Dell Boomi competitor MuleSoft looking at 2017 IPO

Tom Paine

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Gartner Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Integration Platform as a Service, March 2016

San Francisco-based MuleSoft is heading towards a probable 2017 IPO, according to reports. The cloud integration software vendor exceeded $100 million in revenue in 2015, and has a valuation as of its last round of $1.5 billion. MuleSoft was able to forgo an IPO in 2015 after landing a $128 million investment round led by Salesforce, bringing its total raised to $259 million.


MuleSoft's nearest iPaaS (what Gartner refers to as Integration Platform as a Service) competitor, all things considered, is Berwyn-based Dell Boomi. I'm not sure if Dell Boomi's revenue is quite up to MuleSoft's (though revenue isn't everything), but its valuation if it were a standalone should at least be roughly in the same ballpark, though perhaps a bit less.

By all reports, Dell Boomi has continued to perform well under CEO Chris McNabb's leadership. In general, both Michael Dell personally and what is now Dell Technologies have been very supportive of Boomi since acquiring it in 2010. And with the EMC deal, bringing various cloud enabling architectures with it, completed, it should open up new intracompany opportunities for Dell Boomi. Although corporate synergies don't always work out as expected.

It was interesting to note that Pivotal, which is still majority-owned by Dell Technologies despite selling large stakes of it to Microsoft, GE and Ford, has recently entered into a strategic partnership with MuleSoft. Of course, Pivotal has an emerging IoT-centric strategy and some aspects of MuleSoft's product line may be particularly well-suited for that.