Report from Boomi World London: Integration-Platform-as-a-Service (iPaaS)

Integration Platform-as-a-Service (iPaaS), defined by analysts at Gartner, is a cloud service managed by vendors such as SAP or Boomi that enables existing SAP customers to orchestrate integration between a variety of applications, services and data silos, both inside and outside their organization and their own ERP. Using iPaaS, users can control internal and external processes, services and data sources for at least one of the three main applications of integration technology: Data Consistency, Multi-Level Process, Combined Services (Composable ERP).

The cloud offerings of iPaaS solutions are almost unlimited, and Gartner has included the most important providers in the Magic Quadrant for Integration-Platform-as-a-Service. The market leaders are SAP with its Business Technology Platform (BTP) and Boomi, and yet the two solutions could not be more different. At a Boomi conference in London this fall, Abdulla Talal Adusido, Corporate Business Application Director at existing SAP customer Ismail Abudawood Trading (Saudi Arabia), presented the distinguishing features, as both platforms are in use at Abudawood.

At first glance, the Saudi Arabian SAP user has a classic ERP installation in version ECC 6.0. However, the SAP Business Technology Platform is only used for the core processes. Integration and automation across all on-premise and cloud systems in use is carried out with the Boomi platform. In future, orchestration with Boomi will also include AI applications and data management.

Composable ERP

Due to the difficult SAP license situation for a possible conversion to S/4 Hana, this existing SAP customer is considering an open composable ERP. The complete Boomi functionality is to be used for this in the future. In an interview with E3 magazine, Corporate Business Application Director Abdulla Talal Adusido justified this strategy with the simpler use and control: "For Boomi, we needed three days of training, no external consultants and now we can solve our challenges ourselves with Boomi. We still employ four external consultants for SAP and before that we had seven."

Due to the complexity of SAP processes and BTP and the difficult licensing situation, the company is trying to further reduce the number of SAP processes. Theoretically, the company would already be in a position to replace ECC 6.0 and BTP. The company is currently looking ahead and concentrating on Boomi's offerings for automation and communication with external data sources and processes. Gartner describes the situation as follows: integration processes, data pipelines, workflows, automation and composite services are generally created using intuitive low-code or no-code development environments, although some providers also offer more complex developer tools.

These principles are in place at BTP and Boomi. In addition, there are software development life cycle tools and management, including versioning, testing and deployment; IT tools for operational monitoring, alerting, reporting and testing of integrations, processes, pipelines and services in production environments; and a runtime layer provided to the customer as a cloud service.

Productivity with AI

Boomi is a market leader in the Gartner Magic Quadrant, the analysts wrote in a report published earlier this year. The company provides the Boomi platform, including API management, EDI management, Master Data Hub and Boomi Flow. After several years with relatively few changes, Boomi has delivered some important updates in 2023, such as the new Event
streaming service and several new AI-based services.

Gartner sees Boomi's strengths in investing in AI enhancements to the platform to improve productivity, 99.99 percent SLA, recovery times, security options and other services, and simplify usage. Boomi remains in the top five iPaaS vendors in terms of revenue and customers, according to Gartner estimates. Boomi offers some basic features for managed file transfer and intelligent document processing. However, Gartner also points out that Boomi uses a partner model for these functions and robotic process automation. Users hoping for a single vendor for these functions should check whether Boomi offers sufficient support for their use cases.

Naturally, SAP is a market leader in this Magic Quadrant. It offers the SAP Integration Suite; this suite from the global ERP market leader and part of SAP BTP brings a wide range of application, data, process, artificial intelligence and business process integration capabilities that are primarily focused on the SAP application ecosystem and are also designed to enable the integration of non-SAP applications. SAP Business Accelerator Hub, a component of the Integration Suite, provides existing customers with access to pre-built integrated solutions that are aligned with existing business processes.

The analysts from Gartner emphasize: Although the SAP Integration Suite is perceived positively, it is still seen in the market as an SAP-centric offering rather than a universal integration platform. This is indirectly confirmed by the statements of Corporate Business Application Director Abdulla Talal Adusido. SAP does not adjust pricing to market segments and company sizes, a practice that has become increasingly common in this market to increase attractiveness.

From the perspective of an existing SAP customer, the offerings are difficult to compare because SAP is very much geared towards the needs of existing customers with BTP and concepts such as Clean Core and Steampunk, while Boomi addresses an open market with a variety of processes and data sources. Boomi therefore also sees itself as a provider of a data network. The Boomi platform is designed to establish connections and enable communication in order to share information.

Orchestration of data streams

The challenge Boomi faces is the orchestration of divergent data streams and incompatible data silos. Connecting everything with everything else to generate added data value seems to be Boomi's motto. SAP has already failed with the Data Hub concept, and now the ERP provider is trying it with Datasphere. Boomi accesses SAP data sources via APIs, which largely corresponds to the SAP Clean Core concept. Parallel use of BTP and Boomi should therefore not be a problem.

Data synchronization and orchestration seems unavoidable for several reasons: AI applications are based on consistent data sources and the path from ERP/ECC 6.0 to S/4 Hana is almost exclusively possible via data consolidation. With S/4 as a clean-core paradigm, iPaaS is gaining in importance. In future, existing SAP customers will need to develop a platform strategy to meet the requirements of AI, data management, automation and enterprise architecture.

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