Really Simple Integration

Companies are challenged these days. So are individuals. The vast amount of information available and being created every minute is growing so fast how can one leverage that into something meaningful?

Along comes aggregation. It's seen for blog/news feeds, like AllTop, for the thousands of "top bloggers".

But what about organizations and integrating their information needs? Along comes SnapLogic with an open source RESTful architecture integration app. I spoke with Chris Marino, CEO, and John Bennett, Director of Marketing. They explained how they empower organizations through self-service... to "loosely couple a federation of systems" for enterprise mashups of data.

Here's a partial quote from their press release today:

"Really Simple Integration is a new approach to data integration" that "enables enterprises to quickly and easily make core IT data from data warehouses, Master Data Management data marts, SaaS apps, SOA Web Services and other sources."

Be sure to check them out if you're attending O'Reilly's Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco this week. In Web 2.0/open source fashion, they have started a publicly available collection of free components, including a screencast showing a mashup of LinkedIn and SalesForce.com.

So where does this put Business Intelligence and more specifically ETL tools and the static nature of data warehouses. I think this is another step towards the end of the ETL era as we know it. Products like SnapLogic provide transformation functionality but have access to more than internal data sources. Ever heard of an ETL tool able to scrap data off a public website to merge with your sales data?

Business Intelligence has been typically limited to using an organization's internal databases, such as finance, CRM, marketing, and sales. But we're in the age of the Internet now (actually we've been here for quite some time) and to be competitive you need access to the vast amounts of information from external sources of information, such as SaaS applications and information websites.

The small to mid-sized market is where SnapLogic is positioned today. Tiny companies can leverage the open source community, while IT staff of mid-sized companies would deploy SnapLogic for efficiencies. So once the data warehouse is built, users/departments will start asking for the data in different ways. (The static issue with a DW). Or merrying DW data with data not in the DW (and they shouldn't wait 18 months for additional DW implementation to address this need). IT departments can shine by having an easy-to-use tool like SnapLogic.

Sometimes there is no time to wait for the perfect enterprise dimensional model to be designed. Organizations are organic and need to stay competitive and ever changing to keep ahead. Access to information is key.