Boomi vs. IBM Business Automation Workflow

Legacy systems often need to be replaced or integrated with new applications in order to modernize businesses. A strong API strategy that avoids custom coding and third-party programs is essential to enable this integration. Boomi's new-age connectivity and integration solutions ensure safe, secure, and robust integration. In the age of information, businesses are under more pressure than ever to be able to collect and manage large amounts of data. This data comes in from a variety of sources, including personalized devices such as voice assistants and wearable tech. While this data can be immensely valuable to businesses, they often lack the infrastructure necessary to handle it effectively. This can lead to data build-up in databases or silos, and can eventually lead to problems with integration and security.

Have your process first on paper Its important to first document the process before venturing into BPMS. It will save a lot of pain and heartaches. A BPM tool is no magic bullet, it merely automates your process. Its upto you to put visibility and tracking on top of it. Provide monitoring so that you get a chance to improve your process continously. BPM is not an application If you are trying to build an application with BPM, chances are that your are alraedy failing. BPM must be a strategic initiative for an organization. Yes, you build Dashboards, Reports and other software in BPMS, however you do it at a process level not at an application level. http://bpmstech.blogspot.com/2011/05/bpm-initiative.html Know the difference between process data and business data http://bpmstech.blogspot.com/2011/05/lombardi-best-practices.html http://bpmstech.blogspot.com/2012/02/bpm-system-architecture.html

• Pre-built connectors to almost anything which greatly reduce time to release of your integration needs.
• Easy to use development platform with drag&drop features. Non-technical people could build simple integration processes in no time.
• Great user community where you can get quick help if needed. Boomi people hang around there a lot.

Incentivized

• System does a great job normalizing business process and automating order processing tasks. Before TeamWorks, the process was much more manual and more expensive staff ($65k to $70K) were required to manage the process. Since implementing TeamWorks, we need much lower-skilled workers to manage order processing.
• System ensures that we have consistent data across all systems.
• Rules engine is really the “company playbook” – it is the heart and soul of how the company works. It handles thousands of orders per day

• More from a development perspective. It is always difficult to use the properties features. It takes a while to understand how the data/variables can be used across an integration.
• Dell Boomi should also invest more on API Management and not just seen as a ETL,ESB tool.
• Should roll out features more often based on users reviews.

Incentivized

• The system gets crashed when many instances go into the queue stage. The system even crashes and sometimes restarts automatically when the load on the server increases. We had to develop a separate software for this and maintain the same.
• We cannot manipulate the data during run time. It is difficult to develop user-interfaces with complex functionality.
• In order to consume external services that follow HTTP protocol, we need to use IDE for that, and consuming services from IDE takes a lot of time to give a response.

Incentivized

Dell Boomi has provided us with the ability to connect our campus together using our various existing platforms. There are many supported features and have yet to run into something that we cannot do. Its user interface is very intuitive which would allow users to begin developing fairly easily. There is a myriad of resources available

Incentivized

This particular decision will be made by other people. Overall IBM BPM is the best BPM engine that I have worked with. It is implemented at our company and IT and business are already somewhat familiar with it. Therefore if asked I will recommend renewal as long as the price is reasonable.

My IT and Finance teams have noted that setting up the tool is a breeze. Dell Boomi has never caused an issue during a system implementation that I am aware of. We are pleased with the tool and recommend others consider it.

Incentivized

• The system is easy enough to use but, by definition, is a complex tool. However, they have done a good job generally balancing tool complexity / capability with usability. When comparing to MS Biz Talk, for example, Biz Talk has less functionality but is actually harder to use.
• Software is very flexible. For somebody with the right technical background, it’s quite easy to write some Java code to overcome any hurdles or make the product do what is needed

The atom sphere takes a time to load, when I open a process or when I open a log. One more slow processing is when I import objects from NetSuite.

About the performance of processing, it looks like Boomi takes a time to initialize some things such as connectors before starting the process. This is also performance we have.

Incentivized

Boomi support was responsive and knowledgable, however being a closed cloud service, it doesn't have good community support. We found the learning curve to be steep and there aren't avenues like google, forums, or blogs that provide community driven insight into the product or how to go about designing solutions using the tool

Incentivized

Issues can be raised through tickets and it works based on the priority of the issue. The Support Team response is also good and the solution is provided in a short span of time. In a case where the issue is serious, they try to find out the root cause and provide an alternative for it.

Incentivized

• Attended on premise sysadmin training for 4 days, 8 hours per day. Although further follow-up training was available, I never felt the need to go back. Training was very hands-on with real modeling (rather than just following a manual). Very effective.

• Very satisfied – not too difficult at all.
• We had a consultant available as part of our contract, but we didn’t really need to use (except for some advice on ActiveDirectory and single sign-on)

We decided to go with Dell Boomi because another department in our company was already using the software. We did not research competitor applications to use as our business solution. Dell Boomi was very easy and quick to set up, so once we decided to use Dell Boomi for systems integration, we had it set up and running within a few working days.

Incentivized

Pega Pega is a comprehensive suite which offers a unique theme of BPM development in the market. A no-coding approach based on rules with inheritance makes Pega a very powerful product. However Pega, falls short on integration centric capabilities and very rigid to customize. On the other hand IBM comes with array of products which suits needs of varying degree. Advanced integration is solved by BPEL Process Server which has support for state based patterns and mediation. Dynamic rules and event management can be solved with WODM, Cloud to on-premise connectivity with Cast Iron, Enterprise gateway and security usecases with DataPower, Social BPM with IBM BPM , WODM, mobify with Worklight. Pega has a little bit of eveything here and there. It solves the dynamic rule management, brings out the flavor of Social BPM and mobility with Antenna ( I guess) and predictive analytics as well in one single suite. There are certain usecases which needs to have a little bit of everything, however this little bits and pieces of functionality when its blows, Pega would have problems to scale. With IBM its a bit nightmare to maintain a variety of technologies, however you can wish to go for one without the other and go for something only when you truly need it. Pega vs IBM Its difficult to pick a winner. In nutshell when you want a full scale BPM with rich integration capabilities go for IBM BPM. On the other hand if you hava mature integration capability already, Pega can yield quick results for you as well. Pega's strength is its methodology. IBM BPM's strength is integration. Actually you can't go wrong with both in terms of implementation. My strong recommendation is to invest time to process analysis and pick a good vendor to support consulting and implementation.

It scales from small team interactions to business processes serving thousands of employees, as well as straight-through-processing needs that go well beyond. Of course, scale is always in the eye of the beholder, but IBM BPM does a good job of giving you all of the hooks, APIs, and data that you need to take on whatever scaling approaches you need to meet the load

• It has allowed us to scale significantly without having to add headcount, specifically those geared towards data entry. We went from a $10m ARR business to $200m ARR business with the same amount of Order Processors and 12x amount of transactions by leveraging Boomi to perform a lot of the work, and then having the Order Processing team to simply review that the transaction was processed successfully.

Incentivized

• It has added value to the upper management to give visibility into what is happening at any time in the enterprise.
• Boosted employee morale because it gives them all the information to work the case/task in a single location.
• Identifies bottlenecks and improves the turnover.

Incentivized