Data Integration Blog

The quote is from an interview with Parker Harris from Salesforce.com. Continuing to follow SFDC’s progress, I came across this interview with him and here’re some highlights that I thought sounded quite fresh.

According to Harris, in the consumer world, everyone must think not only on one level, but on several. Salesforce.com thought about software, scale and the Internet; questioning what it would take to build this ‘thing’ they were thinking about.

“When we met Marc [Benioff], he had a vision and had written a two page e-mail detailing that we need to make this as easy as buying a book on Amazon,’ Harris says. At the time, there was Amazon, Google and E-bay.

It turns out Salesforce.com was not first concieved as a platform, rather as a number of abstract layers to help sales people.

…we quickly realized the need to unify them. We continued adding layers in response to our customers; columns, end user interface. At that point we realized it could be a platform; we didn’t consciously do that.

The future of platforms like SFDC?

Databases have evolved. Today you don’t really go into business to write it, you find one. I see platforms heading in the same direction.

Mr. Harris is rather frank in admitting to the mistakes the company has made:

We made two big mistakes: we changed everything all at once, which is a big risk for any business, and moved onto large scale systems. Pushing scale in a vertical sense created a complexity that was just too hard. Then we hired the guy from eBay to make sure it never happened again.

You can read the full interview here.

Crisis might have done harm to some parts of the industry, but definitely not to the relational database management systems market, which saw a 12.6 percent growth spike in 2007 to US$18.8 billion compared to $16.7 billion in 2006, according to IDC.

Oracle Corporation is leading with 44.3 % of the market and a revenue growth of 13.3 percent.

This is a lot due to the release of their 11g, with a large majority of ursers upgrading to it in the recent year. This and their Real Application Clusters is what really contributed to the company’s continued growth throughout the year.

Intuit, the creator of QuickBooks accounting software, has recently showcased a new product Intuit Document Management System for QuickBooks Accounting.

Intuit research studies show a huge paper overload in the accounting industry. Around 65 % of accountants’ time is spent on documents, filing, retrieving, and sharing files. On average, a four-drawer filing cabinet can cost $25,000 to fill and $2,000 a year to maintain – 80 percent of which is cost for labor. Plus, misfiled documents can cost up to $120 to replace.

With the Intuit Document Management System (DMS) for QuickBooks Accounting, accounting professionals and small business owners using QuickBooks can store files electronically and access them instantly from their PCs. By moving to a “less paper” office, they can help reduce operating costs, improve service, and help protect their firms from risk and drastically increase productivity.

I posted some results of the recent Forrester survey about it not long ago. It showed 66% of companies being scared of adopting SaaS because of the integration issues.

Well, I found this video on IntelligEntenterpris website that reminded me of survey respondents. So as it turns out, the fear of new (SaaS in our case) is nothing new

John Morris’s latest post, where he highlights the difference between data migration and ETL is, in fact, very much to the point. ETL is a much larger concept that needs more effort and time than data migration. Data migration, if properly defined, is a one-way long-term trip of data from one system to another. While ETL not only can be a repeated procedure, but is also much larger in scope, as it includes all sorts of data transformations (from data cleansing and data quality checking to certain elements of business intelligence).

So, if you look closely, the two are considerably different, not even parts of the same process.

Salesforce.com’s latest announcement of its “global strategic alliance” with Google…what does that mean for the world?

In “global” terms, aside from integration between Salesforce.com’s cloud-based development platform with data from Google services, it’s a quest to outlive on-premises software and replace it with web-based applications. A perspective that doesn’t look too promising for Microsoft and the smaller on-premises software vendors.

Behold and despair, the era of SaaS is starting right here right now. =)

A database, the core of your enterprise data management. How do you know which one you need? With the choice of applications on the market today, selecting the database that fits your needs can be quite a challenge. So let’s see, here’s a few things that could make your list of priorities when selecting which database to use:

* Budget (obviously, first make up your mind on how much you wanna spend)

*Size and scalability

*Speed and optimization capacities

*Performance and reliability

*Security (access rights)

*Integration possibilities

If totally lost, you could check out Oracle Database 11g and IBM DB2 for starters.

Renat Khasanshyn, the founder and CEO of Apatar, will speak on the future of enterprise data mashups at Dr. Dobb’s Architecture & Design World 2008 conference, the independent event dedicated to software architecture, design, modeling, and UML. The event will be held on July 21-24, 2008 at the Hyatt McCormick Place, Chicago, IL, and include 75 focused sessions on real-world topics, visionary keynotes, in-depth training, and networking with peers, industry leaders, and world-class speakers.

In his presentation, Renat Khasanshyn, the founder of the Apatar Open Source Data Integration project, will explore how enterprise architects, developers, and business users can leverage existing mashup technologies to build and deploy data mashups. The session will focus on tips and best practices and also highlight the major challenges preventing mashup design tools from being implemented across the enterprise sector. Finally, Mr. Khasanshyn will walk the audience through the process of building “Cold Call Assistant for Salesforce.com,” the mashup that won the 2007 IBM Business Mashup Challenge.

Session information: what, where, when
“Enterprise 2.0 and Data Mashups: Bridging the Information Gap”
Renat Khasanshyn, founder and CEO of Apatar, Inc.
July 24, 2008, 1:30–3:00 p.m.
Track: Service-Oriented Architecture
Hyatt Regency McCormick Place, 2233 S. Martin L. King Drive, Chicago, IL
Audience Level: Intermediate

https://www.cmpevents.com/SDUM8/a.asp?option=G&V=3&id=575532

Visit http://drdobbsarchworld.com/ to learn more about the conference.

Did you know that Ituit makes Fortune’s list of top 100 companies to work for?

At the 43 position, Intuit (INTU) offers its employees four days off with pay each year to perform community service.

Their QuickBooks accounting software mostly targets small to medium sized businesses, catering for pratically all types of industries…and we all know SMBs are the driving force that powers the US economy. What I’m saying is, looks like Intuit is not only a good place to work for, it’s a good company to work with and to become a customer of.

Quocirca has recently published a white paper on SaaS adoption across the business sector.

SaaS already is a huge part of most business processes, however, there are still companies that rely hevily on their on-premises applications.

…many vendors are realising that to provide a satisfactory end user experience, total reliance on a web browser is not always enough and a desktop component is often needed.

Quocirca lists the following problems with SaaS adoption:

• Most consumer and business applications have an on-demand component
• For many applications an on-premise component is needed to enrich the user experience
• On-demand delivery is attractive to businesses because it helps them manage costs, provides high availability and flexible access
• Business processes are only as strong as the weakest link in the applications that support them
• Some level of integration of on-demand services with legacy applications and internal workflow will always be necessary
• Many new independent software vendors (ISVs) are building in on-demand components from the start
• Existing ISVs are making the move to on-demand too, but they face additional challenges

This only means that there’s a growing need for an effective link between the desktop and web applications and platforms. And since data integration market closely follows the SaaS trend, it looks like integration will be catering for this linkage and transition from the on-premises to the on-demand.