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“Dell Boomi is the glue between data on legacy systems and integrating to the cloud,” said John von Voros, senior product development manager for Dell’s Public Cloud Services, at the Cloud Computing Expo in New York.
It’s that capability that led Boomi’s acquisition in November 2010. Six months later, Boomi is a key building block in Dell’s focus on helping organizations of all sizes transition to cloud-based IT. The ease with which the two companies have come together is due as much to Boomi’s technology—its integration platform was used to successfully combine the different Salesforce customer relationship management (CRM) applications used by the Boomi and Dell sales groups—as it is to what company executives have described as Dell’s measured and methodical approach to acquisitions.
For all of the changes that Boomi has undergone after becoming part of a global organization, left intact has been its unique culture of a company founded in 2000 in Berwyn, Pennsylvania, a leafy, upscale suburb west of Philadelphia, clearly out of the midst of Silicon Valley.
Like many companies that take a more revolutionary than evolutionary path to solving legacy problems, Boomi’s road to success had its fair share of bumps, not the least of which was a shaky economy. Perhaps more impressive than Boomi surviving not one but two bursts of economic bubbles, though, was Boomi’s steady growth during the most recent recession, before it was acquired by Dell as part of its global cloud strategy.
Dell Boomi’s most recent success can be traced back to 2007 when it reinvented the integration business with Atomsphere, which uses an intuitive drag and drop editor and a library of connectors to visually walk the user through the configuration, deployment, and management of the entire integration process.
Atomsphere is built using pure SaaS (Software-as-a-Service) technology, meaning the software and all of its underlying data is hosted and delivered via the Web. As a result, Dell-Boomi says the Atomsphere platform can integrate SaaS, cloud and on-premise applications without the need for IT staff to install or maintain integration software or appliances.
To learn more about Boomi’s ascension and its transition within Dell’s corporate umbrella, the Epoch Times (ET) reached out to Dell Boomi’s CTO Rick Nucci (RN) for a phone interview.
Interview with Dell Boomi’s CTO Rick Nucci
ET: What opportunities did you see back in 2000?
RN: When we started Boomi, we set out to create a much simpler and affordable way for companies to integrate their applications. At the time, I was working for a supply chain software company and I realized that every time we implemented the system the customer would spend two or three times the cost of the system to integrate it with other systems. We were also writing the same integration code over and over again, which brought us to the idea of configuration-based integration. Basically, we wanted to give the user a system where all they needed to do was configure some pre-built integration steps and not have to write any code.
Fundamentally, this is what we’re still focused on today: removing the friction points in the connectivity between applications, regardless of where they reside.
We expanded on configuration-based integration by developing visual integration technology, which gave our customers the ability to simply click, drag, and drop to create integration processes.
Atomsphere takes that one step further. All of the apps vendors are building CRM’s, human resources, finance, and other apps in the cloud so why not put the entire integration platform in the cloud?It made perfect sense to us. But there is no other company out there doing what we do the way we do it.
ET: How did the economic downturn in 2008 impact Boomi?
RN: We introduced the beta version of Atomsphere—at the time, we called it Boomi On-Demand because “on-demand” was all the rage—at Dreamforce in the summer of 2007. In January 2008, we went into production.
This really was a “bet the company” move. We’d diverted our scarce resources into building a cloud integration platform from the ground up. We had a short window to scale and gain momentum.
When the economy crashed later in 2008, we had to make some tough decisions. Venture capital dried up, so we hade to conserve resources. We stayed focused and signed 100 customers in the first year and twice that the second year.
It was a great lesson in staying the course. We came out of 2009 on a roll when everyone in the IT industry was working on cloud strategy and integration.
Next…Customers come to seek out Boomi in an effort to contain costs
