Dell Boomi AtomSphere Summer '13: Cloud Integration Update for ISVs

Dell Boomi is hoping to enable its partner channel with the AtomSphere Summer ’13 Release. New features and functionality are intended to help ISVs and SaaS vendors to enable fast integration through the use of Integration Packs, but the company is also introducing new API management capabilities.

“Basically, it is a pre-determined vanilla sort of integration process that any of our OEM partners can create,” Chris McNabb, Dell Boomi’s director of product management, told Talkin’ Cloud about the new AtomSphere Integration Packs.

The Integration Packs are meant to speed up deployment and integration by creating a single instance for software products that can be customized. But don’t call it a template. McNabb stressed that the Integration Packs are not templates, but instead a system for “change once, deploy everywhere.” According to McNab, it dramatically speeds up the sales cycle.

“It basically speeds up their implementations because it’s one size fits all,” he said.

SaaS providers can use it to manage their integrations for customers from a central location and with a single change. As for ISVs, the use case scenario has to do with reducing time to deployment by creating Integration Packs around integrations that are used repeatedly. Instead, they can create it once and then tweak it for customized integrations each time. In either case, it’s a time-saver, McNabb said.

Another key new feature in the Summer ’13 Release of AtomSphere is the launch of API management capabilities. We’ve been seeing a lot more API management tools being announced, and it makes sense for Dell Boomi to start carving out a toehold in the space, as well. Dell Boomi AtomSphere now supports the ability to monitor, measure, secure, throttle and scale enterprise-published APIs.

“That space has gotten very hot very quickly,” McNabb said.

McNabb noted that Dell Boomi saw the change coming some time back and began implementing API management capabilities in AtomSphere about nine months ago. Although the capabilities have just been announced, they have actually been available in production for awhile now.

The last new major update for AtomSphere is the addition of process libraries, which enables systems integrators to capture business best practices and intellectual property in a process template that can be reused across multiple clients. McNabb said the process libraries were created with Dell Boomi’s channel partners in mind and is meant to provide them the ability to create templates on processes they conduct time and again.

“It dramatically reduces their deployment times and allows them to create a premium fixed price service for leverage in the partner IP they’ve created once and want to deploy many times,” McNabb said.