The new features of Spring 11 are of the "bigger/better" variety, all of which should appeal to Dell's enterprise clients, says Charles King, principal analyst, Pund-IT. "The large data processing solution nearly triples the past performance of a single AtomSphere hub, supporting hundreds of gigabytes of data. The legacy middleware cloud gateway significantly expands the middleware platforms [and the apps built on them], which Boomi can be used to support. The Anywhere Integration Monitoring feature expands the range of Boomi's influence [encompassing both on and off-premises apps/data, as well as third-party monitoring environments] which should help breakdown data silos an easing the ways in which companies utilize cloud services."
While Boomi could have stayed independent, King says it fits very comfortably within Dell's ever-broader enterprise/data center/services focus and, in turn, significantly expands Dell's ability to expand its own services and cloud strategies. "Plus, it's likely that the Boomi team [which is relatively modest in size] would have simply been subsumed in a larger vendor. Overall, I believe the pair are a great fit."
For Rob Enderle, principal analyst, Enderle Group, the acquisition makes sense. Enterprises don't like buying from small firms, Enderle says, because they don't believe smaller vendors have the scope to cover them geographically, and there is too much risk a small company will fail. There is also a need for a heavy services component to make it work. "That would make Dell better than Oracle or IBM. But you still want Boomi to remain partially independent of the parent, and HP likes to tightly integrate its purchases, so that puts Dell ahead of HP, as well. Oddly enough, Dell's lack of software depth and their tendency to leave acquisitions operating independently make Boomi the best match for them."
That's the most significant aspect to the announcements, says Enderle--how aggressively Dell is going after the integration space. "It really felt like the firm had become something very different than what I'd grown to know Dell as. In fact, it is actually unusual to see this much focus on getting things a firm doesn't make to work together, much more common in the rip-and-replace approach which, while more lucrative on paper, is hated by IT buyers for its cost. You typically see an approach like this as a cornerstone of a services vendor. It is the absolute right approach to the problem from the perspective of the buyer, but hardware sellers, in my experience, just can't get around the thought of not driving more hardware sales initially."
Though, strategically, tools like this create relationships that over the long term can be far more lucrative, says Enderle, most executives are taught to think quarter to quarter and will refuse to see this kind of opportunity. "It is one of the attributes of a founder, though: Founders tend to think about the long-term health of their companies and are more likely to sacrifice short-term opportunities in order to get it."
