A SaaS-y night was had by all …
This last meeting had two very different cloud companies - with the only constant being they both were cloud SaaS companies!
Mike Pitaro from Snaplogic spoke first and introduced the concept of “cloud-to-ground” information integration. Snaplogic builds a data integration server that connects and transforms information from SaaS, Web, and more traditional applications in the datacenter (kind of like an ESB/ETL service for the cloud).
SnapLogic uses REST and has an open API that allows a developer to built their own connectors to applications that SnapLogic hasn’t built yet. The ease of use, a free sandbox, and an Open Source version all qualify this as a cloud-friendly product. SugarCRM, Salesforce, and NetSuite are the core applications that connectors have been built for so far with standard Web 2.0 elements such as XML, RSS, and an HTML scraper included. Snaplogic also integrates more traditional data such as delimited files, databases, and spreadsheets making this very versatile to integrate the old and the new seamlessly - while connecting the datacenter apps to the cloud services all coming together in your browser.
Snaplogic is certainly worth a look if you want to be able to quickly integrate SaaS with your current infrastructure without having to face a total migration/rewrite and without having to jump with both feet into the cloud.
The slide presentation can be found here: SnapLogic PDF and the cloudcast can be found here SnapLogic mp3
Tamale Software was a company targeted at financial services companies. I say ‘was’ because they were acquired by Advent Software back on October of 2008. The combination of Tamale’s “front office” capabilities for the analysts and researchers combined with Advent’s mid/back-0ffice services seems a natural fit.
John Fawcett from Tamale spoke about the new product that they have been building and testing that takes their offer to a new level - as a hybrid “cloud” offer. What makes it hybrid is their unique architecture that protects the privacy of the end users data while still leveraging common services.
For example - there is a main server that sits in the “cloud” - which is repsonsible for pushing software updates and upgrades non-disruptively and logs software problem/bug events - but does not have any end user information on it. All the user/company information is located on a local server and on the individual clients. The more private the data the closer to the source it remains with very fine grain protections at the field and user access level.
By using a hybrid SaaS model - the software services are provided and managed by Tamale while the data is kept inside the firewalls of the company using the service and not accessable by even the service provider.
The Tamale cloudcast can be found here: Tamale mp3
