Image via CrunchBase
Boomi, the Pennsylvania based SaaS integration provider, is continuing the momentum they created with the Widget Challenge contest during Dreamforce ‘09 with a slew of new announcements this spring. Last week they announced the new release of their platform, AtomSphere Spring ‘10, that could extend the enterprise SOA to the cloud. Today, they announced a partnership with Rightnow Technologies that helps break down the data silos for their customers.
Boomi’s Atomsphere platform integrates cloud based and on-premise platforms, breaking down the data silos that exist in the enterprise environments. Their platform offers pre-built templates for many of the SaaS applications taking the complexity out of integration. The users are presented with configuration wizards which will help them connect with different SaaS applications and on-premise applications without having any knowledge on how to deal with the complex APIs offered by these applications.
With the new Spring ‘10 release of their platform, they are taking a multi-pronged approach by supporting both point to point integration architectures as well as loosely coupled architectures. This helps enterprises extend their SOA to the cloud by integrating with a combination of SaaS and On-Premise applications. This is well suited to help the enterprises with their dilemma of wanting to use some of the SaaS applications without jettisoning their existing applications and SOA based strategies. The real-time integration functionality is enabled through the connect.boomi.com integration broker and is accomplished with no changes required to firewall security. This is ideal for enterprises not wanting to compromise on their security policies to accommodate cloud based applications. In fact, Boomi uses an Atomsphere agent to initiate this call which will suit the enterprise security policies well. Atomsphere Spring ‘10 release also has Web Service Publishing which allows the users to turn the very integration process into a webservice and publish it to the cloud. This will save quite a bit of time and money for the customers. I would say this is very neat.
Today’s partnership with Rightnow adds one more tool to the Atomsphere applications set and this partnership will allows joint clients to synchronize customer data stored in business applications to more easily analyze and strengthen customer relationships. Now users of Rightnow CX Suite will be able to integrate with other cloud based applications with a few clicks. This will also help Rightnow’s clients to migrate from legacy applications to cloud based ones easily by using the drag and drop features of Boomi Atomsphere.
For the SaaS to gain strong foothold in the enterprise markets, we need integration players like Boomi, Cast Iron, Hubspan, etc.. They are critical for not only migrating enterprises users off the legacy applications but also to interoperate with disparate applications from many different providers. This space is really interesting and I will be covering other players in the coming weeks and months.
