SaaS/Cloud Integration

Originally published in The New Stack Update.

iPaaS (integration platform as a service) offerings have been touted for a while, but have so far not reached a broad level adoption. Perhaps this is because of limited demand for Dell Boomi or open source WSO2. Maybe integration by its very nature requires manual, custom professional services. We do know that according to an UBM/Interop ITX report, 32 percent of technology pros using the cloud do not integrate their IaaS, SaaS and other cloud services with each other. A third do use custom coding and vendor APIs to integrate some SaaS applications. Only 17 percent use a cloud-based integration platform. Moving forward, the success of automation efforts will be inhibited unless disparate cloud services are integrated in at least some manner, even if so called iPaaS products are not the answer.