In Asia, business growth reflects a recent Vanson Bourne survey, whereby connected businesses are far outpacing their competitors. Recognising this, businesses across all industries are seeking ways to modernise their infrastructure. But they come up against challenges like complex application and data integration, as well as integration projects which are simply too resource intensive.
Dell Technologies’ integration platform business, Boomi, proposes to connect organisations to everything and enable it to engage everywhere across any channel, device or platform.
Boomi’s Southeast Asia general manager, Lawrence Ng observed the evolution of enabling technologies, observing the era when network was important to bring information to the right place at the right time when customers would need it.
Then came the other enabling components of technology stack like the operating system, middleware, database and so on.
Observing that data in an organisation is often found in many disparate places, Lawrence recognised middleware’s important role of collecting all these data, to help an organisation connect the dots in understanding and knowledge which data often contain.
‘Data became more and more important because time-to-market had to be in a timely manner,” he pointed out. In time, data equated to (the means to) be able to deal with disruption caused by startups and the recent coronavirus pandemic.
Middleware gaining importance
Lawrence observed middleware used to be largely ignored because it sits between data and applications. “In its legacy form, it sits in the data centre as well,” he shared.
“Boomi is a cloud-based integration tool that allows us to connect software to another database or to another ERP system or anything. And I was intrigued,” Lawrence explained.
He also recognised the tech trends that was unfolding and this spurred him to join Dell Boomi 6 months ago.
“One of the key enablers of success for a company’s digital transformation is integration (and middleware). It is critical because data is becoming the new currency, and data in digital form is the most efficient form for customers to consume. You can move it, you can store it, it is easy to store and retrieve with the right tools.”
Lawrence concluded that with data being a new currency and with data being found in any disparate locations around the organisation, integration became important to bring data together so insights and understanding could be gleaned from it.
