Boomi has revamped their program for ISVs, integrators and other developers, to encourage them to build more solutions on top of and connecting to Boomi, and to validate it on third party software. They also want partners to work with the whole Boomi stack, not just its original integration functionality.
David Tavolaro onstage at Boomi World 18 Partner Summit
LAS VEGAS –Dell Boomi has announced a major enhancement of its Dell Boomi Technology Partner Program. which is aimed at independent software vendors, systems integrators, and other app developers. While the program existed before, it has been made both more formal and more robust, to encourage technology partners to build more solutions for the platform. The announcement was made at the Partner Summit at Boomi World 18 here.
“We are announcing here today the launch of our new Technology Partner Program,” said David Tavolaro, Vice President of Global Business Development at Dell Boomi, in kicking off the Partner Day keynote at the event. “We have six signed up today, as early adopters.”
All of these partners have already delivered Boomi services. OANDA has used Boomi in a solution to provide accurate foreign exchange data to customers regardless of which ERP system they use. RSA integrates RSA SecurID Access with Boomi for secure identity and access management. SAASPASS uses Boomi in a standards-based SSO and MFA solution. SL Corporation monitors the Boomi platform to provide complete end-to end service-centric visibility into its connectors and process flows. Unico uses Boomi to help ISV customers manage and integrate their data platforms. Finally, Upland Software uses Boomi technology as the backbone of their integration platform.
“These six have signed up as early adopters, but all partners interested in building on Boomi will be interested in this program,” Tavolaro said. “This is a key announcement from us for partners who aim to create public connectors. We want to give them the Boomi services and support of Boomi to be able to do that.”
Boomi has had this type of program before, but even though its business is around executing integrations, it has not been very proactive in the past about encouraging ISVs to build their own integrations with Boomi.
“There was a program before, but it never got a lot of traction,” said Chris Port, Boomi’s COO. “This program is an evolution, and is more robust. It’s not radically net-new, but it is a very important step.
“We have a lot of integrations, but those have been primarily been built internally,” Port added. “We want them to build on top of us. We have a lot of skillsets within Boomi, and we could accelerate it quickly in-house, but it makes more sense to have the end customer have ISV partners or systems integrators to build those. This is something that partners could have done before, but we didn’t embrace them doing it in the way that we do today.”
Accordingly, the new Technology Partner Program is more proactive, and makes more enablement resources, training and support available, than it did before. This includes development, testing and demo access to a Dell Boomi tenant, access to the Technology Partner Program team for guidance and support, access to the Dell Boomi Partner Resource Center, training and certification resources, and marketing resources.
Boomi is looking for partners to use the Technology Partner Program to design several types of solutions. They are looking for basic validation of compatibility with the Boomi platform, as their ecosystem expands, and customers want to see a formal validation that other software solutions work with Boomi. They want partners with adjacent solutions to develop interoperability, using the Boomi SDK to leverage their platform documentation and APIs. They also want to see partners build public connectors on the Boomi platform.
“You will see more and more from us the strengthening of the ability of partners to build public connectors for consumption,” Port said. “By leveraging our enhanced Boomi SDK, they will have more opportunity to build businesses on top of the Boomi platform.”
“We would like to see more partner engagement on the process side around industry vertical solutions,” Steve Wood, Boomi’s Chief Product Officer told partners in his keynote. “We want to lean on you guys to bring in that industry expertise, using our SDK. We see where you can fill in gaps. Don’t just wait for us. We want you guys to build stuff around us. That’s why we are an open platform. Open wins every time.”
Ultimately, what Boomi really wants is for partners to go beyond the Boomi platform’s original integration capabilities in its Integration Platform-as-a-Service, and build solutions that extend across its entire stack.
“The Boomi hypothesis eight years ago was a pervasive need for application integration and data integration, and that is still there, but the platform has broadened to be so much more,” Port said. “We offer data quality services with our Hub product. Customers have governance needs from API perspective, and that’s where Mediate comes in, to help them connect across the enterprise. EDI is now super-legacy, and companies say there has to be better way to do things. So with Exchange we can onboard a new training platform in just days by modernizing the EDI platform. Flow is getting to the last mile, bringing this to life for end users by automating workflows with little code. So you can learn the Boomi platform for one thing and leverage it for others. That’s our differentiator.”
Some of the partners are receptive to the message. Slalom, a global systems integrator headquartered in Seattle that has a billion dollar business, just won Boomi’s 2018 North American Partner of the Year award, again.
“We use the whole unified platform including Flow, and the Master Data Management [Hub] has been a greater enabler for our clients,” said Makeah Kumar, Slalom’s Managing Director. “Stitching data siloes has been an interesting use case. We are using the whole stack.”
