Fernando Labastida’s Integration Blog

By Fernando Labastida

DM Review is a great source for articles on data and application integration. However, I have to take issue with a recent article on Application Integration for Midmarket Companies. The article starts out on the right foot, comparing enterprise-level ETL and EAI tools and custom coding, and poking holes in both. Enterprise-level ETL and EAI tools are like “using a chainsaw to open a letter,” and custom code is a very risky proposition: it monopolizes the time of the most skilled developers, lacks scalability and flexibility, and is not reusable, among other things.

However, the prescribed solution is all wrong. The article recommends an “integration appliance” as the answer to the midmarket integration challenge, asserting positive attributes such as low-TCO, no need for programming skills, fast delivery, and simpler operations. An integration appliance is a self-contained hardware/software combination that delivers “integration-in-a-box.”

However, customers and system integrators who have had experience with integration appliances point out the following drawbacks:

1. Simple integrations, such as direct mapping of data from one source to another, can be done without programming; however, when complex business rules have to be implemented, a more common scenario, appliances still require programming, often taking more time to implement than customers expect.
2. Appliances tend to be very costly. Up front costs are high and are not justified when the cost of their attendant software and hardware components are factored in; a proven integration application, coupled with a state-of-the-art server, properly configured by a system administrator, is more economical and provides more flexibility. Connecting additional end-points to the appliance, when complex business rules have to be implemented, cannot be done simply through drag-and-drop configuration, but requires programming, increasing the ongoing costs of ownership.
3. Meeting increasing performance demands with an appliance is complicated. Appliances are delivered with a fixed hardware configuration; optimizing the hardware for increasing data volume requires additional intervention by the appliance vendor. The latest application integration software, on the other hand, comes already equipped to utilize additional CPUs or cores if and when the client company decides to add horsepower, which it can do very cost effectively.

The best solution for midmarket application integration is a robust, agile, lightweight, low-TCO, integration software platform, that can either be delivered as a toolset with an easy-to-use yet powerful visual integration interface and extensive connectivity, or as a fully delivered, fixed-price integration solution.

Click here for a free trial of Pervasive’s new Data Integrator V.9, with the revolutionary new Data Mediation Services for creating your own connectors and adapters. After downloading the software, contact me so I can issue you a license key.

I’ve worked in the Latin American markets for many years now, and I have to say it is a difficult market to penetrate for IT vendors. The biggest competition for software vendors is not other vendors, but custom code. Salaries for developers and engineers are very low compared to U.S. salaries, sort of akin to the salaries of Indian engineers which has enabled the explosive growth of outsourced development. So it’s been a pleasant surprise to see that companies in Mexico and Brazil have really taken to the concept of an integration application.

However, there are peculiarities of selling into the Latin American marketplace that I’ve had to learn in order to be successful. I’ve been advised by my system integrator in Mexico that you can’t say your integration platform helps companies “save on development costs,” because development costs are so low anyway. You’ve got to sell them on the time aspect, how an integration platform will enable a company to configure a new integration on-the-fly, or how an integration platform can enable a company to create repeatable and documentable processes that won’t walk out the door with developers who quit.

Another aspect of selling in Latin America, which actually makes an integration platform a more compelling value proposition south of the border than in the U.S., is the IT and application environment of mid-sized companies. Case-in-point, in working with a Mexican Business Intelligence vendor (there are a whole crop of home-grown ISVs in Mexico and Brazil that I’ve discovered), I’ve learned that in the Mexican manufacturing sector, in areas outside of Mexico City, many companies have older versions of Oracle or SAP and have not kept up with their maintenance and support. Despite the fact that both Oracle and SAP have their own ETL tools that they practically give away, these older versions don’t, presenting a quagmire to the Business Intelligence company: their product works on top of a data mart or data warehouse, but these companies have no way, save custom code, to build data marts or data warehouses. An integration tool will enable them to increase their potential market size and go after the mid-market, which in Mexico is ripe for the picking!

As a follow-on to my late Thanksgiving announcement of the release of Version 9.0 of Pervasive’s Data Integrator, Mike Hoskins, Pervasive CTO and General Manager of the Integration Division, was interviewed in IT Week out of the UK. The FIRST thing they asked him was about the SDK that allows partner companies or corporate clients to build their own adapters. It seems as though the opening up of the Pervasive platform is getting some attention in the media.

Hoskins also commented on the integration market in general. Despite the fact that integration software has existed for a long time (Pervasive’s integration platform has been around for more than 20 years, having gotten it’s start as Data Junction), Hoskins noted that the vast majority of companies out there are still using custom code to integrate their disparate applications. That’s changing, he said, as upper management recognizes the inefficiencies of this model, and ISVs continue to do battle with the integration problem.

Finally, IT Week mentions software-as-a-service (saas) applications and their integration challenges, to which Hoskins replies:

“The Achilles heel for the SaaS model is that people assume that because software is easy to discover, install and understand, integration will be easy as well.”

Read the article at: http://www.itweek.co.uk/itweek/analysis/2204237/integration-platforms-steal

Prominent blogger on data and application integration issues, as well as SOA issues, Loraine Lawson at her blog Mergers and Integrations, picked up on the IT Week UK article, asking if automated integration for saas was a Holiday Miracle.

She added additional street cred to Hoskins’ comment about the growth of demand for integration by saas vendors, pointing to two other blog posts that comment on the increasing role of business executives in acquiring software, as well as the increasing challenges for IT of integrating saas applications.

Read Loraine’s blog post here: http://www.itbusinessedge.com/blogs/mia/?p=260

By Fernando Labastida

The hottest trend in the IT channel and VAR market, according to CMP’s ChannelWebNetwork, is the move to managed services and business software. To achieve more than 10-15 percent growth in a market dominated by hardware-oriented VARS, solution providers need to offer solutions and focus on software, states Craig Zarley in “How to Grow Your Business.”

A new crop of fast-growth software VARS are popping up and focusing on business applications in the SMB market. CRM is experiencing the biggest growth and adoption amongst solution-oriented VARS, with Microsoft Dynamics taking the charge, and Software-as-a-service vendor Salesforce.com, a formidable challenger, according to Rick Whiting in his analysis of the “VARBusiness 2007 State of Technology Survey: Business Software” in his article “How To Succeed in Business Software.”.

“Today it’s less about the technology and more about the business processes these applications will enable on a vertical industry basis,” said Michael Speyer, a Forrester Research analyst, as quoted in the article by Whiting.

Whiting cites concerns, however, by solution providers surveyed about adopting business software. The high cost of software presents major obstacles, as well as the time and expense of training, “…and the complexities of integrating business applications with other information technology.”

In order for the new business software VAR to truly maximize its growth potential, it must focus on its customers’ business needs, fine-tuning these applications to their particular business processes. However, for customers to maximize the value of business applications such as CRM or ERP, they must be seamlessly integrated with other applications in the enterprise, including legacy applications, flat files and unstructured data. For solution providers to spend valuable time custom coding these integrations instead of focusing on value-added business consulting is a waste of time and can result in important cost overruns for the VAR.

An independent data and application integration tool is a good solution to help VARS focus on high-margin business-oriented activities.

What is an independent data and application integration tool? It is a tool that is a stand-alone product. Companies such as Oracle, IBM, SAP and Business Objects all have their own data integration tools, but because they are part of the afore-mentioned enterprise software companies their neutrality is compromised.

Partnering with them for data integration purposes can cause channel conflicts with whatever business application the solution provider chooses as its bread and butter.

VARs need to look for integration tools that meet the following criteria: they need to be easy to use, with minimal to no coding; lightweight and easy to install yet robust and scalable with superior performance; have a variety of connectors that include legacy applications such as COBOL or ISAM, flat files, databases, major applications, and can play in a web services or service oriented architecture (SOA) environment; must provide data quality assessment and remediation; the company must provide great pre- and post-sales support; and finally, it must have a low total cost of ownership.

Solution providers should not have to worry about long implementation or installation times, nor promote an integration solution that costs almost as much as the business application that is their life-blood. It must be an enabler, not a project in and of itself.

Data and application integration tools can help VARS and solution providers in a variety of ways.

The most obvious is in the migration of data from legacy applications to new applications. New cutting edge on-demand applications are nothing without data, or rather nothing without clean or accurate data. Data integration tools, with data profiling and remediation capabilities, are key to successful software migration projects because of productivity and speed gains in using a visual GUI-based design tool.

With an increasing number of VARS focusing on CRM technology, and the popularity of CRM as the repository of record for customer data, CRM projects can quickly turn into major integration projects. Users learn to love the user interface of applications such as Salesforce.com, according to Raphael Spinelli, CEO of SalesAware, a Salesforce.com System Integrator in Mexico City.

“Salesforce.com users want to be able to view sales transactions, product availability, and trouble tickets from their Salesforce.com user interface,” said Spinelli from his office in Mexico City’s swank Polanco district. “We now have to help them integrate with applications such as SAP or homegrown applications,” added Spinelli.

SalesAware uses a data integration tool in order to provide quick and easy integrations between Salesforce and other applications, while they focus on the more value-added tasks of helping their customers, such as one of Mexico’s largest transportation companies, with business process improvements using Salesforce.com.

While VARs and solution providers are starting to transition to a software and business process improvement model as their strategy for fast growth, there are still some considerations to help make this strategy more productive. Data and application integration tools are often overlooked, and integrators often feel they should be able to do the job themselves. However, custom coded integration projects can become a spaghetti-like, point-to-point, brittle nightmare. VARS and solution providers are much better off partnering with an integration tools vendor to handle the mundane integration tasks, and focus on the important revenue generating activities that provide value to their customers.

Fernando Labastida is an account executive with Pervasive Software, and serves the Northern California, Pacific Northwest, Southwest Canada, Minnesota, and all of Latin America. He can be reached at http://www.labastida.com or 512-945-9273.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Fernando_Labastida

By Fernando Labastida

There is an interesting phenomenon happening in the small and medium business segment. The widespread adoption of on-demand or software as a service (saas) CRM, led by Salesforce.com, and followed by companies such as NetSuite and RightNow Technologies.

Well, that’s not really new.

What is new is the expanded use of saas CRM software within these mini-enterprises, whether independent businesses or smaller divisions or departments of larger corporations, as their principal business platform. Since saas CRM manages the lifeblood of the business, sales and customers, and is increasingly more user friendly and flexible, it is becoming the preferred method for companies to manage their business.

As a result, it is also becoming the de facto integration hub, or SOA enabler, for the smaller enterprise.

A case in point is the experience of a well-known educational products sales company. It’s parent company sells educational toys through retailers. However, it launched a division that sells education-oriented items to schools and school districts, such as a handheld screen-based interactive tool that uses story narratives to teach English proficiency to non-native English speakers. This newer division established a territory sales model, with geographically-based sales executives selling to school districts in their area.

The main corporate entity has only a handful of account managers who sell to large retailers such as Wal-Mart and Toys’r'Us. Whereas it is geared towards a retail sales model and related B2B IT infrastructure, the newer division had the infrastructure needs of a territory-based direct sales model. They required a CRM application to track leads, opportunities, and closed sales, and because of the reduced bandwidth of this smaller business unit, they required the efficiency gains of an automated commission calculating application.

With no dedicated IT resources (IT resources are tied to corporate and are available “on-loan” to the new division), and a need to ramp-up quickly, the division chose to bring the CRM and commission calculation functionality of the on-demand model. They chose Salesforce.com and Xactly Corporation, respectively, to fulfill these functions. The one on-premise application they had access to was Oracle Financials for accounting.

The missing piece was to integrate these applications together. They chose to go with a packaged integration platform, adopting their subscription-based pricing model and on-premise software.

In addition to being the CRM platform for the new division, Salesforce.com is also serving as the de facto “enterprise service bus” to incorporate the accounting functionality of Oracle Financials, and to trigger Xactly to do it’s job of calculating sales commissions.

This use of Salesforce.com as a de facto on-demand ESB platform was noted in an August 2007 white paper entitled “Busting Myths of On-Demand Integration,” by Peter Coffee, Director of Platform Research.

“On-demand platforms exhibit the growing capability to provide a foundation for integration,” he said, citing a May 2007 announcement of the Salesforce.com SOA technology that enables the exposure and consumption of web services.

In the same paragraph he notes:

“This is not to say, however, that a move to a Web services protocol strategy (such as that of using a saas application such as Salesforce.com) is a prerequisite for on-demand integration…there are options available for use with the salesforce.com platform” such as custom coding or a third party integration platform.

In other words, on-demand applications, Salesforce.com being the most prominent, are quickly establishing themselves as integration hubs the way ESB providers such as Sonic Software, IBM’s Websphere, and BEA’s Weblogic were formulated to be.

These SOA solutions, however, are cost-prohibitive for smaller companies, divisions or departments, and are often managed by enterprise IT staffs who are unresponsive to the needs of the department. These smaller enterprises have to fend for themselves, and are adopting on-demand applications that require little to no IT involvement.

IT typically has to get involved when it comes to integration, according to Coffee. Such was the case with the educational products company. Their IT department provided the input that the newer division needed to give the technical “thumbs-up” to the integration solution. But due to human bandwidth issues they decided to go with a fully delivered integration solution as opposed to the traditional toolset that is typically sold to IT departments.

Tying together Salesforce.com, Oracle Financials and Xactly Corporation was done in the span of four months and cost less than $50,000. Why did it take that long? Because they had to take a breather between deciding on an integration vendor and a commission calculation vendor.

Compare that with enterprise application integration projects which typically take nine months or more and cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, and you can see why Salesforce.com, together with fully configured integration solutions, are quickly becoming the “integration hubs” or systems of record for the smaller enterprise.

Fernando Labastida is an account executive with Pervasive Software, and serves the Northern California, Pacific Northwest, Southwest Canada, Minnesota, and all of Latin America. He can be reached at http://www.labastida.com or 512-945-9273.