Data Virtualization with Denodo
February 28, 2023Data Sheet for Boomi to Workato Migration
As the world of SaaS and Cloud applications continues to explore within companies, the complexity of bringing them all together using technology in an effort to deliver business value increases. Add to that market forces due to economic conditions and competing demands from customer segments, businesses can easily fall behind the curve and risk losing to the competition, if they are not able to continuously deliver with speed, agility, and efficiency. iPaaS technology providers such as Workato and Boomi (both Gartner MQ leaders) has certainly brought some relief by offering low-code development platform that has provided developers and users the ability to build and deploy workflows at a rapid pace in comparison to the yester years of writing code that would take days on end. But is that enough? No! Businesses are moving even faster with the AI disruption upon us. The expectation is in minutes not even hours with AI providing the ability to generate workflows, not even build them anymore.
This article tries to provide a subtle view into the various components of Boomi and Workato as competing iPaaS technologies, provides comparisons for the features available, and explains why a large segment of customers have made the choice of Workato over Boomi. This article provides,some additional things to consider if you are contemplating a move from Boomi to Workato.
Let us take a project that will need to automatically create users in Okta as employees are onboarded in ADP. We present to you a component table below that will show you the various components involved in either platform (Boomi and Workato) side-by-side for comparison. This will be the same set of components that will need to be considered when migrating from Boomi to Workato.
Development
In Boomi, the development platform is called AtomSphere Platform and developers primarily use the Process Library of Connections and Processes. Integration workflows are created using drag and drop shapes. There are 3 main shapes: connect, execute, and logic using which to integrate applications as well as share data between various backend systems. There are 3 main steps in developing integrations with Boomi. First, choose the action to perform like getting, sending or listening. Second, choose the connection with the application with which to carry out a specific action (read, write, execute, query, search) and lastly, choose what will happen once you receive a response to the action.
Fig 1. ADP Connectivity to Okta in Boomi
In Workato, we use Projects for development. Projects are centralized repositories for assets such as recipes, connections and subfolders. Recipes are essentially workflows that perform integrations that are system level with various applications (or) process automations that can have a human-in-a-loop type activity. Each recipe contains a trigger and set of one or more actions and connectors. When a recipe is turned on, it waits for a triggering event to run the set of actions. A job is the entire flow of each trigger event through the recipe. The recipe builder has a vertical documentation-like layout that allows anyone to follow and understand. This adds a very nice touch. See an example recipe below.
Fig 2. Sample Recipe in Workato for development
Connectors
Both platforms provide a wide range of connectors. In Boomi, there are inbuilt connectors or the ability to leverage connector SDK to build one. There are 4 types of connectors in Boomi -. Application connectors, Event-driven connectors, Technology connectors, and Custom connectors. All connectors have a connection and an operation. You can also use the HTTP connector to do REST operations and the SOAP connector for SOAP requests. In Workato, it’s somewhat similar. A connector comprises of authentication methods, triggers, and actions. Workato’s connector SDK lets us build custom connectors that doesn’t readily exist in the community. That said, Workato has around 1200 prebuilt connectors. The HTTP connector is used for handling raw JSON data from API invocations. JSON is the default format unless specified otherwise in triggers and actions - a JSON parser error will be shown if the SDK expected JSON and received another format.
Workato also provides users with a unique target URL to send webhooks to. Webhooks received can be immediately processed by a recipe as if its a real-time trigger event. Both HTTP connectors and Webhooks typically play a major role in the migration of workflows from Boomi to Workato.
Debugging and Error Handling
For troubleshooting, you have debug logging and trace logging in Boomi. For runtime debugging you can click on a particular shape and click on source shape data and click on the notepad to view the data. Similarly in Workato, you can perform Job debug tracing through Workato logging service. For runtime debugging you can simply use the logger.
Fig 3. Runtime Debugging in Boomi
There are 3 types of errors in Boomi. Runtime errors, Process errors and Document errors. To view runtime errors, you use the atom management and view run time logs. For process errors, you use process reporting and process logs. For document errors, you use the document log.
Workato comes with dashboard which provides a single pane view of all the recipes and successful jobs and failed jobs. When you click on the list of failed jobs, it takes you to the failed instance and you can pinpoint the step it failed and recover from it. You also have the jobs report where you can look at the list of failures in a specific recipe. RecipeOps is a wonderful feature by Workato where recipes are monitored and tracked for job failures, stoppages and workspace activity. You can set rule-based recovery restart and notification, planned shutdown and restarts.
Fig 4. Logger by Workato
Error handling is also very easy and intuitive in Workato. Errors are handled using the Monitor-on-Error block. Majority of the errors are handled using this block. You can set the number of retry times, different action steps based on the error codes, email, slack or sms notify the error or stop the job altogether. When you click on each step you have the input, output and debug options which shows the run time data.
Fig 5. Error Handling in Workato
Logging
Process logs in Boomi are temporary and unless explicitly saved you lose the logs after 10 days. Logs are defined as INFO, DEBUG, WARNING and SEVERE. You do not have a 1-1 relationship between the code and the log which makes it difficult to pinpoint the errors. Sometimes with large datasets you have to write a python script to filter out the errors you are looking for.
Fig 6. Process Logging in Boomi
Workato has a fantastic logging system through Logger which acts as a centralized repository that can be easily searched. You also have the option to add logging for additional datapills that are used in the recipe to aid with further analysis.
Fig 7. Logging in Workato
Deployment
In Boomi, you create point-in-time versions of processes or other deployable components called packaged components. The packaged component acts as a snapshot of the current process and shields it from the build tab. Assign those specific versions to one or more environments to be available to run and deploy the packaged component.
In Workato, you have the option to deploy the whole project or choose individual assets to deploy across environments. When you are deploying projects for the first time you have to reconnect the connections in the target environment. A package zip file can be deployed manually using package import UI or Workato platform APIs. You can also initiate the deployment from CI/CD server using a cURL request.
Data Transformation/Mapping
Data transformation is the process of transforming data from one format to another. This helps seamless communication and data flow between different applications and systems maintaining a state of synchronicity or harmony.
In Boomi, you transform data using the map shape from one format to another. The map shape references a predefined map component. Business rules shape is used to set the if/else and and/or logic to control the flow of documents.
In Workato, you can use recipe logic or lookup tables to transform data. Workato provides a rich set of formulas that can be used in the recipe logic to accomplish transformations. For a small subset of values, the lookup tables can be used.
Fig 8. Sample formula logic in Workato
In addition, Workato had recently announced the “AI @Work” that has a co-pilot functionality that readily presents itself for developers within the platform. This is where we accelerate from the hours to minutes ability that was mentioned at the beginning of the article. It provides a set of AI features for the Workato platform that includes an OpenAI connector, recipe/connector Copilots, GEARS AI and WorkbotGPT. It will require a separate article to discuss the power of AI@Work in its entirety.
Conclusion
In conclusion, Workato is a Gartner leader ahead of every other iPaaS platform including Boomi for a reason and many of the highlights have been provided in this article. Workato caters to various market segments from large enterprises to commercial mid-market companies to SMBs. Workato brings together integration and automation within the box and by adding AI capabilities, it aims to create a category for itself - “enterprise automation”.
Twenty20 Systems has been a Workato partner for the past many years delivering successful implementations to a variety of customers across industry segments. We have been awarded “Workato Delivery Partner of the Year - Americas” this year and we continue to expand our delivery footprint across the globe.
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