In this episode of The Cloud GURU, CEO, and author, Martin McNicoll explains what a middleware like Dell Boomi does for businesses and how Dell Boomi can help businesses connect their data to their back-office financial systems.
Learn how middleware works with your ERP system, and how you can use a middleware to connect web store, marketplaces, CRM system, and more.
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Video Transcript
Hi, my name is Martin McNicholl, CEO of GURUS, and today I’ll talk about Boomi.
What is Dell Boomi? Dell Boomi is a middleware.
What is middleware? So a middleware is a piece of software that allows you to connect one system with another. So when would you need a middleware? So a middleware, like Dell Boomi, is used, as an example, when you want to connect a NetSuite, or any ERP cloud application, with your order entry, inventory management, and all that to your web store, like Shopify.
So some of our customers are in that situation where they are running all their web operations on Shopify. They get the order and then you need to take that order at one point and put it in your accounting system.
As an example, you might keep descriptions of your products in your accounting system but your web store is your front-end for all your customers. This information needs to go back and forth.
Some companies are in situations where those systems are completely separated - bringing tons of problems to their operations.
Customers will order products that are not in stock, or nonexistent, or that were actually retired, so you need to have, for high-volume business, this connection between the two systems. This middleware allows companies to connect multiple different systems.
We have some customers that use Dell Boomi for EDI. These companies need to communicate back information to those different providers to know the status of their orders. Walmart is one of those providers - when you deal with Walmart you need to connect with them with EDI. Now the problem is that when you get an EDI transaction for, let's say, an order, this information is not necessarily ready to be consumed by your ERP or accounting system, like NetSuite. So what this software does is it takes the order and allows you to put business information or workflows and transform the data in Boomi, and then transfer this information back in the right format to your ERP system.
We do large projects and small projects with Boomi, and the real value that we get out of those is that it's also a Cloud application, so our customers do not need to host or provide servers to add this information to flow from one system to the other.
More and more today, these companies are running on Cloud applications, so they're moving data from Shopify to a NetSuite, as an example. Why would they need to buy hardware and software to connect those two platforms?
So what are the signs that you might need to automate the process of moving data from one system to the other, therefore needing a middleware?
So if you're in a situation where you have people that are dedicated to extracting data from one system and re-entering it in another, to a point where they're overflowing with work and your operations are affected - this calls for an intervention.
This calls for you to automate that process. Many times, these situations occur when a company is growing. When companies receive a large volume of leads, as an example from their HubSpot platform that they need to enter in their CRM, or a large number of orders that are overflowing from their web stores that they need to input into their accounting system to invoice and produce the goods - this is where you need this middleware platform.
What happens when you put this system in place is that you're able to automate this process ina way that’s error-free, from one platform to the other.
I used to call this, and I still call it, “Swivel Chair Integration,” when you have an individual in the middle swiveling from one system, moving to the next, transferring data. This is a recipe for disaster.
People can't have the right concentration level for a whole day to transfer information properly. You need a system to do that work.
Dell Boomi, being a cloud-based application, really allows our customers that are in that situation to automate the whole process. To transform the data in the middle, to input it in the other system in a way that can scale with your operations.
Some of our customers started with not even a person working full-time on these operations and still decided to implement Dell Boomi into their operations. If they hadn’t done that, today they would have a team of 30 people just entering data from one system to the other.
The investment was well worth it from the beginning to make sure that their operations flowed properly.