Connecting Clouds to Enterprise Servers

As Gartner predicted, the cloud computing market is growing, services are heating up, and new players are entering the game.

The flood of cloud-related announcements began on Monday with CSC’s entry into the business. Tuesday, cloud integration specialist Boomi announced that it would open up the supply chain software market by connecting legacy supply chain deployments to its Boomi AtomSphere platform.

Today, TIBCO Software (NASDAQ: TIBX) announced the release of the first beta of TIBCO Silver, an infrastructure for building and deploying cloud applications safely, with built-in security controls as well as methods for turning cloud resource utilization up and down as needed. In addition, applications are designed to enable migration between the cloud and enterprise servers.

“One thing that sets us apart is . . . our ability to add capacity or take machines away quickly and easily,” said Rourke McNamara, director of product marketing at TIBCO told InternetNews.com.

Another key differentiator, he added, is that over the last ten years, the company has build translators to restructure the messages from the major enterprise software vendors.

Similar projects are ongoing at other cloud vendors. “There’s a big economic impetus to adopt the cloud, but companies have a lot of on-premise investments,” Chandar Pattabhiram, vice president of product marketing at SaaS and cloud integration provider Cast Iron told InternetNews.com.

Pattabhiram noted Forrester Research surveys that said the number one problem hindering adoption and customer satisfaction is integrating the cloud with the rest of the enterprise.

Rick Nucci, CTO and co-founder of Boomi, agreed. “The electronic data interchange (EDI) world has been stagnant for the last decade or two,” Nucci told InternetNews.com. “But like a lot of spaces, that world is being disrupted by the advent of SaaS and cloud computing.”

He added that change is led by large data-centric companies like WalMart.
“WalMart tells its suppliers, ‘if you want to put your product on my shelf, here’s how you connect with me. All purchase orders and invoices are automated.'”

Since November, he added, the company has connected with most major enterprise software companies by opening up its software so that its partners could build the connectors, whereas before Boomi had tried to build all the connectors itself.

Expect more applications to appear on the cloud as platform as a service (PaaS) providers enable the rapid growth of ecosystems that help companies reach customers, Jeremy Roche, CEO of CODA, an accounting software company that recently developed a SaaS of its software, CODA 2go, on Salesforce.com’s Force.com platform, said in an e-mail to InternetNews.com.

“By building CODA 2go on Force.com, we are now able to deliver an enterprise-class SaaS accounting system that scales to businesses of almost any size. It’s opened up a whole new market for us. We already have customers from six countries and three continents using CODA 2go, a fantastic level of interest from the market and a very healthy pipeline for new customers,” he said.