Cloud approach increases
productivity, lowers TCO
Customer profile
Renesas Electronics America replaces manual processes and dramatically
reduces costs using Dell Boomi AtomSphere for application integration
Company Renesas Electronics America (REA)
Industry Semiconductor Manufacturing
Country United States
Employees 400
Website am.renesas.com
Business need
Find a cost-effective replacement
for a legacy on-premises
integration solution.
Solution
Dell Boomi AtomSphere provided a
cloud-based solution at a fraction of
the cost of the company’s previous
legacy system and also helped REA
increase agility.
Benefits
• D
ramatically lowered
maintenance costs
• Reduced manual processes
• Increased agility for planning
and development
• Accelerated time to value
• Lowered total cost of ownership
(TCO)
Solutions at a glance
• Application integration
“Dell Boomi AtomSphere is one of the best tools
I’ve seen, and Menlo’s been a great partner to
help us.”
Joseph A. Coleman, Senior IT Manager, Renesas Electronics America
Renesas Electronics America (REA), headquartered in Santa
Clara, Calif., is a wholly owned subsidiary of Renesas Electronics
Corporation, a Japan-based semiconductor manufacturer that
is the world’s largest manufacturer of microcontrollers and the
second largest manufacturer of application processors.
Renesas Electronics America was
formed in 2010 as a result of the
merger of NEC Electronics and Renesas
Technology, which was formed in 2003
as a joint venture between Hitachi and
Mitsubishi Electric.
Business need
“It’s improved
our development
estimates and
resource planning
now that we have an
integration project
using Dell Boomi.”
Joseph A. Coleman,
Senior IT Manager,
Renesas Electronics America
REA had an on-premises, legacy
integration system that required a very
manual process of custom coding by
an on-site expert and was costly and
unnecessarily complicated, said Joseph
Coleman, REA’s senior IT manager.
REA also had 27 racks of servers that
had accumulated over time through
mergers and acquisitions. During plans
for a relocation to a new building, the
company wanted to avoid managing a
data center after the move and instead
move all the servers to a colocation in
Las Vegas. “That move helped us decide
to move to the cloud,” Coleman recalled.
Solution
REA had several cloud-based and onpremises applications such as a custom
human resources information system
(HRIS) app, systems and files that it
needed to integrate. The company also
had two instances of SAP — one for
the headquarters and one for the U.S.
subsidiary — that contained a lot of data.
But this data needed transformation
and integration to help with revenue
forecasting to support the nuances of
the local company, Coleman said.
During the evaluation stage, starting with
a simple proof of concept, REA used Dell
Boomi AtomSphere integration platform
as a service (iPaaS) to integrate data from
its U.S.-based HRIS system to Japan
each day into the SAP system and global
directory management systems. REA was
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able to complete the proof of concept by
writing two to three processes.
Dell Boomi: Elegant and secure
In a bake-off against another integration
solution, Dell Boomi’s iPaaS “was more
elegant, easier to use and I like the
security model,” said Coleman, adding
that having the ability to locate an Atom
on premises at REA made it easier to sell
a cloud-based strategy to other areas of
the organization.
For implementation, REA turned to
system integrator Menlo Technologies.
“Menlo Technologies was instrumental
in helping REA with the Dell Boomi
implementation,” said Coleman, adding
that, “Menlo was REA’s first and only
partner, and their blended model of
onshore and offshore support works well.”
According to Gary Prioste, CEO of
Menlo Technologies, the company
has established a Boomi Center of
Excellence, training a number of people
internally so that they always have
available Boomi-ready resources who
are AtomSphere Integration Cloud™
certified. They’ve also developed an inhouse knowledge database, a proactive
approach that Prioste said helps improve
Menlo’s capabilities in the Dell Boomi
ecosystem and allows them to broaden
the skills of Menlo employees.
Products & Services
Software
Dell Boomi AtomSphere
After the initial proof of concept, REA
worked with Menlo to set up processes
for Ultimate Software integration as the
first phase during the facility migration.
Since then, REA has been layering
new integration on top of that as
needed — including integration between
Salesforce.com Chatter and Zendesk
for support tickets, and between
Salesforce.com and SAP — as well as
supporting the increasing needs of the
data warehouse and the Dell Boomi
integrations that populate their robust
reporting database.
Menlo is also helping REA migrate
data from SAP to a local database via
AtomSphere, which involves master
data management processes. Coleman
explained that REA produces a source
extraction that is posted to its FTP
site. From there, AtomSphere picks it
up and loads it into a SQL Server data
warehouse for reporting.
To provide a color-coded, graphical
interface to monitor some of these
processes, Menlo has developed a
dashboard based on the AtomSphere
API that captures inbound/outbound
transactions. The dashboard also
provides REA with the ability to filter and
sort data for detailed analysis and capture
any abnormal behavior, filter the data by
key performance indicators, and display
data in tabular and graphical formats.
High productivity pays off
While REA initially was interested in
an on-premises integration solution
for security reasons, Coleman knew
firsthand that large, on-premises
solutions may be very robust, but
can be difficult to scale, manage and
justify. Instead, he said that because
AtomSphere is easier to use, “There is
less cost, and it’s easier to pick up, easier
to support. REA had legacy, on-premises
technology, and we needed to shed this
baggage and architect a more modern,
cloud-based approach.”
REA has eliminated the need for 2.5
internal resources to integrate using
the custom legacy applications to one
offshore resource. Coleman said that
with the Atom server — a Java virtual
machine sitting on a server — REA has
reduced costs by about 89 percent
compared to what they previously spent
on maintenance, reporting, hardware
and on-site support. Now, they also
experience even better service.
As for the productivity improvements,
with 15 Boomi integrations, they’ve
replaced a number of manual processes.
“We now have 57 process flows for
enterprise resource planning alone — we
never had that before,” Coleman said.
Coleman pointed out that Dell Boomi
has also made the organization more
agile in its ongoing development. “It’s
improved our development estimates
and resource planning now that we have
an integration project using Dell Boomi,”
he explained, adding that for new
projects, REA now has the capability to
quickly conduct a proof of concept.
For example, a major customer required
serialized data from the SAP system.
“Without Dell Boomi, this would have
been a manual process; but with
Dell Boomi, we were able to build
production processes, and fully test and
release to production in less than one
month,” said Coleman.
With the company’s customized
Salesforce objects and customized
Zendesk implementation, integration
isn’t a simple task, but “Dell Boomi’s
been able to handle the challenges,”
said Coleman. “Dell Boomi AtomSphere
is one of the best tools I’ve seen, and
Menlo’s been a great partner to help us.”
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Reference Number: 10022510 © August 2015, Dell Inc. All Rights Reserved
CaseStudy-REA-US-GM-26674