After attending last week’s All About the Cloud, Satish Shenoy shared a summary about the New World Cloud Integration Breakout Session.
Moderator: George Collins, Deloitte Technology Practice
Speakers: Lou Guercia (Scribe Software), Ross Mason (Mulesoft), Lance Speck (Pervasive)
Key Topics Covered:
Key integration challenges, Standards for data quality and security, New breed of integration, Speed of integration, Impact of integration by 3rd party providers on the IT department
Discussion Points:
• A growing cloud market is both exciting and is fraught with challenges – Integration is key ?
o Ross – Rise of SAAS, rise of APIs means great opportunity for integration – Also, projection of SAAS market growth… Projection of SaaS market growth is the fastest growth market ever! So much is happening – It is hard for IT organizations to do it themselves. Good at point-to-point integration but not at broader, more complex integration.
o Lance – SaaS application have better APIs and hence easier to integrate compared to premise-based custom application and easier to integration in the ecosystem. When we say ecosystem, we think of more than the platform itself.
o Ross – We need to start enabling the long tail of integration since there are a lot more APIs and apps now than ever before
• Speed to value – Does integration become to enabler or inhibitor
o Lance – With M&A activity, multiple platforms will exist and crucial to integrate smoothly.
o Lou – New breed of integrators
-Pre-built integration with templates
-Order of magnitude more intelligent about the businesses they are serving
-Clever new business models
• What does the integration you do mean to internal IT department?
o Lou – You can’t trivialize work needed to get integration done – but IT organizations cannot act like they know app integration; The day is not far when there will be pre-built solutions for vertical markets
o Ross – Frankly –IT role changes from implementation to governance, oversight. IT organizations need the help with implementation – Also, line of business should realize they cannot do without involving IT
o Big shift in certain areas are moving away from owning infrastructure to governing IT
• What are the standards for data quality and security?
o Lou – I recently heard a great line recently…”The question is How do you know about the absolute security and resiliency of your own data center” in comparison to a cloud solution; Data is less complicated in the simpler cloud model. Interesting
Quotes heard at the session:
• “Integration has gone from being a necessary evil to one that is a competitive differentiator” Lance Speck
• “Projection of SaaS market growth is the fastest growth market ever” Ross Mason
• “Cloud forces not only value but also enables innovation” Ross Mason
• “Integration is a big chunk of friction and you need to find a way to address that”, Lance Speck
• “It is all about control – Who controls what” Lou Guercia