Fernando Labastida’s Integration Blog

By Fernando Labastida

So, there’s a recession on the way, or already here. Some accounts say it’s going to get pretty bad, and others are not so pessimistic. All I know is that the job losses have been worse than expected, and despite yessterday’s upswing in the stock market due to the Fed’s offer to lend banks $200 billion in exchange for risky mortgage debt, others are not so sanguine about the move.

What are corporate IT departments to do in the midst of such uncertain economic times? Is this the time to retrench and not invest in software? Not on your life. Most companies are probably in the middle of one integration project or another, such as building a SOA infrastructure, building a data warehouse for business intelligence purposes, migrating old data from legacy applications to a new SaaS application, or connecting their CRM, accounting, ERP, project management, inventory management or manufacturing operations in order to make their business more efficient.

These projects are all oriented towards one thing: decreasing costs, and increasing revenue. This is no longer the late 90s / early 2000s. Corporations no longer purchase software to acquire “cool technology.” Software projects are now purely utilitarian, with CIOs focusing on bottom line as well as top line revenues only.

What corporate IT departments need to do is stop messing around and get going with these projects.

If projects are being delayed because of the use of custom code, companies need to acquire a tool to cut down development time. This is not the time to “do-it-yourself.”

Here are the reasons for acquiring a tool, such as (surprise) an integration tool, rather than relying on labor-intensive manual processes, during a recession:

• Low total cost of ownership
• Faster time to market
• Flexible, scalable implementations
• Higher level of integration with third-party technology
• Integrated, cross-functional processes
• Automated, standardized design processes
• Optimization of development resources
• High reliability through proven performance
• Self-documenting

This is no time to use your valuable development resources on the mundane task of integrating applications. They need to be put on tasks designed to optimize efficiency in order to weather the hard times. This is the moment you’ve been waiting for, the moment to acquire labor-saving software tools.

Fernando A. Labastida

CIO Insight, in a recent posting in their “Future of IT” series, announced that 60 percent of those surveyed for their “Future of IT” survey have said they’ve adopted SOA and web services, and three quarters say it will be “the bedrock of their IT architecture.”  However, they are concerned that this last figure is 5%  below the survey results of January of last year.  One of the potential reasons they cite is the failure to meet the expectation that SOA will save companies money, among other things.

I believe that, to a certain extent, SOA has been over-hyped.  As a sales person I recognize that what I sell is not for everyone; SOA is not for everyone either.  Architecting an overarching SOA architecture, with an Enterprise Service Bus (ESB), and all enterprise applications connected to the ESB so that ad-hoc applications can be built “on-the-fly” from the functionality of these enterprise apps, is for large enterprises. And it’s not for every large enterprise either.  There are large companies with dozens of different geographical locations or departments where it doesn’t make sense for all applications to be connected under a SOA umbrella.

And gone are the days when large, 12-18 month enterprise projects are the way to go; the success of Salesforce.com vis-a-vis Siebel is ample evidence of that.  In my world, companies large and small contact me for tactical point-to-point integrations.  If their project works out well with my product, then they’ll roll it out as part of a larger product and buy more of my product.  And it works.  They didn’t have to marshal dozens of people and put together new teams and come up with new strategic IT and Business initiatives and get everybody aligned with the business and IT goals and disrupt what they were currently doing so that their companies could embark on these huge monolithic projects. A small team of go-getters just “got it done.”

So I’ll get off my soap box now, but I think that companies are starting to see that SOA is not for everyone.

“Get on the bus!”

I wanted to follow-up on my post about legacy migration from Nov. 30th to comment on some blog posts about ESBs (Enterprise Service Bus) and SOA (Service Oriented Architecture).

For a definition of SOA, I saw a great one on a recent post “SOA Essentials, Part 1,” by Jeff Davis,

“A Service Oriented Architecture, or SOA, represents an approach towards software development that emphasizes the creation of reusable software services that are based upon discrete units of business functionality.”

In other words, certain functions from applications like a CRM or ERP application are “componentized,” and can be put together to make distinct services that serve a particular function such as “create account,” and these services can then be put together to form an “orchestrated business process.”  These new business processes are essentially composite applications that can be created on-the-fly with the new web services technology available today. 

An ESB is supposed to the be messaging layer in a SOA environment.  Messages from different applications are communicated, using WSDL and SOAP protocols, and transported in the ESB, or service bus.  However, Blogger Loraine Lawson from IT Business Edge, today references an article by fellow blogger Robin Bloor which essentially expands the mission of an ESB from that of being a SOA-enabler to being an “integration-on-demand” enabler.

ESBs, according to Bloor, after interviewing executives at ESB provider CapeClear Software, “…actually herald from the Enterprise Application Integration days. So, he contends, it’s really more than “just” a messaging software for SOA – it’s an integration engine or mediation engine…”

That still does not address the issue of making the functionality from legacy applications available as a service in a SOA environment. ESB vendors essentially need other integration software, such as Pervasive’s Data Integrator, to provide the “on-ramp to the bus,” or “last-mile connectivity,” on to the ESB. Our experience at Pervasive, with ESB provider Sonic Software, has been that older versions of ERP, accounting or CRM packages, or home-grown applications, don’t have web services APIs.  They need a tool that can connect natively to these applications or to the underlying databases and expose their data or functionality as a service first, before they can actually connect to the ESB.

So in the beautiful brave new world of web services and SOA, where every application uses XML and can communicate with every other application out there, legacy applications do not fit into this perfect picture.  However, it will rear it’s ugly head again and again, and as in my previous post, the majority of data in companies out there is still locked away in legacy applications.

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.