Dell Boomi cloud service adds business rules engine

IDG News Service - In addition to using Dell's Boomi integration service to move data from one cloud to another, users of the service can now also create simple business rules to reroute data to different locations, the company announced Tuesday.

The addition of business rules is "an entirely new step in the Boomi product," said Rick Nucci, chief technology officer for Dell Boomi. "It allows you to do multi-step, conditional business logic on your data."

The Boomi service provides a way for organizations to copy data across different public cloud services, such as Salesforce.com and RightNow (which will soon be part of Oracle).

Dell acquired the service when it purchased Boomi, of Berwyn, Pennsylvania, in 2010.

In a new release that goes live Tuesday, Boomi will gain a lightweight business-rules engine, one that can be used to apply simple conditional business rules to data as it is extracted from a cloud service. In certain cases, use of the business rules could eliminate the need to purchase standalone BPM (Business Process Management) software, Nucci said.

The rules engine could be used for all sorts of tasks. The data, as it enters the business engine, is subjected to any number of actions. It can be tested against some other pre-defined value or range of values, or compared to some data located on another cloud service. Different actions can then be taken, depending on the value of the data.

As an example, Nucci noted that an organization could use the business engine to check which states their customers reside in, and apply different actions depending on the state. Or, the service could check to see if the customer has any overdue payments and, if so, route their data to the appropriate collections department.

In addition to the rules engine, Boomi has been augmented with new tools to help operations with their deployments. Dell has a service that can suggest different functions that can be added to integration points. For instance, if the software sees that a database has different columns for first and last name, it will suggest fusing them together as a single entry, called name. The service also keeps track of the customer's usage of Boomi, and, if it sees that the service is not being used, will trigger a support ticket with Dell, which will then contact the customer and offer to troubleshoot potential issues.

The average customer uses Dell Boomi to connect 11 different cloud services and executes about 600 transactions between these services each day, according to Dell.

Joab Jackson covers enterprise software and general technology breaking news for The IDG News Service. Follow Joab on Twitter at @Joab_Jackson. Joab's e-mail address is Joab_Jackson@idg.com