Tech Industry – Page 22

Edge Integration with SnapLogic

February 20, 2008 2 Comments

Around the beginning of this month I started doing some consulting work with SnapLogic. SnapLogic was founded by Informatica alumni who were solving problems of quickly gaining access to data located inside the enterprise in order to build hybrid applications that solved their real-world problems. They originally solved this problem with resourceful scripts that would pull data out of various data sources, store and/or index this data, and then make it available to users in a format of easily consumable by the end users. (when they were originally doing this, the term Mashup wasn’t coined yet, and still isn’t favored inside corporate walls…hence the term Enterprise 2.0).

They quickly realized that they were working for a data integration firm and had build their own low level RESTful data integration. Hence, SnapLogic was formed. As an open source company, the SnapLogic edge integration platform can take data from various data sources and represent a RESTful interface to that data. Since the platform has Components that can talk to standard data sources, you can use the platform to implement a standard data services layer within an organization. Also, since it’s all open source, you can build your own Components, or use ones built by the community, to provide data services into a mix of data sources: local, remote, accessed directly, accessed via an API, etc.

On the internet, we have all see mashups of data from multiple sources (i.e., fetching a set of locations from a real estate database and then laying those homes for sale on top of Google Maps). This is an example of the RESTful data integration in action. Slowly, the enterprise has been pulled in this direction by their users (usually with the IT department kicking and screaming because they have to give up control). The SnapLogic platform has the potential to offer the IT organization a layer of control, but also offer the users access to the data that they need in order to build enterprise mashups.

I have been aware of SnapLogic since before they came out of stealth due to the fact that a number of people that I used to work with were involved with the company. At that time, I was working at IONA and there were a number of interesting discussions going around about REST (most were usually started or ended by Steve Vinoski ) as well as the process of migrating the company from a pure closed source software provider to a hybrid model of closed and open source. Thus, I was glad when the opportunity arose to help out SnapLogic recently and gain more experience with their platform; mixing my integration experience with my recent experiences in open source.

Stay tuned for more about my experiences working with the SnapLogic and their Edge Integration Platform

Microsoft Bids $44.6B for Yahoo

February 1, 2008 Leave a Comment

I open up my morning reading and here is the first thing that grabs me:

Microsoft Offers $44.6 Billion for Yahoo

Of course, something of this magnitude the first place I went for comments was to the Scobleizer. After his stint at MS and his frustrated departure, I knew he would have some interesting thoughts (also a great link to all the buzz around this already).

My initial reaction is that this is a great business merger. Squeeze some huge operating efficiencies (aka, lay off alot of people) and give the combined entity a better chance to compete against Google…not say that they would be able to compete, as the result of that would be seen only a year out and there are a lot of decisions to be made between now and then that will impact the effectiveness of the merger.

I think actually making this work would be tough considering the cultural difference between the two. There would also be the potential for a large exodus of users who don’t want to support MS. Maybe a better acquirer would be Google…as if that would get past the regulators.

Sun MySQL Acquisition Followup

January 21, 2008 Leave a Comment

Since my last post about last week’s acquisition spree, I have talked to a number of people on the topic of the Sun buying MySQL. While I haven’t been running into Sun much lately in my enterprise sales forays it was largely because I have been dealing with SOA based development solutions, an area where Sun doesn’t have a strong solution (even though I had partnering conversations with them at one point to help strengthen their offering). After talking to some people who have been tracking Sun more closely lately as well a few Sun Executives and CIOs, I have seen a different picture.

Sun has been working on this acquisition for well over a year. It fills a very nice hole that they had in their solution stack…the database. No IT Executive I have talked to would seriously consider replacing their Oracle or DB2 with MySQL, but they would consider moving 100’s or even 1000’s of edge databases over to MySQL. This gives Sun a leg up in their enterprise sales and “solution” providing. It also helps to round out their Open Source solution stack (the OpenSolaris/MySQL 1-2).

Additionally, I understand that Sun will hold MySQL as a separate entity and let it run as such. With the inevitable inclusion of a few Sun Execs and Sales connections, this should help ease concerns that the web2.0 companies who run their business on MySQL were having. It still remains to be seen if some of the performance enhancements that the user community has been begging for will be addressed or not.