Boomi busts out of Dell with $4bn sale to pair of private equiteers

Dell has announced the sale of its Boomi Integration Platform as a Service (iPaaS) outfit. The $4bn deal, announced late on Sunday US time, sees Dell offload the business unit to Francisco Partners and TPG Capital. Dell’s canned statement about the deal is full of kind words about how well Boomi has done under Dell’s wing, …

[seven of five]

bomi?

Four billion USD for a company which does ... what exactly?

Anyone ever heard of them? What is integration platform service anyway?

Madness.

[Charlie Clark]

Re: bomi?

Without more details it really is just a number. Being sold to private equity could mean that there's going to be more for investment but it's more likely to be some kind of debt and equity deal: Dell is keen to pay down some of that massive debt it piled on. Boomi will then be stripped prior to being sold to a competitor in a couple of years, if the gearing is right: that will almost certainly be a cash transaction.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: bomi?

>Anyone ever heard of them?

Their 12,000 or so customers probably have, yeah. It's graphically-driven integration between business platforms. Think of tasks like wiring up your timesheet system to your invoice system to your accounts system. Gluing together Salesforce and Workday kind of thing, but done in a way your mostly non-technical business people can actually manage/understand it themselves.

Given the extent of their customer base $4Bn is a firesale price. Shows just how much Salesforce has gobbled up the market segment - if you're not part of Salesforce or about to be bought by Salesforce then the market already considers you dead.

[seven of five]

Re: bomi?

So, think Lego mindstorms?

Making their middleware compatible with all the applications they want to glue together must be rather daunting, especially across different releases.

So they sell mostly the consulting to make it actually work, then?

[Cederic]

Re: bomi?

No, they're actually very cheap as an Enterprise Integration option.

I'm chary of cloud integration services but if you need to get data from Cloud App A to App B (whether it's on cloud, on premise or at a third party) then they have a role and something that's cheap and just sits there working has business value.

Other options are of course available.

[Roland6]

Re: bomi?

> It's graphically-driven integration between business platforms.

It's more than that, clients have been use Boomi as their XML-based B2B order gateway/broker (think EDI) for over a decade.

[TheBadja]

Re: bomi?

If you want to integrate Salesforce, then Salesforce has an integration tool. If you want to integrate with Workday, or ServiceNow, they also have their own integration tools. But if you have (like many large organisations) a portfolio of hundreds of specialised applications for specific parts of you business, with different API's, file uploaders or even none (database access required), Boomi integration sits in the middle and talks to all of these. It used to be called the middleware layer, and there are advantages in separating it from the applications - particularly when you want to move vendors.