Rick Nucci, co-founder and CTO of Boomi, the integration in the cloud firm, joined Dell when it acquired his firm in November of last year. Still Boomi CTO, Nucci said in an interview at Dell World Wednesday that his firm will make major enhancements to its product line (AtomSphere) in an announcement sometime next week.

Using the cloud as an integration hub sounds simple, but of course it gets complicated fast. The most common integration that Boomi is called upon to perform is to link an SAP application on premises to Salesforce.com CRM in the cloud.

But the reach of the AtomSphere engine keeps growing. Boomi was founded in 2000 and became a leading integration hub. Until recently, it integrated an average 3 applications for each project it undertook. Today the figure is 11, Nucci said.

Boomi won’t be alone. Watch for plenty of activity in this space.

Informatica founder Gaurav Dhillon is still busy with his new startup, SnapLogic, which is offering one approach to the problem.

And you'll soon hear more about MuleSoft, the company that’s behind the open source financial services integration project, Mule. MuleSoft has begun its move into cloud-based integration. CEO Ross Mason said in an interview just before Dell World that his firm has launched MuleIon as an integration hub. Integrating applications will be a source of stress for cloud users for a long time to come. Stay tuned.

[Want more coverage of Dell's strategy in the cloud world? See Michael Dell Playing Enterprise Game To Win.]