Cloud Leaders Focus on Integration More than Others

Drivers and Challenges of Enterprise Integration Revealed

Integration is still a major problem for those who rely on the cloud, as a recent Information Week survey revealed.

In yesterday’s blog post, I highlighted a few of the findings, but I also wondered why integration is such a challenge. Why are so many organizations still managing integration work by hand rather than using integration platforms or solutions?

As it turns out, a subset of cloud users do understand the significance of integration.

A collaborative research paper written by Oxford Economics and SAP shows that cloud leaders (registration required for download)—the companies who really head the pack on using cloud technology for innovation and business—focus on integration much more than other companies. Cloud leaders are more likely to:

• Have a dedicated team for focusing on cloud integration (55 percent do).
• Purchase integration tools (58 percent do).
• Engage with integration service providers (52 percent do).

They were also less likely to outsource integration to a third party.

I didn’t see a publication date for this research, but B2C highlighted the report in an article published last week.

As I pointed out in my previous blog, what befuddles me is, why aren’t companies investing in integration solutions if they’re using the cloud for business-critical services and infrastructure?

It was more understandable when we were talking on-premise legacy systems, some of which were used before integration solutions came on the scene.

At first, after reading yesterday’s report, I thought it was because solutions for cloud infrastructure weren’t plentiful. This didn’t really make sense to me, though, since it seems like you could use APIs to connect with software running on cloud infrastructures in the same way SaaS vendors use APIs.

Since SnapLogic was in the news this week for its release of the SnapLogic Integration Cloud, I decided to ask the company about it.

The company is calling its new solution “the industry’s fastest integration platform as a service (iPaaS).” (Although, by “speed,” SnapLogic doesn’t mean what you think it means.)

The integration platform works for SaaS applications, platforms and infrastructure, new SnapLogic Vice President of Marketing Darren Cunningham said.

So there goes that theory.

SnapLogic’s solution comes with pre-built connectors for nine categories, such as analytics, identity management, storage (Box and Dropbox) and SaaS, he explained. You can read more about it on the National Post.