Cloud App Integration .com

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.

The State of Application Connectivity

This exciting opportunity has emerged because the technologies we use to access Web services and data have changed drastically in recent years. In the age of consumer Internet mashups, developers no longer need special permissions or deep coding skills to access applications – which is a good thing, considering the thousands of applications that exist for both consumers and business users.

Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) are available for virtually every application today, published by all kinds of service and software providers. Software-as-a-Service providers don’t give customers access to their underlying databases, so APIs are actually the only way to hook into these cloud applications. Even SAP is modernizing its massive software suite by offering the SAP NetWeaver Gateway platform to make it easier for outside developers to connect to and build on top of core SAP enterprise applications.

Modernizing the Architecture

It’s time for the business Internet to really capitalize on the Web’s latest technologies. All kinds of IT departments can benefit from embracing the use of APIs and RESTful architectures in their organization. Light, yet strong interfaces ensure reuse and scalability because they are more flexible and simple than other approaches commonly used in the enterprise. Web standards like using a URI for every object or resource in the enterprise and HTTP/S for transport ensure that your IT assets are callable from anywhere.

The most successful IT environments have a minimal set of core components, and well-interfaced (standardized, loosely coupled) periphery components that shield both business users and developers from much of the complexity of the underlying application, data model, and service. This leads to lower costs for change which paradoxically is the only constant in today’s rapidly evolving IT environment.

There are some initial steps businesses should take in order to start realizing the benefits of an agile, Web-oriented architecture. Companies can start with one simple connection by making each data source callable and adding an abstraction layer of language-neutral connectors. Once this connection fabric is begun, the RESTful approach can gradually be spread from silo to silo in order to modernize all sorts of data sources in an enterprise – from custom apps and far-flung mainframes, to on-premise ERP, cloud apps, social media data, and even external and partner systems. This will bring old data sources up to a level in which they can interact and sync with consumer-facing APIs and newer SaaS applications.

Consumerizing and Appifying IT

After this foundation is laid, the real potential of cloud connections emerges: the opportunity to finally reach the nirvana of a self-service internal enterprise app store. Similar to Mashery’s API management approach, which helps developers better leverage consumer APIs, enterprises can better leverage and manage data assets by bringing all of their sources and apps together in a single connection hub.

Central enterprise app stores will provide employees with a quick and easy way to tap into all their company’s valuable business data. They’ll deliver much greater flexibility for business users, while still giving IT important controls over the connections themselves. IT departments that succeed will become drastically more agile by minimizing hand-coding and maximizing the use of APIs. They will also deliver on the promise of IT consumerization by intuitively engaging a broader range of end users across the enterprise.

Elias Terman is director of Product Marking at SnapLogic. Interested in contributing to CloudAppOntegration.com? Send an e-mail to our editorial department to find out how.