Dell Boomi massively upgrades workflow automation capability with ManyWho acquisition

Boomi says that adding ManyWho’s technology to the platform will be a game changer for Boomi partners engaged in providing digital transformation to customers.

Chris McNabb, Dell Boomi’s CEO

Dell Boomi has acquired ManyWho, which simplifies workflow automation on its low-code development platform. The deal greatly upgrades the ability of developers on Boomi to easily build workflow applications that automate business processes. Steve Woods, ManyWho’s CEO, will join the Boomi executive team and report to Dell Boomi CEO Chris McNabb.

“ManyWho is one of the very few pure cloud native companies in this space, and the service they deliver uses a low code automation platform,” McNabb told ChannelBuzz. “That’s a rare combination. We both share that cloud-native vision. That’s why we looked at them as a partners when we wanted to be more strategic about workflow automation.”

San Francisco-based ManyWho was founded in 2013.

“They are an early stage startup with a small customer base,” McNabb said. “The top two drivers for us in this deal was their technology, and their team of people.” Boomi intends to keep the staff, and invest in the engineering, channel, marketing, professional services, support and sales resources necessary to grow the business.”

Boomi is an application integration cloud used for what Gartner classifies as Integration Platform as a Service [iPaaS]. The ManyWho technology extends Boomi’s application and data integration capabilities, providing a unique capability for customers to move, manage, govern and automate data and processes in a unified way.

“Hybrid IT dominates today, and it’s characterized by best of breed products from lots of vendors that don’t play well together,” McNabb stated. “Boomi is here to help them solve that problem, and provide that control, agility and short time to value. With ManyWho, we can create workflows, and business process across that landscape, to make it easy to do things like onboard employees, even when lots of vendors are involved, from a single platform.”

Before the ManyWho acquisition, Boomi had some workflow automation capabilities, but McNabb acknowledged that they were very rudimentary.

“While we had certain capabilities here before, to be honest, they weren’t very robust, and could best be described as a very marginal capability,” McNabb said. “Now we have excellent capabilities here. In addition, because this is a low code configuration-based approach, it means that you do not need highly trained software engineers to build these apps. That is very consistent with the Boomi approach as well. You can build things in much shorter times, and get things into production much, much faster.”

The workflow automation capabilities from ManyWho are available in Boomi now.

“We are ready to go to market with it today,” McNabb said. “They have a robust set of APIs, and so do we, so getting them to work together is a fairly simple thing. We will of course have a roadmap to tighten the integration going forward.”

Boomi is in the process of expanding the amount of business it does through partners, and McNabb said that for the channel, this deal is a significant one.

“For system integrators working on digital transformation, it provides agility, especially with the low code platform,” he indicated. “This now becomes something that’s very compelling and differentiated in the SI space.”

It’s also significant for Boomi’s OEM partners.

“If you white label us, onboarding and provisioning new customers can at times be manual, and now automated workflows and unique applications can be created and embedded right into their SaaS platform. That’s an onboarding process OEM partners would love to see, and we can now do that – soup to nuts.”

The ManyWho capabilities on the Boomi platform will provide a significant edge to Boomi’s entire channel, McNabb stated.

“If you are engaged in digital transformation, this is a technology you should take a look at, because it can really differentiate you,” he said. “if you are providing these capabilities to customers, whether selling software or services, this is an enabling technology.”