What is on-demand integration?
Home
SaaScon 2007 -- SaaS is here to stay
Posted by John Hegstrom in: News and Events
We just wrapped up two days at SaaScon 2007 in Santa Clara, CA. It was amazing to hear so many presenters at this year’s conference talking about the economic advantages of the SaaS model. End-user's raved about how easy it is to implement and use SaaS applications. Service providers talked about how multi-tenancy allows them to concentrate all of their R&D efforts on building new features rather than porting to other technology stacks. It seems clear that the SaaS model is not just a fad, it is widely viewed as a fundamental change in the way software is built and delivered.
In my presentation I made some recommendations about how SaaS providers can provide superior integration capabilities that will accelerate the adoption of SaaS.
My recommendations included:
- Expose workflow and events in their API's that allow customers to link business processes across multiple applications and platforms
- Provide the ability for users to access data that is created and managed in other applications, in both batch and real-time modes
- Publish events and provide call-outs to support data quality extensions
- Provide robust and complete API's that can be used for data migration, real-time workflow and process integration, and on-going synchronization
- Solve the "firewall problem"
I ended my presentation with a brief discussion about Informatica's strategy for on-demand data integration, including a brief discussion about how we have solved the "firewall problem" with the Informatica Secure Agent. It's clear that companies want to use a combination of on-premise and on-demand applications. Secure data integration through the firewall will be an important enabler for the continued growth of SaaS.
Comments
John,
A question: Is it necessarily easier to migrate data into a SaaS application than it is to migrate it back out?
Is there more that a SaaS vendor should provide customers wishing to unsubscribe from a given app than simply a flat-file CSV dump, or the capacity to write a report and capture the data output as a file, or some capability, if there is a unique key linking two separate records together, to capture and transmit that key?
I have heard a lot about vendors being unwilling to assist customers who wish to leave in transferring their data to a different vendor, etc., but there has not been a lot of clear documentation of what a customer should ask for in the initial contract so that they can be assured of the ability to easily shift vendors at some point in the future if that becomes their desire. Can you assist? Or point me at some sources for more info?
Posted by: Mikael Blaisdell![[TypeKey Profile Page]](http://blogs2.informatica.com/ondemand/nav-commenters.gif)
|
May 21, 2007 08:39 PM
Mikael,
Ideally every application vendor would make it easy for their customers to migrate their data, either in or out of the application. After all, the customer owns the data and should be free to use the best applications available to create and manage their data.
Unfortunately some application vendors make it difficult for customers to access their data. This lock-in strategy is short-sighted. Customers who suffer from the consequences will tell everybody they know about the bad experience. Smart buyers of any application, on-premise and SaaS alike, need to understand the process for migrating their data into the application and should understand how they get their data out when they want to migrate off the application.
Enlightened application vendors provide good data export utilities, but in order to keep their customers happy they need to deliver new versions with better features and ease of use. It’s understandable that import tools, usability and enhancements would be prioritized higher than data export tools. Unfortunately for customers, this means that even the best application vendors don't make a huge investment in data migration utilities. Where does a customer turn when they need to migrate their data? Look no further than Informatica.
Informatica offers a full range of solutions for data migrations that include:
· Seamless, non-invasive access to complex systems—including mainframe and legacy systems—through a common graphical, SQL-like interface
· Built-in data profiling to discover content, structure and quality of data in all systems and reuse of those findings in the transformation process
· Sophisticated transformation capabilities with built-in data cleansing to reconcile all data and automatically document business rules Highly productive team development environment with automated documentation and full audit trail, enabling disparate and geographically dispersed teams to work effectively and rapidly
If you're interested to learn more, take a look at http://www.informatica.com/solutions/integration/migration/default.htm.
We are also running a seminar on data migration on Thursday June 7. If you want to learn more you can register at http://www.informatica.com/info/jmorris
Posted by: hegstrom![[TypeKey Profile Page]](http://blogs2.informatica.com/ondemand/nav-commenters.gif)
|
May 24, 2007 04:04 PM