“Big data represents a sea change of capabilities in IT” notes Matt McLarty, Vice President, Client Solutions at Layer 7, in this exclusive Q&A with Cloud Expo Conference Chair Jeremy Geelan. McLarty continued: “In conjunction with mobile and cloud, I think Big Data will provide a technological makeover to the typical enterprise infrastructure, drawing a hard API border in front of core business services while blurring the line between logic and data services.”
Cloud Computing Journal: Agree or...| By Hollis Tibbetts | Article Rating: |
|
| January 31, 2012 06:30 AM EST | Reads: |
2,360 |
Fundamentally, as companies increasingly adopt more and more SaaS/cloud-based applications, as more and more data are cloud-based, and as social networking data becomes increasingly critical to sales, marketing and customer satisfaction applications, the "old style" integration stacks that were originally created to run on on-premises PCs or servers will be a non-optimal solution.
This is the normal evolution of things. The mainframe-centric nature of computing gave way to client/server which in turn gave way to Internet and then SaaS/cloud.
Just like mainframe-based applications could never really be retrofitted to be good client/server applications, or how non-relational databases never really worked well with SQL front-ends slapped on, older architectures (server or LAN-based application integration suites) can't simply be retrofitted or wrappered to become sky-based.

As the nature of applications and data change, so must the nature of the integration suites that bring them all together. The EDI hub from 1990 isn't going to provide the right architecture for this. The B2B or EAI server from 2001 can't do this. The nature of the problem has changed.
I'm not saying that every bit of "old style" integration technology needs to be thrown out. A lot of the technologies are similar. But the changing nature of data, applications and integration is significant enough to drive important changes in the integration suites that bring all this data together. Especially for those organizations who plan on (or already have) a lot of cloud/SaaS-based data.
Perhaps most important, though, is the substantial leap forward in productivity and ease of use that the new cloud-based integration suites bring to the table - so irrespective of where your data are, you may want to consider a cloud-based solution for that reason alone.
The Locus of Integration
Apart from the things that I've already mentioned, there is one more important thing that older architectures aren't adept at handling: the changing locus of integration.
Many years ago, the locus, or "center of effort" for integration was the mainframe. Simply because every application and every bit of data were mainframe-based.
In the 1990s and early 2000s when many integration stacks were first built, the locus of integration moved to "the data center", as applications were mostly distributed on servers based in the data center, and connected via the LAN/WAN".
As an increasing number of applications and data silos are sky (i.e., cloud and/or SaaS) based, the locus of integration is shifting closer and closer to the sky. For many organizations, this locus is ALREADY closer to the cloud than it is to the data center.
At the point where the locus of integration becomes closer to the sky than the ground, it makes sense to consider moving the ACT of integration itself (i.e. the Integration hub) into the Cloud.
So, one key aspect of Integration for 2012 and beyond is the ability to support the changing locus of integration by supporting data center-centric, cloud-centric data and applications.
A Word to the Wise
Be careful - there are fair number of "pretenders" out there "technology comb-overs" that pretend to be cloud or SaaS solutions, but are not the "real thing." Just because something runs "on a cloud" doesn't make it a cloud or SaaS solution.
One of the primary benefits of the new "SaaS / cloud" world is so much about enhanced productivity. That doesn't just happen magically by stuffing a bunch of decades-old EDI or ETL code up on the cloud and running it there. You might as well take a COBOL program from 1975 and somehow make it work on Amazon's Cloud - character based "green screen" interface and all.
Cloud and SaaS Integration products need to be about a modern event-based, services-based integration architecture - based on (not just supporting) approaches such as REST or SOAP. Multi-tenant, pay-as-you-go, the whole thing. And they need to have modern tools for development, configuration and deployment - all browser based.
The new generation of cloud-based Integration solutions such as Boomi (Dell), InformaticaCloud, SnapLogic and newcomer MuleSoft iON (among others) are designed from the ground up to be cloud-based integration platforms. These REAL cloud-based products have implementation/deployment times measured in a few weeks.
Many of the "re-tread" pretenders are just the same "dinosaur" on-premises EDI, EAI or data integration solutions that have been around since before people realized that Y2K was a problem. These are products that have a reputation for taking 3-6 months (or longer) to implement - and for years have given Integration a bad name for reportedly being complex, risky, brittle, and difficult/expensive to implement.
Cloud-Based Integration for Cloud-based Applications
Anyhow, it should come as no surprise to you that that 95% of companies (based on a recent survey) plan to implement cloud-based integration. Over 40% of respondents indicated that cloud-based integration will be part of their future within two years.
I was personally a bit baffled by 5% stating that cloud-based integration would "never" be implemented at their organizations. I suspect (although do not know) that those organizations have certain characteristics that do not lend themselves to the movement of sensitive data outside carefully protected boundaries. Or, as David Linthicum pointed out recently, organizations such as the Federal Government - who, although they acknowledge the cost savings of cloud over time, they lack the seed capital to make the move "right now".
Conclusion and Recommendations
It's clear that the very nature of applications and data - where they reside, what forms they are in, how and by whom they are used, how often they change, etc. is in a state of rapid transformation.
The very nature of application and data integration needs to change at an architectural level in order to accommodate the corresponding architectural-level shift in applications and data. To date, many of the traditional application integration technologies have failed (in varying degrees) to rise to that challenge. Their older LAN or Server-based architectures will leave them increasingly at a competitive disadvantage.
It would behoove those choosing cloud-based integration solutions to be careful in choosing cloud-based integration platforms to make sure that they're getting the real deal. Otherwise, they may find themselves giving answers like "cost too much," "took too long," "wasn't flexible enough" in some future market research survey.
Note: The data referred to in this article come from 2011 Application Connection Priorities a research report by GatePoint Research.
Published January 31, 2012 Reads 2,360
Copyright © 2012 SYS-CON Media, Inc. — All Rights Reserved.
Syndicated stories and blog feeds, all rights reserved by the author.
- Kovair Software Brings Competitive Tools Together as Elements of Its Global Application Integration Platform -- Kovair Global Lifecycle Rel. 4.9
- Cadence Accelerates SoC Realization, Reduces Costs With New Open Integration Platform
- Cedara Software to Introduce C4 Integration Platform and New Medical Imaging Technologies at the European Congress of Radiology (ECR)
More Stories By Hollis Tibbetts
Hollis has established himself as a successful software marketing and technology expert. His various strategy, marketing and technology blogs are read over 40,000 times a month.
He has over 20 years experience in creating, executing and managing innovative and effective marketing programs for startup, midsize and large technology companies in Silicon Valley and Austin TX. He has substantial expertise and a highly successful track record in positioning and launching companies and products and achieving solid, sustained growth.
Hollis has developed substantial expertise in middleware, SaaS, Cloud, data management and distributed application technologies, with over 2 decades of experience in marketing, technical, product management and product marketing roles at leading companies in such as Pervasive, Aruna (acquired by Progress Software), Sybase (now SAP), webMethods (now Software AG), M7 Corporation (acquired by BEA/Oracle), OnDisplay (acquired by Vignette) and KIVA Software (acquired by Netscape). He has established himself as an industry expert, having authored a large number of technology white papers, as well as published media articles and book contributions.
Hollis is a regularly featured blogger at ebizQ, a venue focused on enterprise technologies, with over 100,000 subscribers. He is also a featured author on Social Media Today "The World's Best Thinkers on Social Media", and maintains a blog focused on creating great software: Software Marketing 2011. He tweets actively as @SoftwareHollis
Additional information is available at HollisTibbetts.com
or at
Artemis Ventures LLC.
“Big data represents a sea change of capabilities in IT” notes Matt McLarty, Vice President, Client Solutions at Layer 7, in this exclusive Q&A with Cloud Expo Conference Chair Jeremy Geelan. McLarty continued: “In conjunction with mobile and cloud, I think Big Data will provide a technological makeover to the typical enterprise infrastructure, drawing a hard API border in front of core business services while blurring the line between logic and data services.”
Cloud Computing Journal: Agree or...Feb. 23, 2012 09:00 AM EST Reads: 626 |
By Liz McMillan As more enterprises are adopting clouds, the nature of cloud computing is changing. Previously, clouds were used to test applications or for non-mission critical applications. Today, enterprises are using clouds for cost-saving advantages and launching more mission critical applications that have defined performance needs.
In his session at the 10th International Cloud Expo, Eric Shepcaro, CEO and Chairman of the Board of Telx, will discuss how distributed computing has many advantages. It wou...Feb. 23, 2012 09:00 AM EST Reads: 1,923 |
By Elizabeth White Virtualization and private cloud are good for server consolidation, creating flexible environments, and saving IT budget dollars. A recent survey of 1200 companies with 500+ employees showed that 59% had server virtualization in production or pilot. But that doesn’t tell the whole story.
In his session at the 10th International Cloud Expo, Dave Asprey, VP of Cloud Security at Trend Micro, will explain the types of situations when you should consider not virtualizing some of your applications. ...Feb. 23, 2012 08:45 AM EST Reads: 1,692 |
By Elizabeth White Hardware and chemistry improvements will make the $1,000 human genome a reality soon. While the massive amount of genomics data that will be generated represents a huge opportunity to advance personal medicine, it also presents an enormous big data challenge.
In his session at the 10th International Cloud Expo, Dr Andreas Sundquist, CEO of DNAnexus, will discuss how the cloud will address these issues by enabling the management, storage, sharing and analysis of the world’s DNA data and how it ...Feb. 23, 2012 08:45 AM EST Reads: 1,010 |
By Liz McMillan The Platform as a Service (PaaS) market grew out of the fact that no other cloud solution addressed the ever-increasing complexity of managing and writing modern applications: no frameworks, libraries or APIs alone could tackle the sticky application engineering challenges. Unfortunately, PaaS 1.0 is what people are now seeing as strictly a “tool” to easily deploy apps to the infrastructure in a self-service way with little or no differentiation among offerings. However, in order for PaaS to rea...Feb. 23, 2012 08:30 AM EST Reads: 1,648 |
By Pat Romanski Hadoop, MapReduce, Hive, Hbase, Lucene, Solr? The only thing growing faster than enterprise data these days is the landscape of big data tools. These tools, which are designed to help organizations turn big data into opportunities, are gaining deeper insight into massive volumes of information. A recent Gartner report predicts that enterprise data will increase by 650% over the next five years, which means that the time is now for IT decision makers to determine which big data tools are the best...Feb. 23, 2012 08:30 AM EST Reads: 1,979 |
By Jeremy Geelan With Cloud Expo 2012 New York (10th Cloud Expo) now under four months away, what better time to start introducing you in greater detail to the distinguished individuals in our incredible Speaker Faculty for the technical and strategy sessions at the conference...
We have technical and strategy sessions for you every day from June 11 through June 14 dealing with every nook and cranny of Cloud Computing and Big Data, but what of those who are presenting? Who are they, where do they work, what e...Feb. 23, 2012 08:15 AM EST Reads: 854 |
By Jeremy Geelan With Cloud Expo 2012 New York (10th Cloud Expo) now under four months away, what better time to start introducing you in greater detail to the distinguished individuals in our incredible Speaker Faculty for the technical and strategy sessions at the conference...
We have technical and strategy sessions for you every day from June 11 through June 14 dealing with every nook and cranny of Cloud Computing and Big Data, but what of those who are presenting? Who are they, where do they work, what e...Feb. 23, 2012 08:10 AM EST Reads: 1,065 |
By Pat Romanski The proliferation of device connectivity is redefining the functionality requirements and capabilities of many embedded systems as more and more of these devices look to leverage the “Cloud.” While many commercial software and hardware component vendors have begun to realign their value propositions to satisfy growing demand, commercial-off-the-shelf products (COTS) alone cannot meet every OEM’s needs. As a result, the Embedded Cloud has injected a new level of uncertainty and a new competitive ...Feb. 23, 2012 08:00 AM EST Reads: 884 |
By Liz McMillan Building a cloud computing environment with on-demand access to compute, network, and storage resources requires an elastic infrastructure at multiple levels. Virtualization combined with x86 servers has transformed the way we scale out compute resources. Unfortunately, legacy Fibre Channel and iSCSI storage architectures are rooted in rigid mainframe-era designs, and are fundamentally mismatched with the dynamic, shared modern data center.
In his session at the 10th International Cloud Expo, ...Feb. 23, 2012 08:00 AM EST Reads: 2,567 |
- Cloud Expo New York Speaker Profile: Dave Asprey – Trend Micro
- Big Data in Telecom: The Need for Analytics
- Big Data Gold Mine in Cloud Governance and Automation
- Drool, Britannia? Is the UK Failing the Cloud?
- Cloud Expo New York Speaker Profile: Bernard Golden – HyperStratus
- Cloud Expo New York Speaker Profile: Mårten Mickos – Eucalyptus Systems
- Thoughts on Big Data and Data Virtualization
- What Motivates Open Standards in the Cloud?
- What to Expect in 2012: Cloud Computing and Open Source Software
- End-User Participation to Provide Unique Forum for Peer Collaboration at 2012 Technology Convergence Conference
- Will PaaS Finally Bring Open Source Love to the Enterprise?
- Ten Hot Trends in Cloud Data for 2012
- Gartner Hype Cycle for Emerging Technologies 2011
- Cloud Expo New York Speaker Profile: Dave Asprey – Trend Micro
- Big Data in Telecom: The Need for Analytics
- i-Technology in 2012: Five Industry Predictions
- Big Data Gold Mine in Cloud Governance and Automation
- Drool, Britannia? Is the UK Failing the Cloud?
- 9th International Cloud Expo | Cloud Expo Silicon Valley – Photo Album
- Microsoft Tries Hadoop on Azure
- Cloud Expo New York Speaker Profile: Bernard Golden – HyperStratus
- Cloud Expo New York Speaker Profile: Mårten Mickos – Eucalyptus Systems
- Thoughts on Big Data and Data Virtualization
- Cloud Computing: A Comparison of Computing Models
- What is Cloud Computing?
- The Top 150 Players in Cloud Computing
- Six Benefits of Cloud Computing
- Virtualization Conference Keynote Webcast Live on SYS-CON.TV
- What's the Difference Between Cloud Computing and SaaS?
- GDS International: Global Warming Scam?
- Twenty-One Experts Define Cloud Computing
- The Future of Cloud Computing
- The Top 250 Players in the Cloud Computing Ecosystem
- SOA 2 Point Oh No!
- Cloud Expo Europe 2009 in Prague: Themes & Topics
- A Brief History of Cloud Computing: Is the Cloud There Yet?








As more enterprises are adopting clouds, the nature of cloud computing is changing. Previously, clouds were used to test applications or for non-mission critical applications. Today, enterprises are using clouds for cost-saving advantages and launching more mission critical applications that have defined performance needs.
In his session at the 10th International Cloud Expo, Eric Shepcaro, CEO and Chairman of the Board of Telx, will discuss how distributed computing has many advantages. It wou...
Virtualization and private cloud are good for server consolidation, creating flexible environments, and saving IT budget dollars. A recent survey of 1200 companies with 500+ employees showed that 59% had server virtualization in production or pilot. But that doesn’t tell the whole story.
In his session at the 10th International Cloud Expo, Dave Asprey, VP of Cloud Security at Trend Micro, will explain the types of situations when you should consider not virtualizing some of your applications. ...
Hardware and chemistry improvements will make the $1,000 human genome a reality soon. While the massive amount of genomics data that will be generated represents a huge opportunity to advance personal medicine, it also presents an enormous big data challenge.
In his session at the 10th International Cloud Expo, Dr Andreas Sundquist, CEO of DNAnexus, will discuss how the cloud will address these issues by enabling the management, storage, sharing and analysis of the world’s DNA data and how it ...
The Platform as a Service (PaaS) market grew out of the fact that no other cloud solution addressed the ever-increasing complexity of managing and writing modern applications: no frameworks, libraries or APIs alone could tackle the sticky application engineering challenges. Unfortunately, PaaS 1.0 is what people are now seeing as strictly a “tool” to easily deploy apps to the infrastructure in a self-service way with little or no differentiation among offerings. However, in order for PaaS to rea...
Hadoop, MapReduce, Hive, Hbase, Lucene, Solr? The only thing growing faster than enterprise data these days is the landscape of big data tools. These tools, which are designed to help organizations turn big data into opportunities, are gaining deeper insight into massive volumes of information. A recent Gartner report predicts that enterprise data will increase by 650% over the next five years, which means that the time is now for IT decision makers to determine which big data tools are the best...
With Cloud Expo 2012 New York (10th Cloud Expo) now under four months away, what better time to start introducing you in greater detail to the distinguished individuals in our incredible Speaker Faculty for the technical and strategy sessions at the conference...
We have technical and strategy sessions for you every day from June 11 through June 14 dealing with every nook and cranny of Cloud Computing and Big Data, but what of those who are presenting? Who are they, where do they work, what e...
With Cloud Expo 2012 New York (10th Cloud Expo) now under four months away, what better time to start introducing you in greater detail to the distinguished individuals in our incredible Speaker Faculty for the technical and strategy sessions at the conference...
We have technical and strategy sessions for you every day from June 11 through June 14 dealing with every nook and cranny of Cloud Computing and Big Data, but what of those who are presenting? Who are they, where do they work, what e...
The proliferation of device connectivity is redefining the functionality requirements and capabilities of many embedded systems as more and more of these devices look to leverage the “Cloud.” While many commercial software and hardware component vendors have begun to realign their value propositions to satisfy growing demand, commercial-off-the-shelf products (COTS) alone cannot meet every OEM’s needs. As a result, the Embedded Cloud has injected a new level of uncertainty and a new competitive ...
Building a cloud computing environment with on-demand access to compute, network, and storage resources requires an elastic infrastructure at multiple levels. Virtualization combined with x86 servers has transformed the way we scale out compute resources. Unfortunately, legacy Fibre Channel and iSCSI storage architectures are rooted in rigid mainframe-era designs, and are fundamentally mismatched with the dynamic, shared modern data center.
In his session at the 10th International Cloud Expo, ...
While the notion of Bring Your Own Cloud (BYOC) may seem a bit far-fetched, Shadow IT, where users essentially bring unauthorized cloud services into business environments, has become an increasing corporate concern as highlighted in a recent CFO.com article. The risk of Shadow IT is that it comprom...
What happens when technology converges? When old meets new?
A fine example of what might happen is what has happened in the carrier space as voice and data services increasingly meet on the same network, each carrying unique characteristics forward from the older technology from which they sprung. ...
For many of the same reasons IPv6 migration is moving slower than perhaps it should given the urgent need for more IP addresses (to support all those cows connecting to the Internet) is the sheer magnitude of such an effort. Without the ability for IPv6-only nodes to talk to IPv4-only nodes, there’s...
The trade off between security and performance has long been a known issue across IT organizations. One of the first things to go when performance is unacceptable is a security solution. This isn’t just an IT phenomenon either; consider how many of us have disabled endpoint security solutions like a...
Let's face it right now the cloud is pretty immature. The level of automation and management of these environments are analogous to the early assembly lines, but it won't be this way long. This is not the industrial revolution and it moves at a wicked fast pace. Before we know it the next generation...
To build and maintain applications required to reach out to you customer through Mobile & Smart phone is expensive.
Why? Because of platform proliferation. Because of quick technology obsolescence. (See this)
Management perception compounds the problem.
Anybody, not intimately familiar with this...
We’re starting a new series of articles here called ‘Cloud Leaders of Tomorrow‘ – The objective of which is to showcase the movers and shakers of the Canadian Cloud industry.
Our first profile is Kevin Crowe, Director Cloud Services for Long View, and this is a perfect start because within our over...
Hybrid tools try to resolve the debate of … “Should you write a mobile web application which will render on multiple platforms without significant change but won’t be able to take advantage on native features?” Or “Should you create platform specific native application to fully utilize the power of ...
Is Big Data destined for only the top 3,000 companies worldwide? What about medium or small companies who are equally as data-driven? Is there a place for Big Data in SMB markets? When I talk to SMB companies about their use of public cloud services, it’s a no-brainer. Pay as you go, lower costs up...
What’s actually in a Cloud SLA, or what should be in such an agreement, is all over the map. Ask the public IaaS providers, and they’ll give you one answer. Ask SaaS or PaaS providers, and they’ll tell you something different. And what about private Clouds? SLAs take on an entirely new meaning there...








