The latest report from Boomi, a Dell Technologies business and leading provider of cloud-based integration platform as a service (iPaaS), found 9 out of 10 (94%) respondents worldwide are embracing a Composable Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) strategy to overcome the limitations of legacy applications and modernize their businesses to gain a competitive market advantage.

Commissioned with Coleman Parks, the independent survey of 1,675 CTOs and enterprise architects, which included 300 from Japan, Singapore, Hong Kong, Malaysia, and the Philippines, shows companies are keenly aware that their legacy ERP systems, the backbone of every organization, are struggling to keep pace with business today.

This explains the trend toward the modern strategy of composable ERP, which gives companies a flexible platform to bridge the gap between legacy and modern applications to meet business demands in today’s fast, competitive market.

iPaaS provider, Boomi, is now available at AWS Marketplace

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Despite the flexibility Composable ERP provides, integrating all of those applications to work collaboratively and share data is still a challenge. As traditional integration solutions require expensive, time-consuming custom development coding, optimization and automation is a high priority to IT teams today. This is evidenced by 76% of survey respondents investing in standardization and consolidation of applications, and 72% modernizing applications and migrating to the cloud.

“Perhaps the biggest challenge every business faces today is unifying their increasingly fragmented digital ecosystem so they can create the seamlessly integrated experiences that customers, employees, and partners now expect,” said Chris McNabb, CEO, Boomi. “The organizations that are removing that friction through fast, intelligent integration and workflow automation are the ones best positioned to thrive as we move beyond the pandemic.”

Integration platforms

Leading analyst firm Gartner suggests a focus on integration is critical. “ERP vendors will have to provide or partner with integration platforms in order to meet customers’ demands for increased integration capabilities,” Gartner said. “This is because ERP customers will empower business users to bring together applications and data to build business capabilities for their enterprise. Customers will engage multiple vendors, clouds, and services to compose capabilities.”

Boomi’s recent findings suggest businesses see the vast potential of Composable ERP but are struggling to implement an integration strategy. In the survey, 51% of respondents said providing the best user experience possible was the motivation behind adopting integration technology. Yet 47% indicated their current integration solutions struggle to meet their challenges. Forty-two percent say there is a high cost to maintaining these solutions, with 38% finding that they can’t cope with their complex hybrid technology environment.

The report also found that the benefits of modernization by moving their ERP suites to the cloud are improving business efficiency (38%), increasing IT agility (35%), and driving business growth (32%). While the focus on integration and orchestration strategy by providing the best customer experience possible (55%) and innovating internal processes to be more agile (51%).