Monthly Archives: December 2010

Integrating with Boomi, hear our customers @ Dreamforce

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Hear Amrith Nambiar from Mindjet talk about running integration in a 100% cloud environment and Bill Vanderwall from Scientific Learning on integrating in a hybrid cloud and on-premise environment:

Some interesting take aways:

  • Nate Bride talks about the Boomi community approach and gives a plug to the WDCi built JIRA connector that is available via the Boomi public atomsphere – thanks Nate.
  • Bill talks about selecting Boomi over Cast Iron due to the user interface but most importantly due to the Total Cost of Ownership – Boomi is more affordable.
  • Both Bill and Amrith talk about the complexity of bidirectional integration of data, ie which system is the master and how to ensure data integrity in this model.
  • Amrith’s 4 keys to success:
  1. Focus on the business process.
  2. Limit your scope to only what systems are needed for your first project.
  3. Get the right partner (thanks Amrith).
  4. Accept that the interfaces/integration processes will be tuned over time -  don’t expect to build out everything in the first phase if you have complex or dependent business processes.
  • Amrith mentions the custom reporting and error handling infrastructure we have put in place to enable Mindjet to check and validate synchronised data between Salesforce and Netsuite.
  • At the end of the recording, you can hear Walter Dewildt from WDCi answer a question on how to decide if you should push volumes of data to your target application or simply expose data in the source and retrieve as necessary.

Want to know more, check out the Mindjet case study http://www.boomi.com/customers/success/standardizing-back-office-application-integrations-minimal-it-support

Calling an on-premise web service from a SaaS platform?

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If you are, then you no doubt have encountered the security team of your company. If you are small enough to not have a security team, then you probably can get by with opening some firewall ports, but otherwise you may be in for a long wait, and a few lively discussions.

Typically,  security teams do not like to trust “SaaS platforms” and open up firewall ports for inbound connections.

A common problem I see is that while even the most flexible organisations may have infrastructure to deal with this in a secured zone like UAT or Production, most of us have development servers on our internal domain, and getting that opened through the firewall for inbound services is very unlikely to happen. If it does it will most likely require expensive services and additional routers ensure the path through is secured.

So how can you get around this issue?  Dell-Boomi the leader in SaaS integration has a neat solution. Outbound connections and webServices are a dime a dozen, and when they happen through a regular port (443 outbound) then they are simple.

What if you could get a platform like Salesforce.com or Rightnow or Netsuite to call an internal service, that  was proxied  through a firewall friendly connection.  E.G. a Salesforce.com sandbox calling an internal service running on your Dev server without opening a firewall port, all secured by an enterprise ready integration platform.

This is available today, and probably at a fraction of the cost and effort to get your security team involved in opening firewall ports.

if you want to know more, come talk to us at WDCi. We can help you get set up in days, not weeks.