Boomi Grows Cloud Integration Under Dell

February 19, 2013 Alex Woodie

When Dell acquired Boomi just over two years ago, the B2B integration firm was just starting to ramp up its cloud integration service. Today, Dell says its cloud business executes more than 1 million integration processes every day, which led a company executive to declare “the end of middleware as we know it.”

Boomi was an early participant in cloud-based integration business when it launched Boomi On-Demand back in 2007. The software as a service (SaaS) business model was just getting off the ground, and Boomi wanted to be there to help customers integrate their on-premise applications and data, such as IBM i-based ERP systems, with SaaS apps from Salesforce and Netsuite.

Today, Boomi’s AtomSphere Platform offers nearly 80 enterprise application connectors, providing on-demand integration for everything from Oracle, JD Edwards, and SAP ERP systems to IBM i, Google, and DB2. After integration connections and workflows are set up in Boomi’s multi-tenant cloud, customers can rely on AtomSphere to handle the actual integrations, which could be translating and transmitting EDI or AS2 documents for hosted ERP, managing MQ flows, executing SOAP- and WSDL-based Web services, or pulling data from social media networks into a Hadoop warehouse.

Last week, Dell announced that its Boomi business has blossomed, and now executes the aforementioned 1 million processes every day. In just the past year, the number of processes executed by Boomi has grown a whopping 263 percent, the now-private company says.

This success in the cloud led Boomi founder and general manager Rick Nucci to question the future viability on traditional on-premise B2B integration software. “Traditional integration architectures based on hub-and-spoke models are no longer relevant and forcing all integration of the spokes or application traffic through one central hub simply won’t work anymore,” Nucci says in a press release. “In short, we’re witnessing the end of middleware as we know it.”

Dell claims its hosted Boomi business is “up to three times” bigger than its nearest competitor–both in size and number of connections supported–which is a claim that is probably impossible to prove. What is clear is that Boomi’s hosted business will continue to grow, as companies continue to adopt SaaS and cloud-based applications, either as net-new apps or as replacements for on-premise apps. The fact that Dell Boomi just signed IT service firm Wipro as a partner will no doubt help this growth.

While Dell Boomi doesn’t know how to spell “AS400,” it’s likely that connections to IBM i applications and DB2 for i databases still make up a good part of its business. Back in 2006, a Boomi executive told IT Jungle that IBM i-related connections accounted for more than 10 percent of its business.