Posted by Don Nanneman in:
Informatica On Demand
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Integration
History repeats itself…. again. We’ve all seen this happen before. New vendors enter established markets with solutions that meet the needs of an underserved constituency. Often times those solutions are based on some form of disruptive technology. Mini computers disrupted the mainframe business model. Then PCs and workgroup computing impacted the minicomputer model. We went from centralized to distributed and then personal computing and now we’re finding ourselves coming back full circle to a centralized computing model again with the Internet.
The adoption of SaaS as a solution’s approach and a business model has been driven by one of these waves of disruption. While the wave took hold first in the small business market and then fairly quickly moved to the mid-market we’re seeing a definite acceptance by the ‘fast followers’ in many leading large business Enterprises.
Which brings us to the topic of Data Integration. What made mainframes and, for the most part, minicomputers work was the fact that the applications and their data were generally all centralized. Workgroup computing broke that model, as evidenced by the proliferation of emailing of Gigabytes of MS Excel file attachments and various other shared documents. With the groundswell move to SaaS and the success of companies like salesforce.com, RightNow and Taleo we’re seeing data returning to a centralized repository again. However, since not all business applications are hosted and not all of those that are reside in the same data center, SaaS applications have the annoying habit of creating a significant Data Integration challenge for IT managers – that being how to integrate data outside the firewall with the rest of the business applications. That’s one of many key SaaS Data Integration challenges that we’ll be writing about over the next few weeks. We hope you find this forum useful and the content meaningful and helpful. Let us know what you think.
