October 9, 2008

Everybody’s putting integration services in the cloud

Both Pervasive Software and Cast Iron Systems told me recently of fairly pure cloud offerings. In this, they’re joining Informatica, which started offering Salesforce.com integration-as-a-service back in 2006. So far as I can tell, the three vendors are doing somewhat different things.

I get the impression Informatica is still Salesforce-only, e.g. from this price list.

Pervasive DataCloud is currently vendor-specific too. In Pervasive’s case, the fixed point is QuickBooks Online. DataCloud, the pure cloud offering. is newish, with an undisclosed hosting partner. The most common integration is with, you guessed it, Salesforce.com, but Microsoft’s CRM is in the mix as well. Pricing is $1-2K/year.

The most comprehensive integration-as-a-service story I’ve heard may be the one Cast Iron Systems is rolling out. Cast Iron is hosting with OpSource any integration you can get in the Cast Iron appliance. To emphasize this, pricing is identical to that of the rental option for the appliance ($1K/month in the simplest two-endpoint cases), and customers are encouraged to switch between appliance and cloud usage as they see fit. (That said, I think the whole thing is way too new for such a switch ever to have happened yet; the official rollout is scheduled for October 20.) Cast Iron supports a fairly broad range of applications, SaaS and on-premise alike. (Cast Iron is particularly proud of what sounds like a beyond-Barney hug from Oracle’s CRM On Demand business.) Cast Iron claims less than a handful of direct sales of this new cloud offering. However, Cast Iron also claims 23 partners, combined from among several areas:

You may have noticed that everything I’ve cited above is for operational apps being connected with each other, almost always including CRM. What I haven’t heard is integration vendors getting much involved with analytics-in-the-cloud offerings, whether from data mart outsourcers or vendors with cloud DBMS offerings. Not coincidentally, I don’t think many offerings in either category have large customer counts. (Also — Kognitio, which along with Vertica is one of the two data warehouse DBMS vendors most emphasizing cloud offerings, happens to have a data migration subsidiary of its own.)

Comments

8 Responses to “Everybody’s putting integration services in the cloud”

  1. Rick Nucci on October 9th, 2008 2:02 pm

    Hi Curt,

    I just wanted to let you know about Boomi, the company I work for. We announced our SaaS integration platform in Jun 07, and have built from the ground up a true single-instance, multi-tenant SaaS application for solving integration in the SaaS ecosystem, which is a very different approach from the guys you reference above.

    Let me know if you have any questions, thanks-

    -Rick Nucci

  2. Yves de Montcheuil on October 9th, 2008 2:19 pm

    Curt, one of the issues with integration in the Cloud has to do with the applications that reside inside the firewall. Integrating Salesforce.com is useful only if you integrate it with something else: your accounting, shipping, inventory management, etc. Very few companies run all their IT in the Cloud, they often have an hybrid architecture. Which is why Talend offers connectors for SaaS/Cloud applications as well as for all the “traditional” IT stack: RDBMS, ERP/CRM, files, XML, etc. Being able to connect to all your sources and targets is really the key here.

    Yves @ Talend

  3. Vincent McBurney on October 9th, 2008 6:32 pm

    In 2006 Oracle signed a new four year OEM deal with Informatica to give PowerCenter to Oracle CRM on Demand customers. Oracle had already purchased Sunopsis for Fusion data integration but that product is not suited to SaaS data integration. So Informatica is the front runner for Oracle SaaS applications. I’m not sure what traction Cast Iron has with Oracle CRM on Demand customers when they are already getting PowerCenter and can add on Informatica SaaS data quality products.

    Informatica told me a couple months ago they had 55 new customers via SaaS offerings over the last three years – and some of those have turned into behind the firewall customers.

    Click on my website link for more details.

  4. Curt Monash on October 10th, 2008 9:39 am

    Vincent,

    That’s a good question — but the partnership IS out there.

  5. Curt Monash on October 10th, 2008 9:53 am

    Yves,

    I was assuming much of that in my post.

    I’ve been writing for a year or two, for example, that Cast Iron’s main business is connecting on-premise and SaaS apps to each other. Pervasive probably has 10X the customers for hybrid on-premise/SaaS QuickBooks integrations as it does pure cloud ones, and that figure may even be low.

    But my point was that the cloud-only side of integration is ALSO now starting up.

    Anyhow, thanks for stopping in. You guys should brief me some time.

    Best,

    CAM

  6. Curt Monash on October 10th, 2008 9:56 am

    Rick,

    Interesting that Boomi’s news is Intuit/QuickBooks, which is exactly where Pervasive’s offering seems to be pointed.

  7. Multitenancy hype is getting out of control | DBMS2 -- DataBase Management System Services on October 10th, 2008 10:22 am

    […] posted recently on SaaS-data-integration-in-the-cloud, and a couple of vendors stopped by the comment thread to shared what they do. One was Boomi, which […]

  8. Cast Iron takes ‘integration as a service’ to cloud-based or on-premises deployment | Dana Gardner’s BriefingsDirect | ZDNet.com on October 14th, 2008 12:05 pm

    […] Curt Monash of DBMS2 says that the move by Cast Iron isn’t the first such offering, but seems to be the most comprehensive: The most comprehensive integration-as-a-service story I’ve heard may be the one Cast Iron Systems is rolling out. Cast Iron is hosting with OpSource any integration you can get in the Cast Iron appliance. To emphasize this, pricing is identical to that of the rental option for the appliance ($1K/month in the simplest two-endpoint cases), and customers are encouraged to switch between appliance and cloud usage as they see fit. […]

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