Jitterbit Offers New Enterprise Edition and a New, Unusual Integration Tool

A little over a year ago, I interviewed Jitterbit's CTO, Ilan Sehayek. The open source data integration company was just over two years old and already in numerous midsized organizations.

But Jitterbit had its eyes set on the enterprise, Sehayek said. They could tell that large enterprises were downloading their tools, and they wanted to see those numbers rise. He told me:

“...we’ll continue to make sure that we’re penetrating and doing well in the mid-market, but from a product development perspective, certainly in the next 12 months, you’re going to continue to see more and more enterprise-like features in the product. ... We’ve gotten into the big enterprises, and we will continue to add the features that will enable these enterprises to remove, to no longer have to make any more investments in complex technologies that really didn’t deliver on the value that they needed to.”

Jitterbit seems to be making good on Sehayek's statement. Recently, Jitterbit announced the general availability of Jitterbit 3.0, which includes three different products: the community edition (for single users), an subscription-based enterprise edition, and the new Enterprise MX, a subscription service with more management features. According to Intelligent Enterprise:

“Enterprise MX is meant to scale up to larger integration projects, allow more than one developer at a time to be working on an integration project without disrupting the work of others, and to give a systems administrator a management console on his or her PC to monitor and modify an integration process.”

Among the enterprise-friendly features found in Jitterbit 3.0:

• Management tools for multiple servers;
• A single interface for project management;
• Multiple staging environments for development, testing and production;
• Plug-in management  (Sehayek explained the importance of this feature in a June SD Times article);
• Support for more than one programmer to work on an integration project simultaneously (MX only);
• The ability to break large streams of of data into smaller data chunks, which means if the load process is interrupted, it will only impact one chunk rather than the whole process;
• Easier tools to make the tool more accessible for business analysts.

Though both enterprise editions are subscription products, Jitterbit is offering a  30-day trial of Enterprise MX. You can also see a comparison of the three editions on JItterbit's site.

While we're on the topic of data integration, I stumbled across a review of a new solution called Ormetis that's designed to help migrate spreadsheet data. What's intriguing about this solution is it hits that sweet spot between too small for an ETL process, and too large for cut-and-paste.

Bloor Research Director Philip Howard seems impressed with it. “All-in-all, this is an impressive solution," he writes. "I haven’t seen anything else like it and, as far as I know, it is unique. Definitely worth a look.”

Customers have found creative and unexpected ways to use the tool, he adds, including as a means of migrating data to Salesforce.com -- which in and of itself could make this a very popular tool.