Cloud Integration in 2011: Dell Boomi Pushes Envelopes in AtomSphere Fall 11 
This fall, Dell Boomi continues to push the envelope on cloud-driven integration with a host of AtomSphere upgrades and new features. AtomSphere Fall 11 offers 10 times more auto-suggestions for data and field mappings, new support for business rules, predictive assistance and a real-time management dashboard. IDN speaks with CTO Rick Nucci.
This fall, Dell Boomi continues to push the envelope on cloud-driven integration with a host of AtomSphere upgrades and new features. AtomSphere Fall 11 offers 10 times more auto-suggestions for data and field mappings, new support for business rules, predictive assistance and a real-time management dashboard.
“This edition of AtomSphere makes cloud integration projects even simpler and faster to deliver, easier to manage and with more intelligence to provide better business value,” CTO Rick Nucci told IDN. We speak with Nucci in detail about AtomSphere Fall 11’s features.
- More Powerful Auto-Mappings from Boomi Suggest. Dell Boomi has vastly improved the capabilities of Boomi Suggest, the feature that automates data and field mappings – one of the most tedious and time consuming aspects of integration.
At its debut in June 2010, Boomi Suggest’s database offered some 5,000 data mappings. AtomSphere Fall 11 now sports a Boomi Suggest database with 10-fold increase – or 50,000 data mappings and 13,000 indexed functions.
The popularity of the Boomi Suggest feature among users has created a virtuous cycle where the more customers use Boomi Suggest, the more auto-suggestions Boomi can offer customers, Nucci added.
Rick Nucci, CTO, Dell Boomi
“The response to Boomi Suggest has been tremendous. In fact, customers are eating up this feature,” Nucci told IDN. One big reason for Boomi Suggest’s popularity is that without it, customers would have to do these time-consuming mappings by hand. Another is that Boomi Suggest “suggestions” are proving to be about 85% correct, which means that its right for 9 out of 10 mappings, Nucci added,.
No wonder the average customer uses 68 Boomi Suggest suggested mappings.
“In AtomSphere Fall 11, we don’t just have more maps, we have smarter maps,” Nucci told IDN. These smarter mappings offer “field-level transformations,” and are delivered via a huge repository of indexed metadata. The transformations perform operations to make data easier to share, such as converting separating fields for “first name” and “last name” into a global field that says “name.”
Nucci shared how Dell Boomi’s multi-tenant architecture supports Boomi Suggest’s virtuous cycle in a blog post:
Because Boomi AtomSphere is a single-instance, multi-tenant platform, it can learn from the mappings being performed by our entire global community. Here’s how it works. As users build and deploy integrations, the data maps used in those integrations are anonymously indexed. When new integrations are built, Boomi Suggest recommends mappings based on powerful ranking algorithms that weight suggestions based on similarity and relationships of data fields.
- Business Rules Engine. The Dell Boomi business rules engine lets users easily build complex multi-step decision making into their integrations – without coding or complex integration with external products.
“These business rules features will let customers orchestrate complex, multi-step conditional rules and logic into their integration workflows,” Nucci said. “The basic idea behind the Dell Boomi business rules, which came from our customers by the way, is to make integrations and end-to-end operations more effective.”
Architecturally, the Dell Boomi business rules engine applies “if-then” conditional rules to data, as it speeds through different integrations or business processes.
“A great example is ‘translation validation,’ where before sending out an invoice to a customer you get the system to do a lookup to confirm the invoice is correct and the items were shipped,” Nucci said. Other examples would include: checking the geographic location of a customer or launching a credit check to validate an order, or doing a look up to make sure an order is in inventory.
One early customer is already seeing benefits from Dell Boomi’s move to expand AtomSphere cloud integration with business rules.
“The [AtomSphere] new business rules allow us to isolate rules and make centralized changes that can be applied across integrations simultaneously,” said Pradip Sitaram, CIO at Enterprise Community Partners, a US nonprofit that builds affordable housing.
- Predictive Assistance. With this feature, customer usage metrics are integrated into Dell Boomi’s support system. This facilitates proactive client outreach and communications as metrics indicate.
“A common theme we’ve heard from partners and customers is to leverage the analytics we capture from our multi-tenant architecture to provide added insight and value to cloud integrations,” Nucci told IDN.
One analyst, THINKstrategies managing director Jeffrey Kaplan, called AtomSphere Fall 11’s Predictive Assistance its “most fascinating new feature,” saying it “integrates customer usage metrics into [Dell Boomi’s] support system to . . . enable client care to better predict their customers’ needs.”
- Dashboards (for partners, ISVs and end users). These dashboards provide Dell Boomi partner providers (such as MSPs) a “single view” of each customer’s integrations and usage. Activities visible include: volume trends; the apps customers connect to; and where and when integration errors occur. Partners can also share their portal views with end user customers.
Dell Boomi service partners and MSPs can now manage and monitor all of their end-user customers’ integrations from a single portal screen. Further, the dashboard architecture allows any ISV partner to quickly build, bundle, and deploy integration processes within their applications. These dashboards can also be shared with end user accounts, Nucci added.
Boomi AtomSphere Fall 11 is available starting at $550 per month.
