Embedded Cloud Integration and the 3 V’s of SaaS Applications

I recorded an interview recently as part of the Cloud Channel Summit in Mountain View.  Industry analyst Jeff Kaplan from THINKstrategies posted his views on the event here and here.  In my interview I talk about the need for SaaS application and platform (PaaS) providers to either build, buy or partner when it comes to cloud integration. Everyone talks about the 3 V’s when it comes to Big Data. My belief is that IT organizations are equally overwhelmed with the volume, variety and velocity of SaaS applications coming into the enterprise.  This is why the topic of cloud integration will continue to it’s rise in relevance and strategic importance in 2013.

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Governed Self Service: Applying Lean Principles to Cloud Integration

Today I moderated a webinar focused on Eliminating SaaS Sprawl with Cloud Integration. We focused on the usual challenges of silos and data fragmentation, but also focused on the opportunity to apply Lean Integration principles in a next generation integration Center of Excellence (CoE) or integration competency center (ICC).  The conversation centered on the need for speed and business agility, while also maintaining strong governance and control in IT.  What I call “Governed Self Service.”

David Lyle, co-author of the book on Lean Integration, pointed out that integration is a concept that mirrors the “just-in-time” (JIT) manufacturing principles of the automotive industry. With JIT manufacturing, the necessary components to assemble a car are sourced throughout the supply chain and brought onto the factory floor just before they are needed thus minimizing the amount of time a worker has to wait for the necessary part. Lean Integration transforms organizational processes and relies on leading-edge technology for automation and reuse to systematically reduce costs and accelerate delivery. His presentation summarized how the objectives of cloud integration are one and the same as Lean Integration:

• Eliminate waste
• Increase value for end-user customers
• Drive continuous improvement

Mark Murray from the Informatica Cloud team, then delivered a powerful cloud integration demonstration that focused on re-usable templates and the concept of having a central instance and sub-instances that can be deployed out to the divisions and lines of business, while maintaining centralized administration  Pretty powerful stuff!

I’ve embedded the webinar in it’s entirety below:

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Salesforce Customers are Asking for Big Data Management #DF12

Two things stuck out for me at Dreamforce 2012:

1. What an amazing ecosystem Salesforce has built. The Cloud expo was packed with high-quality booths and there were over 3000 people at the partner keynote! Congratulations to the partner success team and kudos on the newly designed Appexchange.
2. How important cloud integration / enterprise connectivity has become to Salesforce customers, partners and prospects. These two slides from that same partner keynote say it all:

When it comes to the back-office, Big Data Management apps top the list of Salesforce customer requirements. Oh, and by the way, all new cloud applications must connect across the business.

Today two post-Dreamforce 2012 articles caught my attention that address the need for cloud integration head on. In his post – Plumbing the Salesforce Clouds is Your Business, Mark Smith from Ventana Research notes:

“The challenges your organization faces with data are getting larger, and the financial benefits of data in the cloud, such as reduced TCO and reduced implementation fees, are substantive. Too much time and too many resources are wasted in manual approaches where data is transitioned inconsistently and incorrectly. Automation helps organizations rationalize their overall information management efforts.”

Joshua Greenbaum at Enterprise Applications Consulting has this to say his his article, Salesforce.com, Enterprise Platforms, and the End of the End of Software:

“And the tools are there, or on the way. Hence the refrigerator pitch, though it was interestingly devoid of details on just how easy it will be to build an integration framework that could tie together a Pandora-like pure cloud environment or a more common hybrid cloud/on-premise environment. But heck, that’s really hard. It took SAP years to get NetWeaver out of slideware mode and into simple and easy to implement mode, despite all their efforts. So I don’t expect Saleforce.com to settle this issue in just one Dreamforce. It will take a while, no doubt.”

I’ll write about the Informatica Cloud integration and MDM session later this week on the Perspective blog. In the meantime, I’ve embedded the slides below so you can see for yourself how three enterprise organizations have taken advantage of data integration, data quality and master data management technology to drive overall Salesforce adoption and success. It’s Big Cloud Data Management in action!

Power the Connected Enterprise with Cloud Integration and Master Data Management (MDM) from Darren Cunningham

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Cloud Data Replication for Salesforce Analytics and Compliance

I moderating a webinar last week that featured two great salesforce.com customers sharing their experiences with Informatica Cloud data replication. The webinar also featured a demonstration of cloud integration in action.

One of the customers shared their insights in this brief video:

Here is the recording of the cloud integration webinar:

And here are the slides:

Informatica Cloud Data Replication for Salesforce from Darren Cunningham

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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.

Talking About Hybrid IT with @LoraineLawson

Over at ITBusinessEdge, Loraine Lawson published a discussion we had recently, which was primarily focused on the Informatica Cloud Winter 2012 release. The conversation ended up getting into the topic of “hybrid IT.” I was asked if companies are really pursuing Private Clouds and had this to say:

“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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#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.

Integration Trends Worthy of Thanks

Ahead of the long weekend in the US, Loraine Lawson posted Five Integration Trends to Inspire Thanksgiving. They are:

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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Informatica Cloud Winter 2012 in Action

This week Informatica announced the 11th release of Informatica Cloud. Featuring a new Contact Validation Service, expanded cloud connectivity and many new enterprise features. I summarized the importance of the announcement to the company, customers and partners on the Perspective blog and we hosted a webinar reviewing the new capabilities here. Here’s the recording.

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Build Your Own Integration – Don’t Be Dumb!

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.