One of the highlights of Dell’s transformation from a low-cost PC provider to a purveyor of IT services and all things Cloud is their Boomi Cloud integration product. Originally billed as a Business-to-Business Integration (B2Bi) tool, Boomi revamped the product several years ago as a full-fledged Integration-as-a-Service offering, positioning it as the point of the spear of Dell’s Cloud strategy.
What caught my eye about Boomi, however, is not simply their Cloud centricity. Instead, Boomi Suggest impressed me the most. Boomi Suggest allows any Boomi customer to publish their integration mappings anonymously to the community of Boomi customers. Subsequently, when another customer wants to perform an integration, Boomi suggests likely mappings. Dell reports that customers select the suggested mapping over 85% of the time.
As anybody who’s monkeyed with application integration can attest, creating the mappings are the Dwarf-in-the-box step that is both hair-pulling and inherently manual. Having a list of such mappings pop up where most of the time you can simply select one can be a huge time and money saver.
The only reason Dell Suggest works, of course, is because Boomi is fully multi-tenant. As we explain in our Cloud Computing course, full multi-tenancy can be especially useful when you want tenants to share information, for example, for social media apps. In Boomi’s case, they are crowdsourcing integration mappings. Finally, crowdsourcing for a more useful purpose than assembling flash mobs in airports. Imagine that!
