Quid fit

Think of an SMB using salesforce, RightNow, Demandtec and NetSuite without any infrastructure of it’s own.

Suddenly they realize that they need end to end business processes or “flows” to “connect” the above four SaaS accounts, transform data accordingly i.e. perform traditional EAI and if needed BPM but they do not intend to use any infrastructure of their own or deploy any on premise software. In fact, they do not have any platform, infra, software or network of their own.

What happens? Do they try to ask a vendor to build a single tenant integration architecture hosted on the vendor’s infra? It is a massive effort. Arrives the integrator of the 21st century with SIPs.

Various SaaS and SIP providers, such as Salesforce.com, eloqua, Success Factors, Informatica, Open Air, nSite, Jamcracker are offering integration APIs, connectors, with others like BridgeWerx, Opsource and OZ Development are offering tools(the tools being on on-demand multi tenant hosted infra themselves) and using SaaS integrators to bring about painless SaaS integration.

But , there are two SIPs that are making waves in Ondemand zero-coding DDPC (Drag Drop Point Click) SaaS integration, one is RunMyProcess and a personal favorite which i used and found to be straight out of Harry Potter is Boomi On Demand. Try out a 30 day trial of BOD to find how we may integrate without any installation in the typical SaaS world, only using the browser.

There are challenges, for example the Boomi On Demand “atoms” are not deployed real time but on a deployment request they are “queued” in the underlying infra provided by Opsource and the “deployer” would take them up on priority basis, so fast changes and testing are not in your hands. But the Boomi On Demand development experience is fantastic as you may find out in your 30 day trial.

Now while being highly interested into how these “on demand” integration tools work i found out besides the well known multitenancy, (also well elaborated here) most of the providers use Amazon EC2 and despite the intimidating concept of “Cloud computing” , the Amazon EC2 is pretty simple to use.

Companies like RightScale are already providing “wrappers” on top of Amazon EC2 automating the process of setting up and managing of server clusters on the EC2 service.

Indeed, Amazon EC2 offers a shortcut to SaaS.

Popularity: 92% [?]

There is no “standard” API for accessing SaaS solutions.
If we limit ourselves within On Demand Applications (SaaS is a paradigm, On-demand Applications are specific subset of pay per Usage basis hosted solutions) like salesforce, RightNow, Demandtec or NetSuite.
( WebEx Connect is a SaaS application but not an On-demand One)

It seems that this market is very segregated and only salesforce.com integrated solutions or “apps” are certified by the vendor via Appexchange certification.
BTW Appexchange or APEX is the API for programmable salesforce.com operations

This is because of the fact that the object model of each of these separate apps are different and that’s why these apps are “separate”.

All these On-demand Apps as mentioned require separate integration implementations as POJOs and then generating web services.

Another reason why a “standard API” is not feasible is due to the disruptive (for the better) effect of JSON and REST via which the next generation On demand/ SaaS Application integration is expected primarily due to the advent of hugely popular facebook API which is theoretically a SaaS deviant in the social context.

Is there a scope of any standard?

Popularity: 100% [?]