The Coming of Hybrid Cloud Integration

While integration has emerged as one of the primary avenues through which solution providers can add value in the age of the cloud there’s still a lot of debate over where those integrations should be executed.

In the first wave of integration in the age of the cloud, the assumption was that all integrations would take place on cloud platform. But it turns out that for a variety of security and compliance reasons many IT organizations want those integrations to take place on premise.

Bring a level of flexibility to where those cloud integrations actually get executed, Talend this week added a Remote Engine capability to a cloud integration service that runs primarily on Amazon Web Services (AWS). Dominic Tavassoli, director of product marketing for Talend, said that the Summer 2015 release of Talend Integration Cloud gives solution providers and their customers the option to create any combination of workflows they want across a hybrid cloud computing scenario.

In addition to the Remote Engine capability, the new release add support for new connectors to, for example, Salesforce Analytics Cloud, SAP and NetSuite applications, along with new sandbox functionality and a Talend Data Mapper tool. Finally, this latest release also adds support for a user defined dynamic schema that makes it simpler to create generic integrations involving Microsoft Excel Excel, CSV and Positional data conversions.

Tavassoli said that as cloud computing evolves its apparent the most IT organizations are going to be looking for hybrid cloud integration capabilities that span multiple on premise and cloud service provider scenarios. What they don’t want, said Tavassoli, is to be nickled and dimed over every connector that might be required. For that reason Talend provides access to over 1,000 connectors in an online library, said Tavassoli.

Of course, not every integration requires the expertise of a developer. Increasingly, “citizen integrators” are making their own point-to-point integrations. But Tavassoli notes that rather than simply let those integrations occur without any regard to compliance requirements, many organizations want to take advantage of an integration platform that enables self-service integrations to occur within the context of some governance by the internal IT organization.

Regardless of the approach taken it’s clear that integration in the age of the cloud is become more nuanced. With this release Talend has joined the ranks of cloud integration service providers that are building a significant ecosystem of vendor and solution provider partnerships intended to facilitate integrations across a hybrid cloud computing environments that in the very near future will soon become the new IT norm.