Going Cloud... Thinking App Integration (part 1)

As many new and upcoming markets are drifting away from the norm of IT, Cloud based services are continuing to grow and grow fairly quickly in the market place, according to IDC’s Cloud Services Overview Report “Sales of Cloud-related technologies are growing at an average of 26 percent a year”.

That is roughly six times the rate of IT spending overall, the report goes on to state that in 2009 estimated spending on cloud technologies was just over US $17 billion and will grow to a whopping US$44 billion by 2013.

So as you start to review your future IT budget and prepare for the move to cloud based services, there are 4 critical elements to understanding the true value of the service being offered – Application Integration, Security, Storage and Virtual I/O.

In today’s article – we touch on Application Integration.

A number of companies have already invested a considerable amount of money into solutions that can assist in managing their network and platform infrastructure, these solutions are an integral part of your business and should not be ignored when moving to a Cloud based Solution.

The complexities involved in implementing a solution and ensuring that your current products’ potential is maximized requires integration.  We spend considerable effort in ensuring that our cloud based offerings, like Service-now.com can support the integrations required to tap this potential, and as leading systems integrators in our field, we provide the necessary skills and resources to make the integration between systems seamless.

Integration means more than just batch-processing chunks of data being traded between applications once or twice per day the way that was done on mainframes, according to Tom Fisher, vice president of cloud computing at SuccessFactors.com, a business-application SaaS provider in San Mateo, California

Being able to provision and manage user identities from a single location across a range of applications is critical, especially for companies that have never been in the software-providing business before and don’t view their IT as a primary product, he says.

So remember you don’t want to lose the capex on that expensive software solution you bought a few years ago, find out if your existing solutions can work hand in hand with the cloud based offering. And will these solutions be able to communicate and forward information between the varying platforms successfully ?

In the next article, we’ll consider the underlying security required as basis of this service.

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