Dell-Owned Boomi To Buy Unifi In Quest For Business Data Insights

With the acquisition, Boomi expects to be able to help businesses discover and manage 100 percent of their data, and not just the 30 percent of so of their data they can easily find.

Enterprise platform-as-a-service technology provider Boomi Tuesday said it has agreed to acquire Unifi Software.

San Mateo, Calif.-based Unifi Software, founded in 2013, develops an integrated suite of self-service data tools in two areas. The Unifi Data Catalog is focused on helping users easily catalog, collaborate, search, and interact with data, while the Unifi Data Platform includes the Unifi Data Catalog as well as tools for date preparation, workflow optimization, and expanded cloud optimization.

Boomi declined to say what it will pay for Unifi.

[Related: The Top 10 Tech Mergers And Acquisitions Of 2019 (So Far)]

Dell in late 2010 acquired Boomi.

While Boomi can connect all of a business' data from on-premises to the cloud to the edge, there's an assumption that the business knows where all its data is, said Steve Wood, chief product officer for the Chesterbrook, Pa.-based company.

"But more and more often, while users may know where their systems exist, they don't know what data is on them," Wood told CRN. "To begin their digital journey, businesses need to know where their data is. Seventy percent of companies don't know where the data is, or even what it is, or can it be trusted."

That's where Unifi comes in, Wood said.

"Unifi helps customers think about how they manage their data with machine learning and A.I.," he said. This used to be a manual process. But Unifi brings the time down to a few days."

While Unifi will likely continue to be offered as a stand-alone product once the acquisition closes, Boomi plans to integrated it into its own software stack, Wood said.

With such integration, Unifi will help accelerate Boomi's roadmap for its data quality and data synchronization tools, its intelligence and machine learning capabilities, and its ability to give customers more insight into their data, he said.

Unifi is Boomi's second acquisition. Boomi in early 2017 acquired cloud development platform company ManyWho to accelerate its ability to provide workflow automation as part of a unified integration platform.

ManyWho was a very successful acquisition which helps feed Boomi's go-to-market discussions, said Will Corkery, senior vice president of worldwide sales and business development.

"ManyWho lets us look at how customers are delivering data," Corkery told CRN. "and with Unifi, we can deliver a better product in the end."

Wood called the acquisition of Unifi a fantastic opportunity for the Boomi's channel partners, particularly those who are knee-deep in customers' digital transformation activities.

"We're the only iPaaS (integration platform-as-a-service) provider with the ability to unlock known data and unknown data, the latter of which accounts for about 70 percent of a company's data," he said. "If you are a partner, now you can deliver 100 percent of your customers' data on a single platform, which is a great outcome for a customer."