Cloud Computing vs. Custom Integration

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As many IT managers will tell you, data integration continues to be a major headache for IT. Tech blogger Loraine Lawson talks to a vendor about some of the issues involved, especially those relating to cloud computing.

Study shows that data integration is still costly and requires a lot of manual coding.

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Cloud is driving growth for data integration vendor Pervasive Software — which isn’t surprising. But what is surprising is that 65 percent of the integration work is still on-premise, according to Lance Speck, general manager for integration at Pervasive Software.

How’s that again?

It seems the cloud becomes the last straw on custom code.

“A lot of these people who were satisfied with whatever clunky custom code they had built to hold them together for the last decade or two are now forklifting pieces of that to the cloud and when they do, they break their integrations and their infrastructure, so they have to rethink how they do it,” Speck said. “So they’re saying, ‘Well, we’re not building ourselves again because that was a mess’ or maybe ‘There wasn’t an option at the time, but now we’d like some place where they have subject matter expertise on how to build it in an extensible way that will scale and give them things they’ve had on their wish list for the last 10 years.’ For us, it’s opened tons of conversations.”

I talked with Speck recently about Pervasive’s past year and its focus for the new year. We also talked about the last Gartner Magic Quadrant for Data Integration Tools. Pervasive is among the thinning ranks of vendors on the Magic Quadrant. The company lost a bit of ground this year on ability to execute, largely due to small factors like a shift in how Gartner weighs its criteria and a client upset at the time Gartner called, Speck explains. But just like at the Oscars, just being in the quadrant is an honor, he adds.

Over the past year, the integration division has focused on channels for growth. It launched Pervasive Galaxy, a marketplace for integrations — connectors, processes, even apps — built with Pervasive’s platform. Lance describes it as “the Apple store combined with a Groupon combined with some combination of marketplace for integration solutions.”

Read the rest about Data Integration and cloud computng at ITBusinessEdge.