivity across your partner ecosystem; design, secure and scale APIs, and build automated workflows that enhance human interaction with data.
Reason #3 to Choose Boomi Over Other iPaaS Alternatives: True Cloud Native Platform
Boomi is a pioneer of the integration platform as a service (iPaaS) category for cloud-native connectivity; it is a truly integrated iPaaS from the ground up that supports modern integration needs!
Boomi’s single instance multi-tenant platform provides all the benefits of the cloud, including flexibility, agility, design patterns, scalability, high availability, built-in redundancy, and automatic upgrades. This translates to reduced complexity and lower costs.
Reason #4 to Choose Boomi Over Other iPaaS Alternatives: Developer Productivity
Boomi is designed to be easy-to-use and offers a range of features to help developers be more productive when creating integrations. Some of the ways that Boomi can improve developer productivity include:
- Pre-built connectors: Boomi offers a range of pre-built connectors for popular applications and data sources, which can save developers time and effort when setting up integrations.
- Drag-and-drop integration mapping: Boomi’s integration mapping tools allow developers to easily connect different systems and data sources using a simple drag-and-drop interface.
- API management: Boomi’s API management tools allow developers to easily create, publish, and manage APIs with little-to-no code, which can streamline integration processes and reduce the workload for IT teams.
- Collaboration tools: Boomi includes a range of collaboration tools to help developers work together more effectively and efficiently.
Also, as described below, Boomi is an intelligent tool that greatly improves developer and administrator productivity. Overall, Boomi is designed to be a comprehensive and user-friendly platform that can help developers be more productive when creating integrations.
Reason #5 to Choose Boomi Over Other iPaaS Alternatives: Market Adoption & Experience
Boomi has been in the enterprise integration business for over 20 years and has been a market leader in the iPaaS space for nearly 15 years. It has received various accolades from leading analysts including Gartner, which has positioned Boomi as a leader for the 8th consecutive year in its Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Enterprise iPaaS.
20,000+ companies globally and across industries are using Boomi to integrate their business, internally and externally (with customers, partners, and suppliers).
Boomi’s experience in the integration industry means that it has a deep understanding of the challenges and requirements that businesses face when it comes to integration. This knowledge is reflected in the features and capabilities of the Boomi platform, which are designed to meet the needs of businesses of all sizes and industries.
In addition to its experience, Boomi is also constantly innovating and updating its platform to stay ahead of the curve in the integration industry. This means that businesses using Boomi can trust that they are using a platform that is up-to-date and able to meet their evolving integration needs.
Reason #6 to Choose Boomi Over Other iPaaS Alternatives: Deployment Flexibility
Boomi offers you all the deployment options you will need—from fully-hosted, fully-managed by Boomi (Boomi Atom Cloud) to deployment in public cloud (AWS, Azure, Google Cloud) or personal cloud to on-premise deployments. And you can even go hybrid where you combine 2 or more of these options based on the systems and applications you are integrating.
Before I go on, let me introduce you to the Boomi Atom—a lightweight, dynamic runtime engine that executes all your integration processes and contains all the components required to run your processes from end to end, including connectors, transformation rules, decision handling, and processing logic.
Typically, if you are only connecting cloud-based applications, you can go with the Boomi Atom Cloud, which provides a “zero-footprint” integration solution without installing any server/network infrastructure or software because all computing occurs in the Boomi data center.
If, on the other hand, you are connecting to resources in your internal network, such as a database, file system, or other on-premise applications, you must install the Atom within your network. Depending on your system and network topology, this may translate to an on-premise Atom or a personal cloud Atom or even a public cloud Atom (if there is a VPN connection to that public cloud infrastructure).
Lastly, when talking about deployment flexibility, I want to also draw your attention to Boomi Molecules (clustered Atoms) and forked executions that allow multiple Atom processes to run concurrently and provide high-availability.
Reason #7 to Choose Boomi Over Other iPaaS Alternatives: Pervasive Intelligence
Boomi is INTELLIGENT, and its intelligence helps you be more productive. Its intelligence starts with data gathering—as its thousands of customers use the Boomi platform, Boomi anonymizes the meta-data, analyzes it, draws inferences, and provides suggestions and best practices to make every Boomi platform user (from developer to administrator) more efficient and effective.
Some examples of Boomi’s intelligent features (source: Boomi) include:
- Automated Data Mapping: Boomi Suggest generates maps and functions for new integrations, simplifying one of the most challenging and error prone aspects of building integrations
- Automated Connector Configuration: Filter Suggest lets users configure the connector query filter with just two clicks—greatly streamlining a time consuming and daunting aspect of building integrations
- Simplified Error Resolution: Boomi Resolve automatically suggests resolutions for common error messages, based on contributions from our ecosystem of Boomi developers and architects
- Automated Regression Testing: Boomi Assure delivers crowd-sourced regression testing to customers, providing the confidence that platform updates will not break existing integration processes
Reason #8 to Choose Boomi Over Other iPaaS Alternatives: Connectivity
Boomi can easily connect with a range of different systems, applications, and databases, making it easy for businesses to quickly and easily integrate their different data sources. This can save businesses time and money, as they do not need to invest in multiple integration solutions for different systems.
Boomi offers a wide range of 1500+ connectors that allow it to connect with a wide range of systems and applications, including popular CRM, ERP, and e-commerce platforms. This means that businesses can use Boomi to integrate their various systems and applications, regardless of the technology they are using.
In addition to its wide range of connectors, Boomi also offers API-based integration options, which allow businesses to connect to systems and applications that do not have a pre-built connector. This further enhances Boomi’s connectivity and makes it a flexible solution that can meet the needs of any business.
Reason #9 to Choose Boomi Over Other iPaaS Alternatives: Support Citizen Integrators
Boomi’s drag and drop visual UI and low code platform ensure the greatest speed and flexibility to support a wide range of projects – from the simple to the most complex. Most integrations can be handled via Boomi’s out-of-the-box, drag and-drop interface.
Additionally, Boomi provides starter templates (via process libraries) and pre-built integration accelerators for common use cases.
All of this translates to empowering a new breed of integration developers from your line of business users, also called Citizen Integrators. This helps your enterprise meet your integration needs more quickly, and eliminates IT as the bottleneck.
Reason #10 to Choose Boomi Over Other iPaaS Alternatives: Security
Boomi is compliant with a range of security standards, including HIPAA, GDPR, and FedRAMP (U.S. Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program) Authorization, making it a secure platform for businesses to manage their integration efforts. This is especially important for organizations that handle sensitive or personal data, as they need to ensure that this data is protected. Boomi’s compliance with these security standards gives businesses the confidence that their data is secure and protected.
In addition to its compliance with security standards, Boomi also has various security measures in place to protect data. For example, it uses encryption to protect data in transit and at rest, as well as implementing security controls to protect against cyber threats. These measures help to ensure that businesses’ data is safe and secure when using the Boomi platform.
Bonus Reasons to Choose Boomi Over Other iPaaS Alternatives
If all my top reasons for choosing Boomi over other iPaaS platforms were not enough to sway you, I cite some additional reasons to consider!
- Boomi offers extensive online documentation and resources to help businesses create and manage their integrations. This includes guides, tutorials, and FAQs that cover a wide range of topics related to integration.
- Boomi offers a self-paced learning portal on “all things Boomi” that can help your team learn Boomi.
- Boomi’s built-in redundancy ensures that data is not lost in the event of a server failure. This is important for businesses that rely on their integration efforts to operate smoothly, as a data loss could disrupt their operations and cause significant issues. Boomi’s redundancy ensures that data is always available and accessible, further enhancing the platform’s reliability.
Bottom Line: Why Boomi Is the best Enterprise iPaaS Today
In summary, Boomi is THE leading enterprise iPaaS that offers a range of benefits for businesses looking to integrate their applications, data, and processes.
Its cost-effectiveness, completeness of capabilities (integration, API, EDI, MDM and more) and ease of use make it an ideal iPaaS choice for organizations in 2023. Its ability to connect with a wide range of systems, automate tasks, and offer customization options make it a flexible solution that can be tailored to meet the specific needs of any business. Additionally, Boomi’s pervasive intelligence accelerates development and enhances developer productivity. As such, businesses looking to adopt an enterprise iPaaS in 2023 should definitely consider Boomi as an option.
If you are interested in learning more about how Boomi can benefit your business, please don’t hesitate to reach out to our team. Our experts would be happy to discuss your integration needs and show you how Boomi can help your business connect and manage its applications, data, and processes more efficiently.
Contact us today to schedule a consultation and see for yourself how Boomi can transform your business.