Dell Selling Boomi For $4B To Focus On ‘High-Priority’ Markets

‘For us, we’re focused on fueling growth by continuing to modernize our core infrastructure and PC businesses and expanding in high-priority areas including hybrid and private cloud, edge, telecom and Apex,’ says Dell Vice Chairman and COO Jeff Clarke.

Dell Technologies is evolving itself once again with the $4 billion sale of its cloud business Boomi to private equity firms in a move to shift its focus to “high-priority” areas including changing its sales motion toward as-a-service.

The news of Dell selling Boomi comes a few weeks after Dell confirmed the spin-off later this year of its majority stake in VMware and 15 months since Dell sold its cybersecurity business RSA for over $2 billion to private equity firm STG Partners.

“For us, we’re focused on fueling growth by continuing to modernize our core infrastructure and PC businesses and expanding in high-priority areas including hybrid and private cloud, edge, telecom and Apex,” said Jeff Clarke, vice chairman and chief operating officer of Dell Technologies, in a statement. “[This is] all designed to help organizations thrive in the do-from-anywhere economy.”

The $94 billion Round Rock, Texas-based infrastructure and PC giant is striving to become a more subscription-based as-a-service IT provider with its Project Apex vision. Apex simplifies how customers and channel partners access Dell’s as-a-service capabilities across storage, servers, networking, hyperconverged infrastructure, PCs and architectural offerings. It unifies Dell’s as-a-service and cloud strategies, technology offerings and go-to-market efforts, providing a consistent experience wherever a workload runs, including on-premises, at the edge or in public clouds.

[Related: Why Dell’s Stock Price Is Climbing Towards $100 Per Share]

As CRN wrote last week, Dell is expected to unveil new offerings around Project Apex this week at the Dell Technologies World Digital Experience 2021 virtual conference.

San Francisco-based global investment firms Francisco Partners and TPG Capital Monday entered into a definitive agreement with Dell to sell Boomi. The cash transaction is valued at $4 billion with expectations to close by the end of 2021. Official financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Francisco Partners has invested in more than 300 technology companies and has more than $25 billion in assets under management. TPG Capital, which is the private equity platform of global asset firm TPG, has over $91 billion in assets under management.

Along with selling RSA and Boomi to private equity firms, Dell sold its cloud-native Kubernetes and container company Pivotal Software to VMware for $2.7 billion in December 2019.

Boomi is a provider of intelligent use of data on its cloud-based Platform as-a-Service architecture. The Chesterbrook, Pa.-based company was acquired by Dell in 2010 for an undisclosed amount. Boomi has more than 15,000 global customers that leverage the technology to discover, manage and orchestrate data.

“Boomi has flourished as part of Dell Technologies, growing exponentially since we acquired them in 2010,” said Clarke. “This proposed transaction positions Boomi for its next phase of growth and is the right move for both companies, our shared customers and partners.”

With Boomi’s low-code application and data integration platform, the company enables customers to make it faster and easier to unify data, systems, applications, processes, people, enterprises and organizations globally.

Boomi CEO Chris McNabb said he’s “proud” of his company’s unified platform for hybrid IT and looking forward to its next phase of growth.

“By partnering with two tier-one investment firms like Francisco Partners and TPG, we can accelerate our ability for our customers to use data to drive competitive advantage,” he said in a statement. “In this next phase of growth, Boomi will be in a position of strength to further advance our innovation and market trajectory while delivering even more value to our customers.”