Dell Boomi taps APAC cloud market

The growing use of public cloud services in Asia-Pacific (APAC) has not only drawn cloud suppliers to the region, but also integration platform players who provide the glue that ties cloud services together in a multi-cloud and hybrid IT environment.

One such company is Dell Boomi, which specialises in cloud-based integration, application programming interface (API) management and master data management used by enterprises in cloud migration, as well as to connect legacy systems to the cloud.

Additionally, enterprises have taken to Dell Boomi’s services to integrate on-premise Oracle systems to NetSuite’s cloud-based applications, said William Fu, managing director of Dell Boomi in Asia.

The success that Dell Boomi – which is scoring nearly six new customers a day for the past 12 months – has had so far has led it to cast its sights on Southeast Asia after it launched operations in 2016 in Australia, one of the most mature cloud markets in APAC.

“We’ve been accelerating our business at very high double-digit, triple-digit numbers over the past three years,” said Michael Evans, managing director of Dell Boomi in Asia-Pacific and Japan.

“And certainly, while we started building some of that core business, we unquestionably started in ANZ [Australia and New Zealand] because of the maturity of the market in terms of Digital transformation and adoption of cloud.

“Singapore was the next obvious market because we thought it was the next fastest accelerating part of Southeast Asia. We’ve expanded into Hong Kong on that trend, as well as Japan as a separate business,” he added.

Dell Boomi’s Singapore office was set up just over a year ago and is being staffed by 20 employees. It counts about 20 customers across Southeast Asia in a range of industries including logistics and telecommunications, according to Fu.

“Not only did we wish we were here earlier, a lot of the customers that we met had expressed the same thing, and that they wouldn’t have invested in another other company,” Fu said.

Speaking to Computer Weekly from Australia, Evans singled out Dell Boomi’s customer retention rate of around 98% – a feat he claimed was testament to the value that customers were getting from the company.

“So, we’ve made sure – particularly in the APAC region – that as we’ve grown, we’ve invested heavily in all the things that customers need to ensure their success. That means support, engineering, professional services and partners to ensure customers get value out of our platform.”

Evans does not think business application suppliers will try to lock their customers into their platform by restraining API development, a move that could potentially limit the work that Dell Boomi and its rivals such as Informatica and Salesforce’s Mulesoft can do for enterprises.

He said from a best-of-breed perspective, an application provider will increasingly strive to provide a good customer relationship management or financial system, so they would want to provide integration points to connect with an enterprise’s existing systems.

As with any software supplier, Dell Boomi is not going it all alone, having built up a network of resellers, referrers, alliance players and managed service providers that are using its technology, so they can focus on higher-value consulting work.

“Our partners are very strategic to us as a cloud business,” Evans said. “They contribute an enormous percentage of our growth and they help us scale regionally and globally to meet the needs of our customers.”

According to Research and Markets, the integration platform-as-a-service (iPaaS) market is expected to grow from $528m in 2016 to nearly $3bn by 2021, representing a compound annual growth rate of 41.5%.

The APAC market for iPaaS is poised to grow the fastest globally by the end of the forecast period, driven by the need for advanced integration services, as well as a growing number of cloud-based workloads across the region.