More on Cast Iron Systems
I chatted again recently with Simon Peel of Cast Iron Systems, and this time I got a better understanding of Cast Iron’s simplicity claim. It refers largely to a drag-and-drop interface that furthermore provides default mappings between pairs of application suites. Simon bristled a bit when I referred to this as mapping “like to like,” because he’s proud that it’s a little smarter than that. Still, “like to like” seems to be what it typically amounts to — customers go to customers, customer addresses go to customer addresses, and so on. Read more
The boom in Salesforce.com integration
SaaS integration is in the air.
- I recently talked with Pervasive Software about their data integration line. A large part of Pervasive’s new business is Salesforce.com integration, including at some big-name software vendors as customer/partner switch-hitters.
- I just rechecked my notes from my January talk with Cast Iron Systems. A large part of Cast Iron’s new business is also integration with Salesforce.com, Netsuite, and other SaaS vendors.
- Informatica keeps putting out press releases about Salesforce.com integration, most recently by offering replication in SaaS form itself.
But of course this makes sense. Without good data integration, SaaS applications would be pretty useless, at least at large and medium-sized enterprises.
| Categories: Cast Iron Systems, EAI, EII, ETL, ELT, ETLT, Informatica, Pervasive Software, Software as a Service (SaaS) | Leave a Comment |
Data integration appliance vendor Cast Iron Systems
I’ve been doing a lot of research lately into computing appliances – not just data warehouse appliances, but security, anti-spam and other appliance types as well. Today I added Cast Iron Systems to the list.
Essentially, they offer data integration without the common add-ons. I.e., there’s little or nothing in the way of data cleansing, composite apps, business process management, and/or business activity monitoring. Data just gets imported, extracted, and/or synchronized, whether between pairs of transactional systems, or between a transactional system and a reporting database. A particularly hot area of application for them seems to be SaaS/on-demand app integration (Salesforce.com, Netsuite, etc.) In particular, they boast both Lawson and Salesforce.com as internal users, and at least at Lawson they are used for a Salesforce/Lawson integration.
The big advantage to this strategy is that their integrator is simple enough for appliance deployment. Read more
| Categories: Cast Iron Systems, EAI, EII, ETL, ELT, ETLT | 5 Comments |
Oracle and Microsoft in data warehousing
Most of my recent data warehouse engine research has been with the specialists. But over the past couple of days I caught up with Oracle and Microsoft (IBM is scheduled for Friday). In at least three ways, it makes sense to lump those vendors together, and contrast them with the newer data warehouse appliance startups:
- Shared-everything architecture
- End-to-end solution story
- OLTP industrial-strengthness carried over to data warehousing
In other ways, of course, their positions are greatly different. Oracle may have a full order-of-magnitude lead on Microsoft in warehouse sizes, for example, and has a broad range of advanced features that Microsoft either hasn’t matched yet, or else just released in SQL Server 2005. Microsoft was earlier in pushing DBA ease as a major product design emphasis, although Oracle has played vigorous catch-up in Oracle10g.
| Categories: Data warehouse appliances, DATAllegro, EAI, EII, ETL, ELT, ETLT, IBM and DB2, Microsoft and SQL*Server, Netezza, Oracle, Parallelization, Teradata | 1 Comment |
More on data warehouse architecture choices
The very name of this blog comes from the kind of “horses for courses” data store strategy implied by my recent post on different kinds of data warehouse uses. A number of other commentators have recently made similar points, although they may not agree with every detail. For example, William McKnight pretty much makes the pure DBMS2 argument, pointing out that a partially virtual warehouse is often superior to a fully centralized physical one. And Andy Hayler of Kalido says pretty much the same thing, although he strongly calls out his difference in emphasis from William’s view.
A tip of the hat to Mark Rittman for pointing me to those two and others.
| Categories: Data warehouse appliances, EAI, EII, ETL, ELT, ETLT, Theory and architecture | Leave a Comment |
Business Objects on EIM, ETL, etc.
I chatted with some Business Objects ETL/EIM (Enterprise Information Management) folks today, in a call that was a direct response to what I heard from and posted about Informatica. The core of the Business Objects story can be summarized (albeit brutally!) like this:
| Categories: Business intelligence, Business Objects, EAI, EII, ETL, ELT, ETLT, Theory and architecture | 1 Comment |
eBay’s version of DBMS2
Every sufficiently large or agile enterprise needs to follow the DBMS2 approach. The following is from an article on eBay’s version:
“eBay has built a software-based Integration Tier. This contains both a data access layer (DAL) and a services framework. The Integration Tier acts as an abstraction layer for software engineers to work with many disparate back-end data sources through a consistent set of abstractions.”
| Categories: EAI, EII, ETL, ELT, ETLT, eBay, Specific users | Leave a Comment |
Informatica’s SaaS/Outsourcing story
The coolest part of Informatica’s visit today was the new SaaS story. Naturally, they’re starting with Salesforce.com, but they hope to use the technology they’re developing for Salesforce with other SaaS vendors, with Business Process Outsourcers, and with anybody else who needs robust cross-enterprise data integration. I don’t actually think there’s a lot of hard technology there; nonetheless, somebody had to build it. And they apparently have, in two main parts.
Read more
| Categories: EAI, EII, ETL, ELT, ETLT, Informatica | 2 Comments |
Informatica’s general story
Informatica came by today. In general their story is: Data integration is very important; all vendors except Informatica and IBM/Ascential are low end; IBM/Ascential is confused; most BI vendors except Business Objects are likely to follow Hyperion’s lead in partnering with them. Read more
| Categories: EAI, EII, ETL, ELT, ETLT, Informatica | 2 Comments |
Hot times at Intersystems
About a year ago, I wrote a very favorable column focusing on Intersystems’ OODBMS Cache’. Cache’ appears to be the one OODBMS product that has good performance even in a standard disk-centric configuration, notwithstanding that random pointer access seems to be antithetical to good disk performance.
Intersystems also has a hot new Cache’-based integration product, Ensemble. They attempted to brief me on it (somewhat belatedly, truth be told) last Wednesday. Through no fault of the product, however, the briefing didn’t go so well. I still look forward to learning more about Ensemble.
| Categories: EAI, EII, ETL, ELT, ETLT, Humor, Intersystems and Cache', Object, OLTP | Leave a Comment |