Dell Boomi: Updated AtomSphere Aims To Ease Move To The Cloud

The AtomSphere Fall 11 version of Boomi should simplify the move to cloud computing with easier integration and more VAR-friendly tools for monitoring and maintenance, said Rick Nucci, founder of Boomi and CTO of Dell Boomi.

One new feature, Boomi Suggest, leverages the collective intelligence of all AtomSphere customers to make suggestions for mapped functions. With a database of more than 13,000 indexed functions and 50,000 data maps, VARs and customers no longer have to manually find their way through an integration configuration, according to the company.

For example, there are map functions concatenating first name and last name to a name field. With Boomi Suggest, that will happen automatically. "It tends to be hours [of creation] per map. And you are creating from 12 maps for small customers, while a big customer might have 12,000 maps," Nucci said. "It's based on the size of the company and a lot of things. Value provided and productivity increases very nicely."

A second new function in AtomSphere Fall 11 is Business Rules, which offers support for more complex decision-making, Nucci said. "You can use Business Rules to do logic, validation, etc. You can configure instead of having to code it. It moves you up the value chain with customers. Now you can do things like sending an invoice out, correlating with incoming invoice data. This was a community-generated [addition]. It was the second- or third-highest-voted request in our feedback system." Business Rules is available to customers with AtomSphere Professional Edition or higher.

A big attraction for channel partners also will be partner dashboards, enabling ISVs to easily build, bundle and deploy integration processes within their application. Through the multitenant architecture, partners can now manage and monitor all of their customers’ integrations from a single screen.

"The channel is a key part of our product strategy. Beyond having a channel program, it is a key part of product strategy. We build features for partners. The dashboard is the latest example of that," Nucci said.

Dell Boomi also expanded its trust.boomi.com site, first introduced last year, which allows users more access to their information and integrations to see if they are functioning at high levels.

"The first step with trust.boomi.com was to provide transparency of uptime for current and recent history. That was the big driver we get from prospects -- how to demonstrate uptime performance. Now we're adding the idea of creating transparency around traction and growth," Nucci said. "We provide the traction and growth of the integration activity across all customers. As someone looking at Boomi, it's a comfort level to go look that these guys are on the up and up."

Finally, new predictive analysis metrics can help foster a better return on investment for integration vs. traditional middleware.

"This is our commitment to preventing shelfware. We didn't build it because we had a shelfware problem, but to ensure we never have a shelfware problem," Nucci said. "It allows us to be completely, successfully set. This is so critical for the industry in general, this type of usage indicator, to make sure they're getting what they paid for out of Boomi."