Where does Berwyn's Boomi fit in $74B Dell-EMC merger?

Boomi was a pioneer cloud-computing company, 30 engineers and salespeople in a hillside office north of Berwyn, selling blue-chip clients like Siemens and JPMorgan its AtomSphere-brand integration software that linked and updated email, HR, sales, you name it, through remote servers at a fraction of the cost of on-site systems, when Dell Computer bought the firm from founder Rick Nucci, boss Bob Moul and investors led by New York's FirstMark Capital in 2010. 

The cloud was the future, said Dell founder Michael Dell; he told the engineers he bought Boomi to grow it, not make it disappear, unlike the constellations of start-ups that have dissolved after investment bankers laid million-dollar bills on their founders' and VCs' desks and ran off with their patents pending and customer lists.

Dell did what he said: "We'll have over 300 people by the end of the year," half in Berwyn -- including software research and development --  the rest in marketing offices from California to India, says Chris McNabb, general manager of Dell Boomi, in his much-enlarged Berwyn offices last week.

"I think Dell could get $1 billion for Boomi if they sell it," says Moul, now CEO of Philadelphia-based Cloudamize. He notes Dell sold other software units as it prepared last week's $67 billion merger with EMC, but kept Boomi, at least for the moment, as one of its fastest-growing, more-lucrative businesses.  McNabb says 150 of the Fortune 500 now use Dell Boomi in some form.

So McNabb is looking for a bigger office in the neighborhood. He feels no need to move to the city: McNabb says it's not hard getting talented millennials, like his Penn and Drexel interns, to commute or move to the heart of the region's tech community along U.S. 202, alongside Ametek and Siemens, not far from Vanguard and LockheedMartin.