Less than a year after acquiring Boomi, a software-as-a-service (SaaS) integration developer for cloud computing, Dell is unveiling the second major release of its AtomSphere offering, Fall 11. The company says it has seen 300% year-over-year growth in overall usage, with customers now averaging 3.7 atoms (run-time integration engines), 11 connections of integrated applications and more than 600 process executions per day.
Many of the features of the new release are customer-generated, says Dell. Originally launched in June 2010 with 5,000 maps in index, the Boomi Suggest for Functions feature now suggests Map Functions, which have grown to over 50,000, for reduced time-to-value by speeding integration configuration. The New Business Rules capability allows customers to more simply manage complex integrations, says the company. New Partner Dashboards lower support costs with at-a-glance features that allow users to look at partner customers and immediately act on problems and monitor performance trends. Predictive Assistance offers improved ROI on integration platform investment vs. traditional middleware via analytics-driven proactive communication, and the updated trust.boomi.com features transparency into operational history and usage metrics.
In August, Boomi was a prominent component of Dell's partnership with Salesforce.com to create a stack of software and services to help small to midsize companies develop IT assets. The company also did a major upgrade in April, with the launch of Dell Boomi AtomSphere, Spring 11, which included capabilities for middleware connectivity, large-scale data management and migration, and anywhere integration monitoring.
Jeff Kaplan, managing director of THINKstrategies, says Dell has done an excellent job of capitalizing on the Boomi acquisition by using it as the centerpiece of its expanding portfolio of cloud offerings and its ecosystem of cloud partnerships. "It has also encouraged the Boomi team to accelerate their technological innovations and encouraged the Dell sales teams to sell Boomi’s capabilities in the market."
As for the new release, Kaplan thinks the most fascinating aspect is its Predictive Assistance capability, which integrates customer usage metrics into Boomi’s support system to enable client care teams to deliver more proactive services and better predict their customers’ needs. Overall, he is optimistic about the product's reception. "Because integration is one of the biggest impediments to cloud adoption, making integration easier will substantially expand the market for cloud services."
