Cloud App Integration .com

Todd Bursey, general manager, PSA at FinancialForce.com

In today’s professional services organizations (PSOs), customer acquisition and customer satisfaction are more important than ever. Yet, the disconnect between sales and services teams remains a major roadblock to delivering on this imperative. And as recent research has shown, it is a fundamental limitation to an organization’s growth and success.

In our experience, sales and services alignment can only be achieved through full transparency into the business by both parties. Each side needs to support everything from the goals of a single client engagement all the way up to the strategic initiatives of the firm. Read more… »

A service-oriented architecture is only a few steps from the cloud. Read this for advice on how to transition from SOA to SaaS.

by Pierre Fricke, Red Hat

Ask anyone who works in a corporate environment about the challenges of sharing and accessing information. From moderate-size businesses to larger corporations, they’ll tell you those challenges are very real.

Thankfully, they can be circumvented by a service-oriented architecture (SOA) and cloud services, both of which help make logic and information more widely available for use across the enterprise.

That’s because a business that implements and relies on a SOA has already laid the groundwork for successful cloud integration. Read more… »

Elias Terman, Director of Product Marketing at SnapLogic

Companies are looking for ways to become more efficient, more intelligent and more agile. In addition to discovering new technologies to support these goals, businesses are also recognizing new internal and external data sources to glean insights from—whether via social media channels, market research, government data, or competitive sources. IT departments, however, need to help organize, filter and cleanse all this information before it can make an impact on an enterprise, which can be time-consuming unless the company embraces an enterprise app store approach. Read more… »

Business Rules Management Service designed to bring order to chaotic processes [Press release]

JBoss, the open source division of Red Hat, updated its ESB, BSRM, and SOA platforms. The updates include significant changes to the Complex Event Processing (CEP) engine, which JBoss says will improve the way connected technologies interpret and respond to events in real time. A blog post from the JBoss team explains how the technologies may have a specific impact in the mortgages industry.

Tools from CastIron, WebSphere, and Tivoli integrated into SmartCloud offering [Idevnews]

IBM recently released a new version of SmartCloud, which combines security, application integration, and provisioning technologies. SmartCloud is designed to facilitate the creation and management of business rules, application logic, and policies within a hybrid cloud environment. According to the article, IBM is counting on more and more enterprises moving to a hybrid cloud environment. Independent research suggests that trend will continue.

Some systems upgraded from mechanical to SaaS in one swoop [Environmental Leader]

Taking an on-premise system to the cloud requires careful restructuring of the theoretical pipes and wires that pass data between applications. The challenge is far different when SaaS integration requires the restructuring of pipes and wires that pass water and electricity. The growing sector of energy monitoring software is responding to that need. This article from Environmental Leader looks at trends and challenges in energy monitoring software.

The following was contributed by Clark Newby, Senior Vice President of Marketing at SnapLogic.

At SnapLogic, we’re obsessed with the exciting opportunities presented by SaaS applications, and we closely follow how companies are merging these solutions into their IT portfolios. In order to get a quantitative look at the “state of integration” today, we recently commissioned an Application Connection Priorities report, which highlights trends in the integration goals, needs and challenges of companies in 2011 and beyond.

We found that companies are primarily focused on integrating business intelligence and analytics (39 percent), productivity and collaboration (36 percent), sales (34 percent), and financial applications (28 percent) over the next 12 months. This reflects the growing adoption of newer technologies like Birst, Google Apps, Salesforce, and FinancialForce.com. Integration is a key step in the process of replacing cumbersome enterprise application stacks with these flexible SaaS offerings, and it will become even more important as IT portfolios expand to include niche SaaS applications in additional functional areas. Read more… »

Slideshow highlights 10 key cloud application integration trends [eWeek]

This slideshow takes a look at 10 cloud app integration trends to follow over the coming 12 months. Social media and increased adoption make expected appearances, but the importance of big data and the way the recession affects IT spending are worth the read.

Improvement of integration capability helps SaaS pull companies forward [Idevnews]

Software as a Service started to take off just as the global economy was coming in for a hard landing. While many industries have stagnated, SaaS has matured both technologically and economically. Companies once reliant on venture capital have become profitable, and applications once less reliable and robust than their on-premise counterparts have become the tools of choice for many organizations. In this article the author highlights specific reasons why SaaS will be a leader of economic recovery.

We talk with Mike Hoskins, CTO at Pervasive Software, about Hadoop and Big Data

With the digitization of communication has come an exponential increase in data production. But the relational database, still the primary means of data storage for companies around the world, was not designed to handle the volume and types of data created by mobile technology, social networking sites, and internet applications.

Hadoop, a platform for organizing and managing so-called “big data,” emerged from engineers at Yahoo! over five years ago and has since grown into a viable alternative to the relational database. We recently spoke with Mike Hoskins, CTO of Pervasive Software, about Hadoop. Hoskins also runs the Pervasive Innovation Lab, where he and colleagues have been working with Hadoop for several years. Hadoop is now maintained by the Apache Foundation. Read more… »