When Dell Inc. sold off its software division in 2016 prior to the merger with EMC Corp., the only company it kept was a small integration and data management company called Boomi Inc. Last March, the renamed Dell Boomi acquired an even smaller firm called ManyWho Inc., a unified cloud and faster “low-code” software development platform.

This may sound like a typical “big fish eats small fish” story, so common in today’s technology world, but there’s actually more than meets the eye. Dell Boomi’s business is booming and a major reason is that it separated itself from the highly competitive integration platform as a service vendor pack with a technology model that could change the role of enterprise developers in a major way.

“In the digital revolution, the only person who’s really been in control is the developer,” Steve Wood (pictured), founder of ManyWho and vice president at Dell Boomi, said in an exclusive conversation with SiliconANGLE at the company’s Boomi World conference in San Francisco on Thursday. “Let’s give more people access to the creation process.”

Low-code solution

The “democratization” of the developer by Dell Boomi is based on technology that essentially hands customers a low-code development solution for building and deploying workflow applications by configuring higher-level functions rather than hand-coding them. Thanks to the acquisition of ManyWho, Dell Boomi is now claiming to be the only software company that combines workflow automation with application integration in a cloud-native platform.

“It’s about connecting everything together,” Wood said. “From a company perspective, we have a full-stack platform now.”

The company officially rebranded ManyWho as Boomi Flow on Thursday, during its inaugural conference. It took advantage of the opportunity to showcase one customer — Afrox Healthcare – as an example of what its cloud integration technology can do. Afrox needed to build a mobile app to streamline processes for medical care in remote Sub-Saharan Africa. Personnel were migrating from laptops to Samsung tablet computers, so Boomi Flow delivered an app that connected the tablets with critical patient data in SAP SE and Salesforce.com Inc. applications.

“They didn’t have to write any code, and it took eight weeks,” Wood recalled. “No one else could do that.”

Early demo didn’t run

Dell Boomi’s acquisition of ManyWho didn’t just suddenly fall out of the sky. In an exclusive conversation with SiliconANGLE, Chris McNabb, Dell Boomi’s chief executive officer, described how he first came to know Wood over three years ago when ManyWho was just getting launched. “I recall that his first demo didn’t even run,” McNabb laughed.

The pair stayed in touch as Wood’s startup began to gather customers. The early-stage company soon attracted suitors as well, including feelers from a few significant cloud providers ManyWho’s founder declined to name. “We had as many acquisition offers as we had customers,” Wood recalled.

What ultimately brought Dell Boomi and ManyWho together was a mutual desire to fill gaps for both companies. Wood was concerned that his customers were reluctant to do business with a small startup. Acquiring the Dell name fixed that problem. McNabb wanted to add workflow automation to the Dell Boomi stack. “Technically, it’s a match made in heaven,” McNabb said.

Four new customers per day

In keynote presentations on Thursday, Dell Boomi executives painted a picture of solid growth. The company now has 6,200 customers, according to McNabb, up from 2,000 reported in 2014, and is adding four net new clients per day. “Moving data from anything to anything is a critical core enterprise capability,” McNabb told the gathering. “We don’t want you to survive in your hybrid IT [information technology] landscape; we want you to thrive in your hybrid IT landscape.”

What’s next for Dell Boomi and Boomi Flow? Company representatives were careful on Thursday not to reveal much, but Wood hinted that artificial intelligence is something the company is looking at very closely, including a potential application of AI to the Boomi Flow model. “We’re making big investments in intelligence,” Wood said.

Like many tech companies, ManyWho’s genesis can be attributed to a larger Silicon Valley player: Salesforce. Wood’s first company – Informavores – was bought by the cloud computing powerhouse in 2009, and Salesforce was an early investor in his latest venture. The company’s unusual name also owes a debt to Salesforce because of function tracking task fields in the software that are informally known as “whos.”

The company’s name was a play on the concept, in this case referring to many needs – cloud integration, no limits, application programming interfaces-first – that ManyWho was seeking to meet for customers. “It was a lot of tough, technical things,” Wood recalled. Based on the success of Dell Boomi so far this year, those demands may not be so hard to accomplish anymore.

Photo: Dell Boomi