Simple and Quick Enterprise Integrations using Dell Boomi

Enterprise Integration Challenges

In the midst of an incredibly challenging economic climate, ‘change’ has been a hot topic around the world. Enterprises worldwide have been undergoing changes because of internal challenges and external challenges because of mergers and acquisitions (M&A). The application landscape is getting really complex where in several applications are redundant, isolated and not fully leveraged in the enterprise.

Enterprise Integration (EI) is the need of the hour as it plays a very critical role in bringing People, Process and Technology together to deliver an efficient enterprise with business agility and IT flexibility. Enterprise architecture frameworks such as TOGAF also play a major role in providing tools and methods to effect a smooth and seamless integration at an enterprise level.

Adding to the complexity of IT application landscape is the ever increasing popularity of ‘cloud’ applications. While enterprises move some of the functions such as CRM to cloud, rest of the applications are very much still in the premise behind the firewall. This presents us a very interesting problem – data synchronization between cloud and on-premise applications. There are several ways of addressing the problem from building Point-to-Point (P2P) connections between applications to centralized Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) based integrations.

While P2P seems a good solution for small scale integrations, it brings forth with few critical issues – create resources ‘critical’, scatter mediation capabilities such as data connectivity, transformation, enrichment etc. and needless to say, maintaining the hardwired code.

Service-oriented Architecture (SOA) based Enterprise Service Bus solves the scattered message processing logic by centralizing them and leveraging them for present and future integrations. They are secular in providing connectivity to all possible applications. However, the challenges are steep learning curve, heavy upfront capital expenditure and slow time to market.

It is evident from past several customer engagements that the customers are not really looking for highflying, hyped technologies, or expensive tools but they are really looking for simplified integrations, faster time to market, more productivity, small learning curve and very importantly lower capital expenditure.

Complex problems do not need a complex solution. They actually need a simple solution with great innovation. Here is my attempt to introduce you to one such solution – Boomi and provide you a very quick overview of Boomi and how it could help enterprise customers in achieving quick integrations.

Boomi – A cloud integration platform

Boomi is a latest acquisition from Dell in the cloud space. Dell Boomi is an on-demand, cloud integration platform that connects your on-premise applications with cloud applications such as Salesforce.com, Sugar CRM and so forth. What is really fascinating is that its graphical user interface (with drag & drop feature) enables any integration designer with no or little knowledge of programming languages to create integration processes to move data from one application to another in a real quick time.

Boomi Core components

Process

Integration process is the heart of Boomi integrations. The deliverable of any integration in Boomi’s context is the integration process. The process is like a mini workflow that is woven visually by connecting several connectors, data maps and routing logics. It connects to different applications and moves the data from source applications to destination applications. In between applications, you can have if loops, business rules, data transformation, exception handling etc. Depending on your preference, you could follow either top down approach – start with creating process and then other required components or bottom up approach – start with creating required components first followed by creating the integration process.

Interface

Once the integration process is created, it can be accessed in following ways: -

API – Certain applications might want to get the data in real time. In order to fulfill this, Boomi allows you to expose integration process as a Web Services. Using Web Service Server connector, you will be able to turn your integration process into a Web Service. Only the deployed process will be available as Web Services. Once the Web Service is exposed, it is ready for consumption. All that you will need is a SOAP client to create and send SOAP request to Boomi web service. For beginners, please consider using SoapUI tool to test the Web Services. It does not force you to write single line of code. The description of the Web Service (WSDL) can be accessed through this link http://<boomi_atom_host>:8080/ws/soap?wsdl.

Scheduler – you can also schedule the integration process to run at regular intervals. In order to schedule a process, it should have been already deployed. There are several options for scheduling a process – scheduling from once a day to once a minute. You can also schedule only on particular days(s) on a week. Please see official documentation for more information.

Mediation

In a secular enterprise application landscape, applications implements different technology and use different data formats. Boomi understands this and supports co-existing of applications by providing diverse connectivity and data transformation features.

Connector – Boomi has a rich set of connectors that support nearly all popular applications. Boomi connectors are classified as standard connectors and application connectors. Standard connectors provide connectivity to standard data sources in the enterprise such as AS2, Database, Disk, FTP, HTTP, JMS, LDAP, Mail, SFTP and Web Services. The list is not limited and is still growing. As you would understand, these connectors will allow you to connect to data sources within the firewall and web applications outside the firewall as well. Boomi also supports several popular applications such as Salesforce, SAP, NetSuite and so forth. For complete list, please see the official documentation.

Data Profile & Data Map – Data profile is used to capture the structure of the message that comes into or goes out of Boomi integration process. As of now, profiles can be created for different types of data – XML, Database, EDI, Flat file. Once profiles are created, you would be allowed to do a field mapping that aids in data transformation and enrichment. Boomi supports all types of transformation for example, XML to XML or XML to Database, Flat file to XML and so forth.  Field mapping is a nice UI that helps you visually design the mapping between fields present in the source and the destination profiles. It also supports applying certain functions such as string, mathematical etc. in the field mapping. For example, string function ‘toUppercase’ can be applied to a field so that the destination profile gets all the characters in uppercase. Data maps and profiles are very important constructs that you will use in almost all integrations involving applications like Salesforce.com.

Data Process is useful feature for data manipulation. It allows you to manipulate the data inside the process. If the incoming document is a flat file document, you can use data process to split the entire document into multiple documents – one document per row. This is not all. It provides several useful functions such as zipping/unzipping, PGP encryption, Base 64 encoding and so on.

Route supports a much needed ‘content based routing’. This feature can route the incoming request messages to different destination applications based on certain content in the incoming message. My colleague’s favorite example for content based routing is Forex rate conversion. If the Forex rate conversion involves a small amount, the request may be forwarded to a ‘cached’ Forex rate service. If the amount is large, then the request may alternatively be sent to a ‘real time’ Forex rate service that gives most accurate Forex rate. This helps in avoiding any potential Forex loss due to volatility.

Boomi also supports business rules. It allows you to execute one or more business rules and depending on the outcome of execution, the request can follow either of the two paths – true or false. The rule creation is supported by very intuitive user interface. The feature also allows creating a custom error message that can be accessed in nodes in the down for error reporting purpose.

Exception step provides you the control to stop the process flow execution. It also allows creating custom error messages that will be captured in the process reporting. These messages can be used for further troubleshooting. The customer error message can be a static message and/or dynamic message.

Do you have too many messages to be processed and worried about the execution time? Boomi has a solution for that as well. Flow control step will allow you to execute the incoming documents in multiple threads. However this feature has been disabled in Test mode.

That’s all? No, it has so many other useful features as well. Please refer to official documentation.

Platform

AtomSphere - an on-demand integration platform available as a service. It allows companies to build, deploy and manage integration processes directly from the web. It does not matter whether you are in need of integration applications which are on the cloud or on-premise. It enables both

• Cloud to cloud integration
• Cloud to on-premise integration

It offers easy to create and manage integrations, subscription based services. Its nice user interface will help you in moving away from code based integrations to configuration based integrations. Getting started with using Boomi AtomSphere is really simple. Just get access to it by opening a trial online account now at https://ondemand.boomi.com/application/registration.php

Boomi Atom - a runtime component that runs all integration processes. It is small but very powerful and self-contained; once your integration process is deployed onto the atom, it has all required components to execute the integration processes.

Depending on your organization’s integration requirement, your atom can be installed into the cloud or on-premise.

• Atom in the cloud – this is ‘pure’ cloud approach. All your applications are in the cloud and so is the atom. Atom will be installed in the Dell Boomi data center. Hence, your organization will have zero footprint of software as everything is on the cloud
• Atom in on premise – this is very much required when part or all of your applications are behind the firewall. For example, database. In this case, atom is also required to be installed behind the firewall so that atom can connect freely to inside applications using respective protocols and connect to outside applications over internet. Your organization firewall should allow connecting to applications which are located in the internet

Molecule - a single tenant, clustered atom that runs integration processes in parallel. It provides both load balance and fail over features. Atoms that are installed in different machines can be grouped to create a molecule. The molecule configurations are very useful for handling high volume of transactions and improve overall performance. However this feature is available only in the high end Boomi edition.

Non-functional features

Security - For any cloud application, one would always wonder about the data security. Boomi does not store any customer data and it simply transfers data from source applications to destination applications. Also, it uses secure protocols such as SFTP, HTTPS to transport data between applications.

For cloud atom that runs in the Boomi data center, it is very secure and it adheres to partner security requirements. The data center is also deemed SAS 70 Type II compliant.

For local atom that runs in on-premise, the data is on the customer server, the atom is behind the firewall and the organization data center will ensure the security.

The above ensures that data is secured both in the server and in the transit.

Monitoring & Managment - For any complex system, monitoring and management are key issues. One would want to gain visibility into an integration process – execution status, error message etc. Boomi AtomSphere provides a console through which process can be monitored.

Atom Management console will allow to monitor the status of the atom, configuration, web server settings, and heap memory, stop/resume the scheduling of deployed integration processes. It also allows you to subscribe to RSS feeds for getting the atom status and process errors. For real time message processing, atom has a built in web server that listens on default port number 8080. You can modify the port number here if it clashes with other application servers’ port number.

Process reporting helps you in obtaining information on the running or already finished running integration processes. It provides filters to search for details of one process or all processes from one or more atoms. You can also apply time filter such as ’Past Hour’, ‘Past 24 Hours’ etc., to limit the number of search results.

Boomi features

Boom is really an innovative offering from Dell and it has all necessary features to support cloud and on promise integrations. To name few very important features of Boomi,

• Simplified integrations using visual designer and drag & drop features
• Self-service portal, with minimal IT involvement
• Subscription based cloud solution to integrate on-premise applications quickly with other cloud applications
• No hardware or software to install or maintain and no need to maintain patches and upgrades
• Ready to use connectors available for almost all popular applications
• Supports both on-premise and cloud applications integration
• Supports routing, field mapping and Transformation of messages
• Highly scalable and secure

Boomi Benefits

• Less Learning Curve
• Reduced integration life cycle
• Quick time to market
• Convert CAPEX into OPEX

Want to know more about Boomi?

This article is just an attempt to give you a quick overview of Boomi’s architecture, feature and benefits. Boomi is really a great platform and it is much more than what is described over here. I know you will really be tempted to read more to understand and try the benefits of Boomi in your enterprise. There is a 30 day free trial license available at https://ondemand.boomi.com/application/registration.php. To help you get going, there is a ‘help‘ documentation available at http://help.boomi.com and support any questions there is a forum as well at http://www.boomi.com/forums/. What more you can ask for, get started today.

Disclaimer

The views and opinions expressed in this article are entirely of the author's and do not necessarily represent the views of the company that he works for. This article has been written from a user perspective and from author’s personal experience and you are advised to read official documentation for more accurate information.