Dell Enhances Software With SharePlex, Boomi Upgrades

Dell’s transformation from a PC maker into an enterprise IT solutions and services provider continues with news of new software developments.

The company has spent billions of dollars over the past few years buying dozens of businesses as it builds out its enterprise technology capabilities. Among the acquisitions have been Quest Software, Gale Technologies and Make Technologies, and Dell officials have promised to invest in and grow the businesses.

SharePlex Upgrade

The company now has a $1.5 billion (£985m) software business, and in recent weeks has highlighted new software capabilities that are the fruit of such acquisitions. During a conference call with analysts and journalists in February to discuss quarterly financial results, Chief Financial Officer Brian Gladden said the Quest unit – Dell bought the company last year for $2.4 billion (£1.58bn) – led strong results for the software business, bringing in more revenue than the $180 million (£118m) to $200 million (£131m) expected.

“We also saw good sequential growth in our security software business, and continued to add customer-centric software solutions to address critical customer needs,” Gladden said.

Dell is scheduled to announce its latest quarterly numbers 16 May.

Dell officials on 15 May announced a new release of SharePlex, a data replication and data integration solution inherited when the company bought Quest. SharePlex traditionally had offered data replications from one Oracle database to another. However, with SharePlex 8.0, the solution now can capture and deliver data from an Oracle database to a range of other databases, including Microsoft’s SQL Server, IBM’s DB2, Sybase, Netezza and Teradata. In addition, using the Change Data Capture (CDC) feature, SharePlex 8.0’s replication technology can deliver the Oracle-held data to unstructured databases like Hadoop and GreenPlum.

The use of CDC replaces traditional extraction methods, so now with SharePlex, only the data that has changed is captured and moved. Using CDC brings with it reduced costs, faster data replication, and better business intelligence and analysis, given that only the most recent data is analysed, the officials said.

The new capabilities reflect the increasingly heterogeneous nature of IT environments, where a variety of structured and unstructured databases are in use, according to Dell officials.

Boomi Release

“For 15 years, our customers have depended on SharePlex to manage mission-critical transactional data in Oracle,” Darin Bartik, executive director of product management for Dell Software Information Management, said in a statement. “Now, our customers can replicate, integrate and analyze that data using the rest and best of their database and data warehousing environment.”