When Michael Dell teased he world yesterday about an impending cloud acquisition, I concurred with many of my peers in thinking it would be a fairly large, low in the stack operator. This assumption stemmed from Dell’s previous Cloud forays which have traditionally been somewhat infrastructural.

How wrong were we? Dell announced this morning the acquisition of Boomi a company we’ve covered previously. Boomi is  company that is all about easing the integration between different applications, be they on-premise or cloud. Their aim is to finally break down data silos and to do so in a way that doesn’t require the integrator to have any knowledge about how to deal with the complex APIs involved in the process.

I’ve always been a fan of integration, and like the fact that Boomi enables it more readily than with an API driven approach.

Boomi already works with a number of different applications and platforms – salesforce, QuickBoks, Zuora, Taleo and NetSuite for example. This move looks set to allow Dell to move rapidly up the stack, providing it’s customers with vertical specific, hardware nad software solutions that are all integrated.

I have to say it’s an acquisition a little out of left field and I truly hope Boomi doesn’t become orphaned within it’s new owner. Their offering is really to good to be left to die in a corner somewhere – I’m hoping that Dell will take this seriously despite the low dollars reported to have been involved in the deal.