Dell & Boomi – All Just a Little Bit of History Repeating

Reading the news about Dell’s acquisition of Boomi on Tuesday, I’ve come to this conclusion: history is repeating itself. Even more consolidation in this space is likely to occur. Integration between unstructured information “in the cloud” and on-premise will continue to be a huge challenge for not only businesses but for vendors like Dell, IBM, and Microsoft who are eager to maintain their relevance as they find themselves in the zenith of this paradigm shift. The acquisition of Boomi confirms this trend.

Integration is a huge challenge across the entire software spectrum. While on Progress DataDirect’s end we tend to see customers wanting to connect an app to a data source, it’s all a matter of making information from disparate sources (both on premise, SaaS, and web-based information) talk to one another.  Integrating SaaS applications such as Salesforce.com has become especially high priority as more and more businesses look to lower the total cost of software ownership. Boomi manages to integrate SaaS and on-prem apps in a way that’s secure and reputable, which is why they caught Dell’s eye as an acquisition target.

Making sure they had a seat at the table of cloud computing (which incidentally VMWare yesterday claimed was a “certainty”), Dell’s latest move underscores the fact that they’re not going to be shipping boxes forever; at least as their primary sales channel. In a way, Oracle is doing similar things with Exadata, and IBM with Cast Iron. While as startups, these cloud-based companies defined their own path, they now represent a distinctive value proposition to the old guard. There will always be a need to wire information together, and make sure users have a good experience in the process (whether that takes place on-premise or in the cloud). That’s why we’re happy to be in the business of connectivity – it’s not going anywhere!