Cloud Integration vs. SaaS Integration vs. Salesforce Integration

I did a quick comparison on Google Insights on a few keywords I track and thought I’d share the results. A few observations:

• “Salesforce Integration” was first out of the gate in May 2006. This is roughly when AppExchange was first launched.
• “SaaS Integration” entered into the vernacular in 2008. About the same time the term “on-demand” died I suspect. SaaS integration hasn’t done so well as a term, however. I put in SaaS application integration and it only made matters worse. This was a bit of a surprise I must admit.
• “Cloud Integration” made a dent in October 2008 and has been on a steady climb ever since.

 

Google Trends has similar results. But when you go to Dice.com it’s a bit of a different story. There are:

• 246 “Salesforce Integration” jobs
• 387 “SaaS Integration” jobs
• 1102 “Cloud Integration” jobs

But back to the keywords. I put in the terms “Data Integration” and “Application Integration“ to compare and they’re an order of magnitude greater than all three, albeit with a much longer history. Of note, however, is that the trend line for both of these more mature terms was on the decline for a few years but now seems to have leveled off somewhat.

#GartnerAADI Tweet Stream in Review

This past week I attended Gartner’s Application Architecture, Development and Integration (AADI) summit in Vegas. The tagline for the conference was:  ”Cloud, Web, Mobile and Social: Rocking Your Enterprise Application Strategy.” To illustrate how “All In” Gartner when it comes to cloud computing adoption, the conference featured two tracks on the topic:

• 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.

The Most Important Cloud Application Priorities for the Next 12 months

I like this slide presentation published on eWeek by Chris Preimesberger - Cloud Computing: Cloud Application Integration: 10 Key Trends to Follow. Good graphics and some solid take-aways on the importance of integration to cloud computing adoption and success.

A few highlights:

• 77 percent of companies expect to implement at least one SaaS application in the next two years.
• The number of enterprises expecting to implement at least four SaasS applications will double from 17 percent to 33 percent.
• 57 percent of enterprises expect data volume to grow more than 25 percent in the next 12 to 18 months.
• 45 percent of enterprises cited a lack of integration as the largest roadblock in fully harnessing the value of applications and data.
• 56 percent of enterprises believe easily connecting applications and data would free more time for staff to work on other business initiatives.
• 50 percent of enterprises believe simple application connections would enhance flexibility, time-to-market and competitiveness.
• 42 percent plan to implement cloud solutions to address integration in the next two year, if not sooner.

Be sure to check out the complete eWeek article here.

Related articles

• The Cloud Computing Takeover (regulargeek.com)
• Surviving In The Cloud (dynatrace.com)
• Lessons from Cloud Adopters: Cloud-to-Cloud Integration Is a Challenge (devx.com)

TDWI Q&A: Data Integration and Cloud Computing

Image via CrunchBase

I participated in a Q&A session with TDWI recently and provide my thoughts on the following questions:

• What impact is cloud computing having on traditional IT roles and responsibilities?
• What are some of the barriers to adoption of cloud-based applications and platforms?
• What is the role of data integration as it relates to cloud computing?
• Can companies move incrementally to the cloud without making a full-on commitment?
• What about service-level agreements? How should they be enforced with cloud vendors?
• What sort of architecture should companies look for, especially for BI and data warehousing applications?
• What about performance concerns, especially with large data sets?
• How is Informatica addressing the cloud computing opportunity and challenge?

As there doesn’t appear to be a comment section on the site, I’d appreciate any feedback or comments you might have on the discussion.

Related Articles

• SaaS will dominate your cloud strategy (zdnet.com)
• BBC News on Cloud Computing: Going Beyond Buzzwords (cloudintegration.wordpress.com)
• The Amazon Outage is OK, OK? (Well kind of) (diversity.net.nz)

Cloud Application Integration Overview

David Taber published an overview of the different layers of software as a service (SaaS) application integration. They are:

• Layer 1: On-Screen Integration
• Layer 2: Presentation Layer Integration
• Layer 3: Business Logic Integration
• Layer 4: Data Integration

When it comes to which path to take, I actually don’t see as much distinction between the layers and I don’t believe there are necessarily different tools that apply to each one. Sounds like he’ll be going into more details in subsequent CIO.com posts. Be sure to read the full article here.

Related Articles

• Gartner Forecasts 16% Increase In Enterprise SaaS Revenue During 2011 (cloudave.com)
• Research Report: 2011 Cloud Computing Predictions For Vendors And Solution Providers (enterpriseirregulars.com)
• Informatica debuts pay-as-you-go data integration service (infoworld.com)

The SOA, ROI, VIP: Greg the Architect

Am I the only one who hadn’t heard of Greg the Architect until today? This is pretty funny stuff. The marketing guy and his iScream is particularly good.

Ten Things a CEO Should Know About Cloud Computing

Deloitte put out a press release today called, “10 Things a CEO Should know About Cloud Computing.” While I’m not so sure a CEO needs to know all of this (a CIO definitely does), I thought #8 was particularly strong:

Integration with the cloud

According to Forrester, integration is one of the top concerns people have about cloud computing. Therefore it is going to be one of the main drivers of user adoption of the cloud. Integration cost and duration, integrating software as a service (SaaS) and traditional applications and managing and monitoring interfaces are key challenges around integration.

To respond to the integration challenges underlying most implementations, cloud vendors are now proposing SaaS integration solutions that offer an easy way to integrate systems compared to traditional approaches.

CRM Account Synchronization in the Cloud

Based on the number of people who registered for the webinar and the attendance, clearly Account Synchronization is one of the top cloud integration challenges. Here’s how we defined the requirements:

• The need to load Accounts into Salesforce CRM  (Here we talked about the importance of data translation – “this is a mapping exercise.”)
• The need to load Contacts, associate them with Accounts, and maintain relationships (People often perform this task via Excel lookups, which can be difficult to set up and maintain.)
• The need to establish bi-directional synchronization between systems (Use cases include process-centric application integration and customer master data.)

We then reviewed the 5 potential ways that organizations are addressing this challenge today:

• Hand coding (Always the #1 competitor to a real data integration solution)
• Free tools (The Informatica Data Loader, for example,  is extremely popular with Salesforce.com customers. Here are some reasons to consider upgrading.)
• Outsourcing (There are benefits to having an SI manage data integration, but it should be in concert with a tool or platform.)
• On-Premise Tools for IT (I like this Informatica Perspectives post called Salesforce.com Integration – Inside Out or Outside In? What’s the right choice for you?)
• Cloud Services (Growing list of benefits for customers (rapid deployment, fewer resources, frequent upgrades, etc.) and ISVs (time to market, reduced development costs, etc.)

The rest of the webinar (which is available for viewing here) focused on demonstrations of how Informatica Cloud Services addresses the Account Sync challenge and customer examples. After lots of great questions, we made the following best practice recommendations:

• Don’t underestimate data loading (Take time to understand your data.)
• Don’t underestimate your data volumes (Ensure your data integration solution can scale.)
• Leverage external IDs to simplify integration (Bring over key IDs from on-premise objects.)
• Expect the unexpected (Aglity in a cloud-based integration solution is key.)

Here is the slideshare presentation:

Informatica Cloud Account Synchronization

View more presentations from Darren Cunningham.

Informatica Cloud in Action: Partner XML Integration into Salesforce.com

Here’s a cool Informatica Cloud demonstration showing quick and easy data synchronization between an XML file and Salesforce CRM. The scenario is of a business partner XML file that needs to be integrated into the CRM Account object. For more cloud integration examples, be sure to check out the working beta of the Informatica Marketplace.

Cloud Integration: Batch vs. Real Time

In the last few days there have been diametrically opposite messages coming from two vendors who claim to deliver best-in-class data integration solutions for Salesforce.com (and other SaaS application vendors). Doug Henschen wrote about both cloud data integration product launches.

1. The first vendor focused on data migration to the cloud.  They acknowledged that data migration “often turns out to be more complex than expected” and highlighted the importance of performance to data integration (while throwing a few unsubstantiated haymakers at the competition I might add).
2. The second vendor focused on real-time application integration, making the claim that their product, “offers two-way, system-to-system, event-driven integration that is real-time rather than batch oriented.”

Hmmm. So which is more important? Real time or batch data integration? And is it really an either-or proposition? Are we really now dragging the old ETL vs. EAI debate to the cloud?

To me it gets back to a topic I’ve written about before: What to Look for in a Cloud Data Integration Solution.

If a data integration vendor claims to be all about one or the other it should be a red flag. The bottom line is to understand your requirements, your data volumes (both today and long term), your integration complexity (both today and long term), your resources (on-premise or SaaS?), and the skill set of your users (SaaS administrators and IT roles). And when it comes to a Salesforce.com partner, be sure to dig into customer references and read the reviews on the AppExchange. This will reveal quite about about overall customer adoption and success.

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