Dell Boomi Enhances AtomSphere With New SOA, Security Features

Dell Boomi has made several enhancements to its AtomSphere platform that include new enterprise-focused data integration, crowd-sourced regression testing and security management improvements, according to the company.

The AtomSphere Summer 12 release will help deliver predictable service levels for real-time data transfers in the cloud by reserving cloud resources, said Rick Nucci, general manager of Dell Boomi, Berwyn, Pa.

"The theme of the release is customers are solving increasingly complex problems using Boomi and are going broader in using Boomi," Nucci said. "We're addressing ETL [extract, transform and load] and cloud integration."

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Among the new features in AtomSphere is Boomi Assure, which enables crowd-sourced regression testing. Users can submit their integration processes with test data to Dell Boomi, which will ensure viability and support in future AtomSphere releases, Nucci said.

"Once that integration process is submitted to our test environment, we execute that test; and, we are assuring users that not only we are testing it but that the testing will replicate their exact use of Boomi. This allows customers the assurance that they can test their exact use case," Nucci said. "If you think of the comparable on-premise world, the onus of upgrading falls on the shoulders of the customer or the partner delivering the capability to the customer. They have to download new versions and test the configuration and customizations they made against the new version."

With Boomi Assure, customers are ensured the testing is done and any necessary changes are painless for the customer, Nucci said.

"We've addressed that by taking on the service of doing that testing work," he said.

New ETL enhancements include Join, or document cache, a capability that enables users to join multiple data sources; Bulk Copy, which increases the bandwidth of integration projects onto one converged platform; and a Hadoop connector, for processing big data through Apache Hadoop, according to Dell Boomi.

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"[Join] is a traditional ETL capability that allows you to join multiple data sources from different applications into one resulting data set and do that in a very scalable manner. We are able to join those data sources in memory for very fast access. We aren't having to reach out to multiple applications to do that work," Dell Boomi's Nucci said. "[Both Join and Bulk Copy] are traditional ETL capabilities. It's not that those are unique to Boomi, but you can now do these capabilities in the same product and be able to handle cloud integration scenarios."

Boomi has also added new governance and security management features that provide greater flexibility managing security policies and enable password creation policies to conform to corporate standards, Nucci said.

"It's SAML-based [Security Assertion Markup Language] single sign-on. When you log into Boomi, the log-in can be delegated to a trusted identity provider using the SAML standard. We've also added the ability to centralize, define and manage password policies for all Boomi users. You can decide on the length and complexity and expiration of passwords that users set up," Nucci said.

Finally, a new Service-Oriented-Architecture (SOA) Worker feature provides custom-configured Atom for through-the-cloud data movement that ensures predictable performance levels for real-time data transfers, according to Dell Boomi.

"You can very consistently scale the performance of those Web services by reserving cloud resources in our cloud. You can say I want the capacity of one SOA worker or five SOA workers. Think of them as event handlers that accept Web service requests. Customers running Web services can get repeatable and reliable performance times as they scale out," Nucci said.