Dell leaped further into the clouds Tuesday, announcing an acquisition of software-as-a-service company Boomi. The deal aims to provide Dell (DELL) with some software magic designed to allow its corporate customers to transfer data from hosted, or cloud-based, applications to applications sitting inside computers at the customers’ offices.
Boomi’s integration software doesn’t require additional appliances, software or special coding to get the data to flow to customers’ apps, Dell says. Terms of the deal were not disclosed, indicating it was small enough not to be material to Dell. Boomi is privately held.
Dell, as with the other hardware makers, has been pushing to expand into cloud computing. For Dell, the Boomi acquisition has been relatively painless, especially compared with its previous effort to snag cloud-computing company 3Par. In a bruising battle that went on for several rounds, Dell lost out in a bidding war to HP (HPQ), which paid $2.35 billion for 3Par. Dell walked away with a $72 million termination fee.
Dell may have found good use for some of those termination fee funds in acquiring Boomi.