Based on quantity and quality of customer reviews, here are the 11 award-winning AppExchange apps for 2011:

• Best ChatterExchange:  Marketo Sales Insight
• Best Contract Management App:  Adobe® EchoSign: Global Electronic Signature Service
• Best Dashboard or Reporting App:  Real Estate Software, REthink Real Estate CRM
• Best Data Cleansing App:  CountryComplete Free v2
• Best Data Integration App:  Informatica Cloud
• Best Human Resources and Recruiting App:  Jobscience Recruiting 
• Best Marketing Automation App:  Marketo Marketing Automation, Email Marketing & Lead Management
• Best Mass Email App:  iContact for Salesforce – Email Marketing
• Best Productivity Tool App:  Box for Salesforce
• Best Quoting App:  BigMachines
• Best Surveys App:  Clicktools Surveys and Scripts

Congratulations to all of the winners. You can learn more about each of the winning apps here.

“If you’re Salesforce.com, you say that private cloud is like a unicorn, it doesn’t really exist and it’s everyone liking the benefits of cloud computing but feeling like there’s too much risk in terms of security and data privacy and those sorts of things. At Oracle Open World, I had several enterprise architects come up to me and say there’s two things I want to talk about: cloud computing and Big Data. And I said, so you’re an enterprise architect and you’re trying to figure out a blueprint for your company? Absolutely.

When it comes to cloud, one guy went so far as to say, “We will not do any public cloud in our company. It’s going to be 100 percent private.” And then you ask him are there any SaaS applications in your business? “Oh, yeah, they’re all over the place.” Well, good luck, right? Good luck shutting all that down and going 100 percent private, it’s just not going to happen. That’s why I think it is going to be a mix. It is going to be hybrid, whether it’s public-private, whether it’s cloud and on-premise. Hybrid is the new black.”

Accurate? Way off? I’m interested in the discussion.

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1. Get Ready for Data as as a Service
2. True Cloud MDM will Emerge
3. Analytics as a Service is Ready for Prime Time
4. Enterprise PaaS Adoption Leads to Integration Platform as a Service
5. IT as a Service: The Conversation Continues

You can read the complete post on the Informatica Perspectives blog.

I’d love to hear any feedback and input you might have on the topic. We discussed some of these and other trends in a webinar today with Jeff Kaplan from THINKstrategies: Doing Data Right in the Cloud – How the Best Companies are Getting it Done. Here’s the recording on YouTube:

• The Business of the Cloud
• Cloud Infrastructure

There was also a track with significant cloud content called: Architecture for Postmodern IT: SOA, WOA, EDA, and Cloud.

I plan to post some observations and notes on the Perspectives blog next week, but just looking at the #gartnerAADI stream of tweets from the conference tells the story. Here are few of my favorites:

That’s to Gartner for a fantastic event! Lots of great sessions, customer and analyst discussions. With SAP’s announcement of their acquisition of SuccessFactors, 2012 is definitely shaping up to be the biggest year yet for cloud computing adoption in the enterprise and cloud integration will continue to be a hot topic.

1. Integration is in demand
2. More people outside IT are realizing the value of integration.
3. New Frontiers for Integration.
4. Integration via the cloud.
5. SOA now sells itself.

It’s a quick read with some useful links as resources.  Be sure to check it out here.

To my readers in the US – have a fantastic Thanksgiving holiday!

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Image via CrunchBase

Recently Hollis Tibbetts has been writing extensively about all aspects of data integration (with a heavy does of cloud) on ebizQ. His most recent post pulls no punches:  Building Integration Yourself – Possibly the Dumbest Idea You’ve Had in a Long Time.

The article wraps up with a series of questions to consider before you jump into the “tarpit” of hand-coding your data integration. I suggest you pose these questions to anyone in your IT organization who tells you they’re “just going to write some scripts” or “simply develop Web  Services” when it comes to cloud integration:

1)  In the SaaS world, APIs are updated on average 4-12 times a year. What is the impact of that on your custom code? What if a document format (e.g. and EDI document) changes? Will you even know in advance of these changes, or will the change happen and suddenly your system stops working and you have a crisis on your hands?

2)  Are you prepared to handle latency and unavailability issues, timeouts, etc.?

3)  Have you budgeted for building a sufficiently robust logging system for errors, as well as for when data ends up somewhere it shouldn’t and you need to undo the situation?

4)  Can you guarantee that data won’t get lost when something “bad” happens?

5)  How will you monitor what’s going on in the system?

6)  Coding transformations and business logic in Java, C#, C++ or any other programming language is very time consuming. Transformations and business logic change a LOT. How will you support that? Most integration products support simple or standard scripting languages, drag and drop, reusable objects, etc.

7)  How do you plan to implement mapping – especially between something like a Web Service and a Relational Database (where one can be hierarchical in nature and the other a collection of tables). What happens when one of those things changes? Have you thought about transactionality and serializability? Do you need to support that?  How will you do it?

8)  Many applications require the use of proprietary SDKs for integration. Are you trained in those? Prepared to support changes in the SDKs?

9)  What levels of performance are required? How do you plan to meet those? What happens if that changes – is scalability built into your solution?

10)  If more sources or targets for integration are added, will your system support that, or did you build something that is a throwaway?

11)  Does your home-built system support concurrent development?

Great questions Hollis and a great article. I hope everyone considering hand-coding their data integration reads and shares it.

Cloud Integration Do’s:

1. Build well rounded, cross-functionalimplementation core team
2. Pay special attention to understanding your complete process and data workflow
3. Make sure to compare your legacy application accessibility to the integration platform capabilities
4. Take advantage of  SaaS application (in this case Salesforce CRM) and Informatica Cloud native functionality (External IDs, Upserts, Error Logging, etc.)
5. Document what you build (You will need to refer to it often)

1. DON’T underestimate value of integration to overall SaaS adoption (Workflows are cross platform in real life, your systems should be also!)
2. DON’T ignore the value of detailed use cases and end-to-end testing with the entire team
3. DON’T try this without a full sandbox!
4. DON’T Worry, it WILL all work out in the end

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