Archives for Cloud app integration news category
19
Jan
Posted in Cloud app integration news, Enterprise Service Bus by Mike Ponta on Jan 19 2011
MuleSoft this week announced Mule Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) 3.1. Mule ESB 3.0 was released in September, and introduced many new capabilities for cloud integration. According to Mule’s initial press release, the upgrade includes a service orchestration capability called Flow which enables cloud-based services orchestration. We recently spoke with MuleSoft CTO Ross Mason about developments in SaaS ESB integration.
In this article, CIO‘s David Taber takes a look at SaaS integration in different application layers. He begins by looking at on-screen integration, also known as mashups,and moves through presentation layer integration, business logic intergration, and finally data integration. Each type of integration requires a different degree of complexity and security, but the deeper one goes the more comprehensive an can become. Read more for details.
In this interview, Juan Carlos Soto, Senior VP and General Manager at Informatica, describes why business-to-business data integration is an important part of the broader integration problem.
4
Jan
Posted in Cloud app integration news by Mike Ponta on Jan 4 2011
Author Jeff Kaplan suggests that established computing companies will keep buying innovative startups to strengthen their position in the burgeoning cloud computin market. He provides some examples from the previous year, including a few niche software providers that purchased SaaS companies to help make the jump to cloud.
Writer James Urquhart acknowledges that despite multiple attempts to integrate IT systems across multiple clouds, none of them have been successful. However, he believes that integrated cloud services are the key to success in the industry, and that Microsoft and Google are the most capable of delivering on that need: Though labeled by some as aging, the companies have the most substantial technology portfolios needed to broadly integrate systems.
Managed IT services provider Tenzing has partnered with middleware provider Apprenda to provide ISVs with a SaaS delivery platform. The Apprenda SaaSGrid technology is designed to help integrate SaaS applications in a multi-tenancy environment. Toronto-based Tenzing also says that the partnership can help American software systems integrate with Canada-based data sets.
14
Dec
Posted in Cloud app integration news, Salesforce by Mike Ponta on Dec 14 2010
Salesforce.com expands PaaS offerings at Dreamforce event
Salesforce.com announced several major updates to its Platform as a Service (PaaS) offerings at DreamForce last week.
Salesforce unveiled Force.com 2, the next iteration of its proprietary development platform. For the most part Force.com 2 seems to simply wrap up existing Salesforce offerings—SiteForce, AppForce, Vmforce, and ISVforce—into a single package, but there are a few new changes.
Database.com, the cloud database that operates Salesforce.com services and applications, will be available for public use. That means that it can manage data from applications created independently of the Force.com platform as well as those made within it. Data integration between Force.com applications and non-Force.com apps should become simpler as a result.
Salesforce.com also announced the purchase of Heroku, a Ruby PaaS provider. Ruby is a popular language for lightweight, fast applications and is known for its ease of use and active development community. Heroku supports the Ruby on Rails application framework.
Database.com, Heroku buy get varied reviews from observers
Read more… »
Cloud service release suggests popularity of hybrid approach
Rackspace today announced Cloud Connect, a service designed to improve scalability by integrating proprietary hosting servers with Rackspace’s cloud servers. The release of a service like Cloud Connect points to a larger trend in cloud computing: enterprise users want the benefits of public infrastructure but want to keep control of their most important applications.
Recent commentary supports that claim. Mike Vizard of ITBusinessEdge suggests that Cloud Connect helps companies integrate mission critical applications running on private infrastructure with other applications running in the public cloud.
Rackspace CTO John Engates told ZDNet that Cloud Connect is a means for handling bandwidth overflow from a private cloud into a public cloud while maintaining compliance and security.
Releases such as Cloud Connect highlight the reality of today’s cloud computing market: the enterprise is not ready to put everything on the public cloud, so cloud computing providers must accommodate hybrid approaches that combine cloud and traditional systems.
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Java at center of upcoming PaaS offerings from Red Hat, IBM
When cloud computing hype began, many viewers foresaw the end of Java. The programming language was, in their eyes, too cumbersome for the demands of fast and lightweight performance in internet-based computing. The introduction of VMForce and addition of Java support to the Google App Engine proved Java had a place in the cloud. Recent Java Platform as a Service (Paas) developments suggest Java is becomeing further entrenched.
Red Hat announced the purchase Makara,an application deployment and monitoring provider, in order to accelerate development of its PaaS offering. According to Tim Prickett Morgan at Channel Register, Makara’s cloud application platform helps scale resources allocated to Java applications as they run on a PaaS. Because Java applications are often demanding of resources, scalability is essential.
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Hybrid cloud management the substance beneath “hybrid cloud” hype
The hype surrounding hybrid cloud may suggest that it’s a paradigm-shifting idea. But combining internet-based services with private cloud resources is not revolution, it’s simply responsible: It rarely makes sense to swap an entire technology stack into the public cloud, but the advantages of hosted SaaS and commoditized infrastructure are not usually worth foregoing entirely. As an ITBusinessEdge article points out, just about all cloud computing will be hybrid cloud computing.
If nearly all cloud scenarios will be hybrid in some way or another, simply identifying the type of cloud is no longer important. More significant than identifying a cloud type is the discussion about hybrid cloud management: What’s the best way to maintain control over data and applications while still making use of cloud technology? For many observers integration is paramount.
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18
Nov
Posted in Cloud app integration news by Mike Ponta on Nov 18 2010
Appirio head of products Narinder Singh says that mobile is the next big step for the cloud integration services industry. He discusses how mobile integration can make users the center of systems, not technology. Singh also discusses broader cloud integration services trends and the importance of the public cloud.
Boomi CTO Rick Nucci believes that hybrid cloud integration, where on-premise applications are integrated with cloud applications, is the “middle world” of integration needs, falling between B2B integration and on-premise integration. Nucci says that for many CIOs, data governance is the first concern when looking at hybrid cloud integration services.
Kapow released this week Kapow Katalyst 8.0, a data integration platform. Katalyst is a browser-based data integration engine designed to support data extraction from cloud applications without applications programming interfaces (APIs). It allows for integration with IBM Websphere, Oracle WebLogic, and Tomcat.
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12
Nov
Posted in Cloud app integration news, Enterprise Service Bus by Mike Ponta on Nov 12 2010
Workday CTO Stan Swete believes that cloud integration is a major hurdle for those CTOs wary of cloud, on par with security and autonomy. According to this ZDNet article, integration comes up in every conversation.
According to this article from ITBusinessEdge, many companies adopting cloud computing have become disillusioned with Enterprise Application Integration (EAI). Many companies with growing B2B integration initiatives are finding that the EAI and ESB systems within their stacks are redundant, because the intrasystem integration is no longer as important as the B2B integration.
Cloud-based document management provider KnowledgeTree today announced offline backup functionality for its customers. KnowledgeTree acknowledges that it gives their customers “piece of mind.” The move underscores how customer confidence in cloud security and reliability is not absolute, nor should vendors assume it is.
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10
Nov
Posted in Cloud app integration news by Mike Ponta on Nov 10 2010
Observers believe Dell made a smart entry into SaaS integration
A week after Dell acquired SaaS integration provider Boomi, many viewers see the acquistion as a smart way for Dell to move into the SaaS integration without taking on more than it needs.
Jeff Kaplan at SeekingAlpha.com suggests that Boomi makes sense for Dell because it is the right size at the right time. He writes that Boomi is “small enough for Dell to digest easily to test the integration market opportunities, and that Dell may not have been read to acquire a bigger player, like Informatica.”
Krishnan Subramanian at CloudAve.com points out how Dell didn’t have the need for a larger vendor. With their recent acquisition of Perot systems, Dell can already offer “integration services around all around the stack.” The Boomi acquisition only helps Dell to specifically target SaaS integration.
Carl Brooks at SearchCloudComputing.com highlights how the acquisition of Boomi fits into Dell’s larger cloud strategy. Brooks mentions how Dell’s purchase of Boomi will allow customers to integrate home-grown applications, in keeping with Dell’s greater strategy of offering “Do it yourself IT.”
Read more… »
4
Nov
Posted in Cloud app integration news by Mike Ponta on Nov 4 2010
Fiorano software yesterday announced the launch of Fiorano Cloud Platform, a platform built upon the Fiorano Enterprise Service Bus designed to integrate both SaaS and on-premise applications. The Fiorano Cloud Platform is designed to allow for business process and data integration between various sources and locations. It is hosted on Amazon EC2 and targets cloud integration for service-oriented architecture (SOA).
Dell on Tuesday announced that it will acquire Software as a Service integration provider Boomi. Dell looks to use the Boomi acquisition to help support customers looking to transition to cloud computing. Boomi’s AtomSphere application platform is designed to simplify data transfer between cloud and on-premise applications.
The author here takes a look at how GoodData is embedding business intelligence (BI) dashboards into partner applications. The author suggests that GoodData’s strategy is an alternative to other BI vendors, who look to market stand-alone tools. He considers the advantages of each option in this post from ebizQ.
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