Boomi's Cloud-Based Integration May Signal VAN-less EDI 
Cloud computing is taking a bite out of expensive and entrenched VAN-based EDI services. Cloud-based integration PaaS Boomi is providing ASP Global Services, a supply chain SaaS firm, reliable and high-visibility EDI integration and management services. EDI success may signal a huge uptick in on-demand integration from the cloud.
Cloud computing is taking a bite out of expensive and entrenched VAN-based EDI services. Cloud-based integration PaaS Boomi is providing ASP Global Services, a supply chain SaaS firm, reliable and high-visibility EDI integration and management services. EDI success may signal a huge uptick in on-demand integration from the cloud.
“Integration in the cloud’ is one of the major tide changes coming, as the industry understand how to deliver visibility, reliability and less complexity,” Rick Nucci, CTO and co-founder of Boomi, told IDN.
ASP Global Services is using Boomi Atmosphere cloud-based integration offering to seamlessly connect the ASP warehouse management system (SphereWMS) with multiple client applications. As a result, a cloud-based EDI connection is allowing ASPGS clients to eliminate expensive VAN (Value Added Network) services by letting customers use the cloud to directly send and receive orders in industry standard formats.
"Due to its scalability and ease of use, [Boomi] AtomSphere has accelerated our sales process and significantly reduced the development portion of our implementation process, allowing us to get our customers up and running faster." said Mike Mullane, CEO ASPGS in a statement.
Before Boomi, ASPGS integration projects “were painful and unpredictable,” Mullane acknowledged, often requiring custom coding that added cost and complexity. With Boomi, ASPGS can connect to any B2B data source within Boomi’s AtomSphere network, including SAP iDocs, X12, and EDIFACT.
“Boomi's cloud architecture for integration also simplifies the EDI exchange,” Nucci said. “ASPGS supplies the application, the EDI maps and data to us, and we keep that information resident [in the cloud],” As a result, ASPGS can driven end-to-end EDI exchanges from the c cloud, and avoid paying for VAN supply chain and EDI services.
Inside Boomi’s AtomSphere Architecture
How Cloud-Based EDI Is (Finally) Taking on VANs
Since the 1980s, many IT professionals who rely on EDI-based supply chain services have looked for ways to cost and complexity of integration and data sharing with EDI partners, suppliers and customers.
Boomi’s AtomSphere is a PaaS designed to leverage a multi-tenant cloud (via inventive use of APIs and metadata) to simplify the management of complex order and inventory business processes, and make it easier for logistics providers to manage warehouse operations among trading partners, suppliers, and carriers – for all logistics processes.
Boomi’s AtomSphere is architected as a highly available cloud-based environment where a company’s smarts (metadata and a library of API-based connectors) facilitate integration among a wide network of SaaS, ISVs and system integrator partners. Boomi now supports 55 SaaS partners, (including Salesforce.com, NetSuite, PivotLink, and works with 600 end user customers.
In 2009, Boomi began to optimize its cloud integration PaaS for EDI. “Boomi’s API approach lets customers avoid much of the complexity, cost and delays of earlier attempts to use the Internet as a way to avoid using costly VANs,” Nucci told IDN.
The Boomi AtomSphere APIs are built to expressly leverage each partners’ metadata traffic, which in turn supplies Boomi’s multi-tenant cloud with important data and process models key to EDI, supply chain and data exchange with other systems, Nucci explained. “This approach means that by working with customers, we can help them totally avoid expensive and tedious data mapping [projects]” for one-to-one or one-to-many integrations.
For easy implementation by IT, Boomi AtomSphere support metadata for both SaaS and on-premise applications without requiring any changes to firewalls. AtomSphere can also be deployed directly onto the network where the on-premise application resides.
