Dell Boomi CEO: Acquisition Of ManyWho Will Help Partners 'Bring Solutions To Market Very Rapidly'

Dell Boomi acquired cloud development platform company ManyWho and intends to push the startup's offerings through its channel as it accelerates its ability to provide workflow automation as part of a unified integration platform.

The acquisition, which closed Thursday for an undisclosed sum, hastens Berwyn, Pa.-based Dell Boomi's ability to deliver workflow automation – including the ability to connect and manage data and ensure data quality and efficient business and IT processes – together with its Software-as-a-Service capabilities.

Dell Boomi CEO Chris McNabb said the company intends to roll ManyWho into its channel, which today includes about 260 partners and drives roughly half of the company's revenue. DellBoomi hired its first channel chief, David Tavolaro, late last year.

[Related: Dell Boomi's First True Channel Chief Sees A Big Partner Play For Data Integration]

"It'll be an added solution in our arsenal, and it's going to very quickly help bring solutions to market," McNabb said. "Our technology plus ManyWho provides businesses agility and short time to value, and if you're a partner of ours, you can now offer those capabilities to customers and bring solutions to market very rapidly."

Larry Cone, founder of Philadelphia-based Dell Boomi partner KitePipe, said he expects his company's revenue to "not quite double" this year compared with last, and said adding ManyWho brings Dell Boomi over a key hurdle. "Boomi is great at integrating different cloud applications, but increasingly we're looking at these integrations as pieces of one overall workflow. ManyWho gives you a single place to do management [whereas] before we would do that customized at each endpoint, whether it was NetSuite or Salesforce or Concur."

Dell Boomi also works with about 40 OEM partners, and McNabb said their ability to provision, implement and integrate customer apps combined with ManyWho's workflow capabilities will "greatly enhance for our OEM partners the ability to on-board their customers. They can on-board customers in less than half the time it takes today, and there's a lot of value in that."

McNabb said the ManyWho acquisition is a sign that Dell Technologies Chairman and CEO Michael Dell isn't about to let up on his push to make the company the dominant player in every aspect of the IT market. Dell acquired Boomi in 2010 and hung onto the company even as it sold off its other software assets last year in the run-up to its landmark $58 billion acquisition of EMC. "We get 100 percent commitment and support from Michael. We needed his full commitment and support to do this acquisition. People might say Dell wouldn't have a lot of appetite for acquisitions after acquiring EMC, but it's just not the case. They're looking at what's going to push the business forward, and they continue to invest."

Dell Boomi is a major player in the fast-growing integration Platform-as-a-Service market and offers a range of tools that allow partners to unify data across enterprise environments. Research firm MarketsandMarkets estimates the PaaS market will grow from $528 million last year to more than $3 billion by 2021.

Dell Boomi plans to keep four-year-old ManyWho at its San Francisco headquarters and retain all of the firm's approximately 20 employees.

In addition to rolling ManyWho into its channel, Dell Boomi intends to invest in ManyWho's engineering, marketing, professional services, support and sales capabilities, according to McNabb.