Dell Boomi rides the IPaaS wave

Dell Boomi, Dell’s integration platform as a service offering, is claiming triple digit growth in the Asia Pacific and Japan region on the back of what it says is an increase in hybrid cloud environments requiring organisations to integrate cloud based and on-premises applications.

Dell Boomi managing director APJ, Michael Evans, said organisations understand the importance of integration, but traditional strategies for connecting systems had been unable to deliver on the needs of today’s digital operations.

“The organisations we speak with have already made significant progress with their cloud transformations, and require greater versatility than on-premises, API-only-based integrations can provide. This is fuelling the adoption of iPaaS, which aligns to the scalable, best-of-breed and low maintenance cloud-based environments through which modern businesses operate.”

This demand, Evans said, was driving strong growth in Dell Boomi’s business globally and in the region. “We were very successful globally in ever aspect of our business. We had a phenomenal year.”

He said Dell Boomi had started investing in the APJ region in mid 2016, in sales, support and professional services resources and building a partner community in the region.

“We now have a team in Singapore and a team in Japan. We have grown in triple digit numbers and taken on a significant number of new customers and partners.”

He said recruitment in Singapore and Japan would continue, and there would be more partners announced during the year. ANZ managing director, Nicholas Lambrou, said Dell Boomi would shortly be opening an office in Brisbane.

IPaaS defined

Gartner defines IPaaS as “a suite of cloud services enabling development, execution and governance of integration flows connecting any combination of on-premises and cloud-based processes, services, applications and data within individual or across multiple organisations.”

In its March 2017 Magic Quadrant for IPaaS, Gartner said the market had expanded significantly during 2016, approaching US$700 million in revenue and growing around 60 per cent in revenue. “However, some providers far exceeded this and, in the case of some smaller vendors, registering triple-digit growth was not uncommon,” Gartner said.

Dell Boomi released the results of a survey commissioned from Vanson Bourne showing strong demand for IPaaS in Australia and New Zealand, saying it showed “half of Australian and New Zealand organisations struggling to become more connected.”

Survey reveals integration challenges

“The vast majority (89 percent) of respondents have faced drawbacks as a result of poor integration. The top three concerns flagged include unreliable applications (34 percent), financial loss and efficiency downturns (33 percent), and poor workflow efficiency (26 percent),” Dell Boomi said.

“Of concern is that 59 percent admit their organisations have missed opportunities as a result of poor integration, while 17 percent believe they may have done so unknowingly.”

At a press briefing in Sydney three Dell Boomi customers explained how they had used the platform to solve their integration challenges: University of Technology Sydney, Study Group and the Fred Hollows Foundation. 

David O’Connor, manager – IT enterprise architecture and strategic planning at UTS, said UTS had implemented an Application 2020 strategy based on cloud technologies and “the foundation for building a new generation of digital services and experiences for students and staff.”

 “The ability for us to make our data more accessible and move it as necessary across these cloud services in a secure manner via APIs is absolutely critical,” O’Connor said. “Boomi gives us the agility we need in this space.”

“Because of the ease of use of Boomi we were able to do more in our implementation project than we had expected to be able to do. So for no extra cost and no extra time we developed APIs outside the scope of the original project, which is a bit unheard of.”

Study Group is a UK based organisation, but with its IT based in Sydney, that works to help people wanting to study in universities outside their home countries, mostly at universities in the UK, US and Australia. It provides English language and university pathway programs to about 60,000 students and some 4000 agents around the world.

The company has used Boomi to replace a series of on-premises integrations, which were unable to manage the volume of student information generated by and passing through various internal systems.

Study Group global head of delivery and architecture, Marty Grant, said: “We are now at a point where we have full visibility over data, which has made employees more productive and boosted trust in our systems from the agents with whom we partner.”

“We had no one in our team with any integration expertise. We started in November 2016 and in 12 months we had about 2 different systems connected. We did that with three people who were not hard core developers, and they were doing other things at the same time,” Grant said.

Luke Van Leeuwen, associate director of technology and business services for the Fred Hollows Foundation said Boomi had helped the organisation overcome the challenge of synchronising all data across multiple applications in a hybrid cloud environment.

“We have about 25 offices in 22 countries so we had to move to the cloud. We needed an integration platform to stitch everything together.”

With Boomi he said the Foundation was looking to implement a system to manage its work, and gather data from other organisation with which it works.

“We want systems that will manage programs across the countries we work in and collect data. We are very much a data driven organisation. I have an integration team of about 1.3 people and they are able to achieve some quite amazing stuff in a short time frame, stitching things together.”