“Cloud Integration in Minutes” – True or False?
- by Bruce Tierney
The short answer is “yes”. Connecting on-premise and cloud applications “in minutes” is true…provided
you only consider the connectivity subset of integration and have a small
number of cloud integration touch points.
At the recent Gartner AADI conference, 230 attendees filled
up the Oracle session to get a more comprehensive answer to this question. During the session, titled “Simplifying
Integration – The Cloud & Mobile Pre-requisite”, Oracle’s Tim Hall described
cloud connectivity and then, equally importantly, the other essential and
sometimes overlooked aspects of integration required to ensure a long term
application and service integration strategy. To understand the challenges and
opportunities faced by cloud integration, the session started off with a slide
that describes how connectivity can quickly transition from simplicity to
complexity as the number of applications and service vendor instances grows:
Increased
complexity puts increased demand on the integration platform
As companies expand from on-premise applications into a
hybrid on-premise/cloud infrastructure with support for mobile, cloud, and
social, there is a new sense of urgency to implement a unified and comprehensive
service integration platform. Without
getting this unified platform in place, companies face increased complexity and
cost managing a growing patchwork of niche integration toolsets as well as the
disparate standards mandated by each SaaS vendor as shown in the image below:
dddddddddddddddddddd
Incomplete
and overlapping offerings from a patchwork of niche vendors
Also at Gartner AADI, Oracle SOA Suite customer Geeta Pyne,
Director of Middleware at BMC presented their successful strategy on how BMC
efficiently manages their cloud integration despite disparate requirements from
each vendor. From one of Geeta’s slide:
Interfaces
are dictated by SaaS vendors; wide variety (SOAP, REST, Socket, HTTP/POX,
SFTP); Flexibility of Oracle Service Bus/SOA Suite helps to support
Every
vendor has their way to handle Security; WS-Security, Custom Header; Support
in Oracle Service Bus helps to adhere to disparate requirements
At BMC, the flexibility of Oracle Service Bus and Oracle SOA
Suite allowed them to support the wide variation in the functional requirements
as mandated by their SaaS vendors.
In contrast to the patchwork platform approach of escalating
complexity from overlapping SaaS toolkits, Oracle’s strategy is to provide a
unified platform to support disparate requirements from your SaaS vendors,
on-premise apps, legacy apps, and more. Furthermore, Oracle SOA Suite includes the many aspects of comprehensive
integration beyond basic connectivity including orchestration, analytics (BAM,
events…), service virtualization and more in a single unified interface.
Oracle SOA
Suite – Unified and comprehensive
To summarize, yes you can achieve “cloud integration in
minutes” when considering the connectivity subset of integration but be sure to
look for ways to simplify as you consider a more comprehensive view of
integration beyond basic connectivity such as service virtualization,
management, event processing and more. And finally, be sure your integration platform has the deep flexibility
to handle the requirements of all your future SaaS applications…many of which
are unknown to you now.
