Jitterbit: 3 Ways Cloud Integration Will Aid ‘Business-Critical’ Apps & Data 
IDN continues its series on thought leaders in the “cloud integration” sector, as it is poised to become a crucial component in defining the next wave of cloud and SaaS adoption for companies concerned with leveraging legacy assets. IDN speaks with Ilan Sehayek, the CTO of Jitterbit, an open source provider of cloud integration solutions for data, applications and SaaS.
While SaaS and cloud adoption are rising dramatically, many customers say they need the ability to easily and quickly access more enterprise data to make their cloud-based applications truly “business critical.” In response, Jitterbit is driving real-time integration and data synchronization between on-premise and cloud resources for end users and SaaS providers.
Jitterbit CTO Ilan Sehayek predicts that 2011 will be the break-out year for cloud-focused integration solutions.”
It’s really an exciting time for cloud now, as integration is becoming a more important part of the go-to-market solution,” told IDN. “Cloud integration is now no longer an afterthought, it is coming to the top of the list for IT architects, developers and even business users.”
Jitterbit’s latest offerings expand the “cloud integration” landscape in some critical directions, and include:
Jitterbit CloudReplicate, an offering to integrate enterprise data to Salesforce.com and any Amazon EC2 cloud-based RDBMS. The offering aims to make it easier to retain, retrieve and provide real-time reporting. Under the hood, CloudRerplicate mirrors Salesforce to a central data warehouse to allow customers to access a more accurate and up-to-date view of their data from the cloud. The approach is designed to allow end users to conduct advanced business intelligence on their enterprise data.
Jitterbit Connect for Salesforce.com, a wizard-based integration tool that simplifies the process of connecting on-premise enterprise apps with Salesforce.com. It allows Salesforce admins and users to connect CRM data with other on-premise and cloud systems, and supports bi-directional data integration through the Salesforce Web Services API.
Jitterbit offers a “no coding” approach to cloud integration, which is based on pre-assembled configuration libraries. “This simplifies and accelerates deployment of integration between application, data, and business processes across on-premise and cloud systems.”
“Cloud integration is now no longer an afterthought, it is coming to the top of the list for IT architects, developers and even business users.”
Ilan Sehayek
CTO
Jitterbit
Where Jitterbit Sees 3 Waves
of Cloud Integration Adoption
The demand from customers to integrate their cloud and on-premise resources is driving the need for more simplicity, Sehayek said.
“Over the past two years, we’ve seen a shift is what companies want in terms of ‘cloud integration’ solutions,” he said. “Starting in 2009, the thrust for cloud integration was for companies that needed to integrate with SaaS applications. But in 2011, we’re seeing the need for cloud integration going further.”
Most cloud integration, especially to SaaS applications, is done manually—data is uploaded in batches and not continuously and that simply doesn’t scale or ensure data quality. “So, we see many customers who want a mission-critical connection [to SaaS] that will constantly synchronize their data between on-premise and the cloud,” Sehayek said.
And, as customers come to perceive that their cloud deployments should not simply be silos, but rather extensions of their enterprises, there is a surge in demand for and questions about a variety of new cloud integration capabilities, Sehayek told IDN. “We focus not just on one cloud integration product set, but rather we focus on what are the core ubiquitous problems people are trying to solve where integration can help,” Sehayek said. “So, in short, we go where the market is going.”
These days, Jitterbit’s conversations about cloud integration are driving the company to create solutions for three different classes of adopters:
- Larger enterprise customers looking to integrate not simply end user data, but their enterprise cloud-based resources with SaaS providers, such as Salesforce.com
- Smaller firms and SMBs ready to actually put core pieces of their infrastructure on the cloud.
- SaaS // cloud-based ISVs looking to increase adoption by bundling integration-ready capabilities into their offerings, which would remove cost, complexity and other barriers to end user adoption.
Use Cases, Realities Driving
Demand for Cloud Integration
Seeing these trends all through 2010, Jitterbit last year focused its core cloud integration portfolio to support business-critical SaaS-driven applications, such as Salesforce.com.
“We believe that while the demand for SaaS applications will continue to grow strongly, enterprises also need those solutions to be flexible, easy-to-configure, and not require tons of added development work by enterprise IT,” Sehayek told IDN.
In fact, SaaS integration is becoming a hurdle to SaaS adoption as enterprises discover how costly and complicated it can be to tie existing resources into SaaS capabilities. “These integration complications can really blow up a budget and even really start to throw out the value proposition of an entire SaaS project,” he added.
Toward that end, Jitterbit is developing offerings (and considering offering) specially designed for ISVs offering cloud-based SaaS options of their software. “For SaaS customers, integration needs to be as invisible as possible, and we believe offering SaaS providers a way to provide customers easy integration will become a crucial ‘value-added’ OEM-type of capability,” Sehayek told IDN.
“More and more, we hear from ISVs with cloud applications that tell us they need a better and easier way for their SaaS applications to grab an organization’s data, business analytics, billing information and so on,” Sehayek said. “And, it’s not just grabbing one type of data just once. They need to be like an always-on utility, and feed multiple data streams [from the customer site] into their SaaS application, reliably and continuously.”
