Dell Buys Boomi: Right Inline With My Cloud Strategy
Posted by Bob Warfield on November 2, 2010
Just read that Dell is buying Cloud data integration company Boomi. That’s right in line with the focus on data strategy I’ve recommended for Cloud vendors. I’m not sure how many more companies in this space are available to be picked up. IBM picked up Cast Iron Systems, which was another great catch.
Just a refresher on why these companies are so pivotal, because it amounts to two key observations:
First, Clouds have latency, which creates a network effect. It’s easier for apps in the same Cloud to talk to each other than it is to go across Clouds. Hence Clouds are going to accrete applications based on which ones need to talk to each other.
Second, in the SaaS world, integration is a tremendous competitive and transaction friction issue. No Enterprise application is an island, they all need to talk to some other application. If that integration has to be done without the leveraging benefits of a supporting technology, if it has to be done strictly as a service, that adds a lot of friction to the transaction. That friction can slow down sales momentum. In addition, from a competitive standpoint, SaaS apps are often bought by the Business with the idea that they will cause minimal support overhead for IT. Whether IT buys into that or not, the availability of suitable integration technology is going to determine how happy everyone is. If IT has to constantly dive in and bandaid the integration, nobody is happy. If IT can get comfortable at the outset that the integration solution will be high quality, everyone will be a lot happier.
These data integration acquisitions are very strategic to the Cloud space. Good on Dell for going after Boomi.
chatellm said
Temboo is a company that is trying to dive into that space as well, check them out http://www.temboo.com. They haven’t fully launched their platform as a service yet, but will by the end of November.