Cloud App Integration .com

Elias Terman, SnapLogic

In today’s cloud era, we can’t seem to get enough of the acronyms flying around, including everyone’s favorites – SaaS, IaaS and PaaS. And while we all know the obvious -ility benefits of these cloud computing services (flexibility, scalability, affordability), it’s now time to look deeper into how we can leverage them more intelligently.

It’s amazing what infrastructure as a service (IaaS) offerings for hosting, storage, and networking can deliver in terms of unprecedented flexibility and scalability for all kinds of applications. But as with any disruptive new technology, there’s much below the tip of the iceberg that’s not obvious at first glance. Read more… »

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… »

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… »

Organizations of all size recognize the need for application integration governance

When it comes to application integration, governance may not be the first technology that comes to mind. Still, it’s an important part of the integration process, and governance technologies are seeing wider user as service-oriented architecture and cloud computing adoption grows.

“A couple of years ago only very large organizations were pushing governance, and it was very much from a top down approach,” said Paul Fremantle, CTO of enterprise service bus and middleware provider WSO2. “We’re beginning to now see everybody wanting an answer.”

WSO2 released a new version of its governance registry last week. Fremantle said that over 90% of users of the WSO2 ESB use a governance registry alongside it.

“What you want to do well with governance is make sure people go through the right review process before they publish a service to the ESB,” said Fremantle. “Typically you want to have a flow from design to development to unit test and system test then onto production.

“To move it from one thing to another you want to have a checklist,” said Fremantle. “Are [developers] reusing schema, or using new schema that has the same data but a different format? Did they go through the review process? Have they got the right security policy on this service?”

Rise of public APIs driving governance and ESB adoption

Fremantle said the recent push towards using public application programming interfaces [APIs] for integration is not much different from the rise of SOA and ESBs. “An API is just a service,” said Fremantle. “The whole drive to APIs is having a big impact on this space.”

Is your CRM on lock-down?

By Sharam Sasson, CEO of Jitterbit

CRM software is critical to the success of enterprise organizations, but simply collecting customer data is a whole different beast that getting true value from that data. And the real elephant in the room is the fact that SaaS-delivered CRM systems are exacerbating these issues.

For years companies have approached their data as chunks of information to be thrown into various siloed applications. This problem has become magnified in the world of cloud CRM, because these systems are often adopted by the business units in an organization. SaaS-based systems are great for companies that don’t want to depend on IT to manage their enterprise applications, but non-technical users struggle to integrate these cloud systems with their other systems, many of which still reside on premise. Without data integration, most organizations limit themselves to a single view of the customer by using only the data that they can access easily rather than all of the data they have. It is essential that all data be used to define the comprehensive “single version of the truth” about that customer. Efficient customer data management utilizes more than just the information in your CRM system; it includes production information, order fulfillment information, service history, contractual information and competitive information.

Here are three things to consider when adopting a SaaS CRM solution: Read more… »

On-premise or cloud, choosing an integration tool requires careful consideration

Choosing between a cloud-based integration tool and an on-premise integration tool is an important decision. Many factors must be considered.

We recently talked with Geoji George, Director of Product Management, Integration Division, at Pervasive about that choice. Pervasive released a cloud-based version of its Data Integrator v10 this past November. An on-premise version will be available this spring. Read more… »

Some SaaS application databases have limited functionality compared to relational database with SQL

While many major cloud applications offer a database as part of a service, that database option may limit what can be done with the data.

We spoke with Jitterbit CTO Ilan Sehayek about the use cases for cloud data replication. He says that cloud data replication allows users to improve data usability. One example of how data usability can be improved with cloud data replication is by putting Salesforce.com data into a relational database.

“That way they have relational access to that data,” said Sehayek. “The query language in Salesforce doesn’t give the types of information that [some customers] are looking for,” said Sehayek.

Read more… »

Top SaaS applications feature platforms for extensibility

As the cloud application market matures, the top SaaS applications will be those that make it easy for users to customize the apps in order to fit their specific needs.

“I think that we’re starting to see certain leaders bubble to the top,” said Ilan Sehayek, CTO of Jitterbit. “I do think that within the cloud arena, these will be the vendors who have provided the more flexible solutions.”

Sehayek cited Salesforce.com, a popular SaaS CRM system, as an example. “The adoption of Salesforce.com started off with sales teams in pre-sales activities,” said Sehayek. “Maybe they took it down to establishing what the contract is—that was initially what people did.”

But Salesforce.com users quickly began to use the application for much more. “You start off with the front end part of the customer, but now you have customer support and contact centers using this product,” said Sehayek. Before long, Salesforce.com fledged from a sales tool to a CRM system.

“These cloud applications started to become platforms,” said Sehayek. “We have people that do human resources with Salesforce.com. That has nothing to do with sales at all.”

Sehayek does not suggest that more focused applications will not be succeed. “Point specific vendors that focus on their markets and serve a particular purpose will do just fine,” said Sehayek. “But I think over the time the ones that rise to the top are ones that offer easy and simple ways to build and extend what users need.”

Sign up for the free CloudAppIntegration.com newsletter!