Dell Buys B2B Integration Vendor Boomi

November 9, 2010 Alex Woodie

Dell last week announced a plan to buy Boomi, a developer of Java-based business-to-business (B2B) integration tools that had a decent base of customers on the IBM i platform. Dell expects to leverage Boomi’s expertise in helping customers integrate cloud-based application with on-premise ones.

Boomi’s offerings blurred the (already somewhat blurry, and always too hairy) lines separating traditional forms of application and data integration, with expertise spreading from EDI and AS2 management, to MQ orchestration and document management, to data synchronization and XML-based Web services.

The graphical drag-and-drop design studio sported by the company’s Boomi Integration Platform helped business analysts concentrate on business processes instead of knowing how the underlying protocols would work. And it’s capability to work with IBM‘s family of AS/400 servers resulted in users of the platform accounting for more than 10 percent of Boomi’s customer base, an executive told IT Jungle four years ago.

In 2007, Boomi adapted its Integration Platform to the burgeoning world of software as a service (SaaS) with its new AtomSphere platform. Soon, the capability to connect customers’ on-premise applications to cloud-based products like Salesforce.com–and to run the data and application integration software itself in a cloud–became the Philadelphia-based company’s number one ambition in life, and is what eventually led to the acquisition by the computer giant from Round Rock, Texas.

Boomi president and CEO Bob Moul says the Boomi team is thrilled to join Dell. “This was a fantastic outcome for the team, our customers and partners,” he says in a press release. “Dell gives us the global platform to continue to scale Boomi AtomSphere as the leading integration solution in the SaaS and cloud computing industry.”

Terms of the acquisition were not disclosed. The deal is subject to customary closing conditions.