Informatica Perspectives

The number of articles and blog postings on cloud computing is staggering. Here is one from Chris Boorman Cloud Computing - integration is key which in turn references several other blogs. And check out this Architecture and Integration Summit taking place in Minneapolis on October 30th www.architectureandintegrationsummit.com. Informatica is leading a keynote presentation along with participation from Amazon and Salesforce.com.  The presentation by Sanjay Krishnamurthi, Peter Coffee and Jeff Barr will conclude with a live demo showing how salesforce.com can be integrated with Amazon using Informatica’s On-Demand integration – cloud computing to cloud computing using cloud integration. 

This is very unscientific, but if you visit www.googlefight.com and type in the keywords “Cloud Computing” and “SaaS”, the winner is Cloud Computing with 15,000,000 hits!  SaaS is also huge with 14,500,000 hits, but given that this acronym has been around a lot longer, it is surprising to me that the Cloud Computing term wins the fight.

Cloud computing is not only here now, it is ubiquitous. Clearly salesforce.com is one of the most well-known and often talked about business applications that are available as SaaS, but it is not the only one. Take Informatica for example. We have 17 different SaaS services in use within our own organization which may a surprising number to some. Not only that, but some of these are pretty darned important for day-to-day operations. The data in all of these cloud applications needs to be synchronized with our corporate systems and integrated with on-premise applications not to mention our contact hub and data warehouse.

If you think your company doesn’t use business solutions in the cloud, go ask your CIO. You might be surprised to find out how long the list is. And if your CIO doesn’t know the answer, then there is a high probability that some of the business units in the company are using an external service provider and forgot to tell IT.

The point is that cloud computing is now mainstream, so if it’s not part of your IT strategy and architecture, you have some catching up to do.  Most importantly, you need to learn enough about this new phenomenon to be able to deal with information security, compliance and integration needs. I don’t want my comments about security of data in the cloud to suggest it cannot be done or that it might not meet regulatory compliance or corporate data policy demands. In fact, quite the opposite is true in the virtual world.  Services like Informatica On Demand and Boomi have proven that accessing and transmitting data to and from cloud computing environments like Amazon and Salesforce.com can be done securely and safely.  In my mind, cloud computing may, over time, prove to “unlock” data from its current confines as long as you address these very real and very practical requirements.  In other words, keep your feet on the ground and tackle the key issues without getting caught up in the hype and promise of cloud computing.

By they way, here are two other Google fights of interest:

“Integration Competency Center” = 489,000 hits versus “SOA Center of Excellence” = 131,000 hits which indicates that ICC’s are mentioned on the web close to 4-times as often as the SOA COE.  Even more interesting is “BI COE” = 1,190,000 hits versus “SOA COE” = 130,000 hits.  It seems from this that business intelligence COE’s are 9 times more common than their SOA counter parts. This may not have anything to do with Cloud Computing – but it’s fun.