St. Louis–based firm World Wide Technology is a global technology solutions provider, and its managed-services operation runs on integration.
WWT helps organizations design, build and deploy IT infrastructure, including cloud computing, cybersecurity, networking and digital transformation services.
For industries like healthcare, it secures patient data and modernizes systems. For finance, it strengthens cybersecurity and compliance. And for retail, it optimizes supply chains and customer experience platforms.
Across all of it, integration is the connective tissue. Its eBonding system, an electronic connection between two or more systems that synchronizes information securely over the internet using APIs, is essential to what it offers its customers, from restaurant chain Wingstop to D.C.’s Metropolitan Police Department.
Half a million on a build
However, as its customer portfolio has grown, so has its complexity. Multiple customers, partners and OEMs have brought their own tools and data sources — meaning WWT had no single source of truth to work from.
The size of the challenge became apparent when the team attempted to build an integration between ServiceNow and a monitoring tool the traditional way.
“It took six months, involved five people and cost around half a million dollars,” recalls Ken Maglio, principal solutions architect at WWT. “It was far too slow, but that was pretty typical for traditional ServiceNow development with integration partners involved.”
WWT needed a low-cost, scalable solution that a small team could manage without spiraling development cycles.
A data-led solution
After evaluating options including MuleSoft, Informatica, Jitterbit and Oracle, WWT chose Boomi. WWT and Boomi deployed Boomi’s Integration, API Management and DataHub across WWT’s managed services operation.
“It felt like building integrations in Visio rather than writing code,” Maglio says. The approach reduced the barrier to entry and brought developers with traditional coding backgrounds into low-code workflows.
Without an architectural blueprint to follow, the team built the platform completely from scratch.
The result shows a single connection between ServiceNow and Boomi, with modular, per-entity integrations created for individual customers and partners.
The structure reduces what would otherwise be a complex web of point-to-point connections. Boomi DataHub serves as the system of record across the environment, managing bidirectional data flow and reacting in real time to events including user input in ServiceNow, keeping data consistent across all sources.
From months to days
The benefits trickled down. For one large healthcare client of WWT’s, the implementation eliminated the equivalent of a full-time resource previously needed to manage manual ticket updates. It also scaled monthly ticket volume from hundreds to thousands, reduced ticket churn, clarified ownership and improved direct communication with end users.
Prior attempts using traditional coding had not delivered the same outcomes, says Maglio. More broadly, integration development time fell from several months to a matter of days, and WWT’s team can now accommodate customer requests that would previously have required a longer lead time or a flat refusal.
One proof of concept eventually led to a workflow that reduced effort from six months to roughly 40 hours, Maglio says. “With customers, it can take a bit longer because you still need testing and validation,” he notes, “but if we could move at full speed internally, we could probably complete those integrations in about a week.”
A harder test in the field
Last year, WWT’s multisite services organization, around 2,000 people running approximately 4,000 projects annually, needed to integrate a field service tool used by technicians in the field.
IT had declined to support the work. The timeline was three to four weeks, and the requirements included not just data integration but AI-assisted image validation.
The customer needed to confirm that hardware being replaced matched the correct device records, down to the serial numbers. “The customer needed to know that a specific phone belonged to a specific employee because it also had to be configured correctly in the master system,” Maglio explains.
The team built a configurable integration between Smartsheet and the TrueContext field platform, then layered an image validation system on top, inputting project-specific data into prompts for each image and validating the results against project records.
The workflow runs through Boomi using an event-driven architecture with Event Streams. With this, the validation process achieved a 92% success rate.
Scaling without losing control
But the faster WWT’s teams can build, the harder it can become to keep that building governed. Maglio says WWT has deployed Claude across its roughly 12,000 employees, and the pace of internal tool-building has raised questions about how to maintain oversight as development accelerates.
“What I’m trying to build now is an ecosystem where people can rapidly create solutions while still operating inside governed enterprise platforms,” Maglio says.
A preview of Boomi Companion showed WWT that rather than only generating new integrations, it can analyze existing processes, identify errors and apply corrections all while keeping everything within the native Boomi environment, where processes can be inspected and adjusted manually.
For a business that runs on integration, the next test is whether speed and control can scale together.