Dell wants to reduce the number of common integration errors, the time it takes to fix them, and add new analytics capabilities to the Dell Boomi AtomSphere integration service. Dell Boomi AtomSphere CTO Michael Morton says that when it comes to integration many organizations not only continue to make the same errors over again; they encounter many of the same problems that other organizations have already experienced.
A new Boomi Resolve capability that is being included in the spring 2014 release of Dell Boomi AtomSphere leverages analytics tools created by Dell to proactively identify potential sources of integration problems. The service, says Morton, then alerts developers that either a particular issue is a recurring problem or that based on similar attempts made by other organizations there is likely to be a problem with a particular type of integration being attempted.
Morton says that the Dell Boomi AtomSphere service has kept track of over 18 million error messages in its repository to identify patterns associated with potential problems. Boomi Resolve analyzes that data in real time to give developers feedback about their own integration efforts. Interesting enough, Morton says the 100 most common errors account for 80 percent of all error messages.
The near-real-time customer usage metrics, such as amount of data flowing through integrations and active updates to integrations, that Dell gathers are then fed into Dell Boomi’s customer relationship management (CRM) system. Once Dell identifies a particular set of error patterns the Dell Boomi Client Services team proactively reaches out to customers whose usage metrics indicate they might need some additional assistance. An SOA Dashboard also provides customers with a status report of the performance of an organization’s integration process services.
With this release, Morton says Dell has also enhanced support for bidirectional conversion between XML and JSON data formats to better accelerate application integration across these formats. In addition, while Dell Boomi Atomsphere does not have a specific API management feature, Morton notes that the capability is essentially already baked into the service.
Morton says a big part of the reason that Dell can deliver this capability is that Dell Boomi AtomSphere is based on single instance, multi-tenant architecture that enables Dell to correlate activity across a service that now supports 450 million integrations a month; up from 35 million integrations this time last year.
Since acquiring Boomi in 2010, Dell has increased the scope of the service to the point where nine million mappings have been indexed on behalf of over 2,000 customers. In fact, as part of the move to going private, Dell CEO Michael Dell specifically identifies Dell Boomi AtomSphere as one of the key technologies that would drive the company’s overall expansion into IT services. In the meantime, as demand of integration services increase in the cloud, the general expectation is that the number of mappings indexed by the Dell Boomi AtomSphere service will increase by several orders of magnitude in the years ahead.
By Michael Vizard on programmable web
