The age of integrated experiences: Data management for the modern enterprise

Customers today are expecting more: more connectivity, more application deployment, a more streamlined architecture.  And they have every right to these expectations, because unless they have the capability to modernise, they will be left behind. Ultimately, what they expect is an integrated experience — one which ties together technologies and helps them achieve a business goal.

Integration of old

Traditional integration as a service (iPaaS) models, designed to create a cohesive IT landscape, are no longer moving the needle enough — especially given the modern challenges facing enterprises today.

Typically, integration has been focused on connecting processes and data from systems and databases, breaking down data silos. A united architecture that reduced the reliance on legacy technologies was the way forward. For years this was the normal, but not anymore. Integration alone is no longer sufficient to meet the demands of the modern enterprise.

In a modern IT architecture, the ability to build connections between a backend ERP system and a CRM application, or design an API or application workflow, are just the basics — they’re no longer enough for a frictionless customer experience. Offering your customers a fragmented experience is almost guaranteed to get them to explore alternative options.

For businesses embarking on digital transformation initiatives, it is not about solving one problem through integration, it is about putting in place an architecture that is primed to achieve business outcomes. This is where Integrated Experiences comes in.

Out with the old, in with the new

iPaaS has evolved from being a tool for simple cloud integrations to becoming a key driver for digital transformation. This is a shift ultimately driven by market need, the need for enterprises to process more data, faster, and to translate this data into actionable business decision-making.

Digital transformation is not a nice to have, but an essential to have. Integration forms an element of this journey, but integrated experiences goes one further through user engagement. What does it achieve having backend integrations, connections, and data insight without engaging the user where they want to be engaged, be it mobile device or desktop? Enterprises want a friction-free experience connecting to the applications that they need: technology solutions to solve a human problem.

To achieve integrated experiences requires three pillars to be in place:

●   Constant connectivity — Across the enterprise, technologies not only need to connect systems, apps, and databases, but also devices and processes. The enterprise, despite all the technological advancement, needs to remain human-centric, and constant connectivity makes it easier for your workforce to create and deploy integrated solutions that drive the business forward.

●   Data readiness — It is essential to be able to find, connect, and aggregate data from across the enterprise. Having a basis for data management ensures that, with integrated experiences, this can reach the next level.

●   User engagement — Arguably most importantly is engaging end users wherever they are, on whatever device they choose. This is what separates traditional integration from integrated experiences. Whether you offer a mobile application, web presence, a portal, or a chatbot, it must enable customer and end user engagement.

Solving the code conundrum

Traditional coding practices have held back integration for many enterprises. Application development and deployment has been restricted by code-heavy approaches to uniting digital systems. Fortunately, this has now all changed.

Low-code is a central fabric of integrated experiences, enabling users to build and deliver in an agile manner, accelerating time to value without sacrificing other core IT tasks. If the foundational building blocks of an enterprise are low-code compatible, this infrastructure instantly becomes flexible, meaning that data can be discovered, synchronised, and integrated with other applications in an easy-to-use interface.

When it comes down to it, low-code technology is about giving users the tools they need to achieve their business outcomes in an efficient way. Having an open, SaaS-native, low-code platform means that users can change their infrastructure as and when they see fit, developing APIs that reflect how their model is changing.

Data management at the speed of light

The challenge of finding, aggregating, and transforming high quality data is not going away anytime soon — but the tools are changing.

There may be thousands of end sources for data across the enterprise, with data records well into the hundreds of thousands. These sources can be databases, cloud apps, or connected devices.

Synchronisation can be a nightmare, especially when the tools in place are hard to code and require manual uplift for the data to be actionable.  Project LightSpeed, Boomi’s artificial intelligence and machine learning offering, delivers a personalised, cloud-native data integration and synchronisation solution.

Using AI, this project analyses metadata across the Boomi customer and partner marketplace to create recommendations that automatically generate a data synchronisation solution tailored to actual usage. Integration and data management practices take different forms, and LightSpeed does away with a ‘one size fits all approach’ to give enterprises true actionable insights on how best to manage their data.

LightSpeed addresses the low-code conundrum: how can we make it as easy and as simple as possible for users to deploy data synchronisation projects?  Through automating time-consuming and laborious tasks, LightSpeed accelerates time to value for business users, giving them the tools to move away from field-level mapping and instead generate data synchronisation projects across their ecosystem.

Driving your transformation with the Deloitte-Boomi Alliance 

Deloitte is one of the leading providers of Enterprise integration services partnering with Global organizations through their digital transformation and integration programs. Deloitte provides its clients with advice on integration strategy, maturity assessment, business cases, prototyping as well as end-to-end delivery.

With its unique Alliance partnership with Boomi, Deloitte empowers clients to drive transformative growth, enhance agility, speed time to value and increase long-term strategic flexibility. The strong Alliance has led to a core group of 600+ certified resources across Integration Architecture and delivery, API management, Master Data Hub, EDI and Flow capabilities, placing Deloitte at the forefront of enabling an integrated digital experience using Boomi.

For more information please contact emea@boomi.com.

Author

Mike Kiersey, Principal Technologist and Evangelist at Boomi, a Dell Technologies Business. Mike’s core role is helping create a Boomi product that serves to connect businesses in the Digital Era. Before joining Boomi, Mike was the Global Pre-Sales Director at Dell EMC, supporting seventeen global partners to develop end-to-end strategic solutions and IT initiatives to address digital transformations. Mike, has broad industry knowledge with experience in government, defence, legal and financial services.