How to Better Integrate Cloud Apps by Managing the Integration Lifecycle
One of the things that might have gotten lost in the barrage of cloud services that Oracle recently launched is a shift of focus in terms of where Oracle is looking to advance its integration capabilities.
Amit Zavery, senior vice president of cloud platforms at Oracle, says that rather than being solely focused on professional developers and internal IT organizations, with the arrival this month of the Oracle Integration Cloud service, Oracle is courting so-called “citizen integrators.” These power users within departments typically want to be able to combine data sets, but don’t have much patience when it comes to waiting for internal IT organizations to actually do that for them.
By moving the integration process to the cloud, Zavery says Oracle will be providing self-service capabilities that will enable users to integrate data with little to no help from the internal IT organization.
For Oracle, that shift represents something of a departure in focus that coincides with a major realignment of the company around delivering both software as a service (SaaS) and database as a service (DBaaS) in the cloud. Essentially, Oracle is trying to convince customers to either use its SaaS applications directly or let Oracle manage databases on their behalf, which happen to run on a set of Oracle infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) platforms that it is bundling at an aggressive price point to gain market share quickly. As part of that exercise, Oracle is now also seeking to directly engage power users who are frustrated with the level of integration capabilities they now get mainly via their internal IT organization.
Oracle is hardly alone is figuring out that there is a fairly large number of citizen integrators out there. Those citizen integrators may not supplant the need for professional developers entirely, but the fact that an enterprise IT stalwart like Oracle is now trying to reach out to this emerging class of integrators speaks volumes about the future direction of enterprise IT.
