
Virtualization and Cloud executives share their predictions for 2014. Read them in this VMblog.com series exclusive.
Contributed article by Maneesh Joshi, Senior Director of Product Marketing at SnapLogic
Five Cloud Predictions from SnapLogic
We haven't seen a more exciting time in enterprise software
in a long time. Cloud, Social, Mobile and Analytics are truly changing the way
enterprises are approaching and conducting their business today. Because data
and application integration technologies are regarded as key enablers of these
trends, I feel that I'm bang in the middle of this revolution. And I'm loving every moment of it! With this integration perspective in mind,
here are my predictions for 2014.
1. iPaaS makes ESBs obsolete
ESBs have had a great 10 year run where they were regarded
as the platform of choice for creating a service abstraction layer for building
loose-coupled integrations across on-premise applications. Although the vision
was great, ESBs are now facing extinction because of their inability to adapt
to the new world of cloud and SaaS applications. The major complication that
ESBs were unable to adapt to was that a big chunk of endpoints (SaaS) were now
being accessed over the public internet. ESBs were unable to negotiate the
unpredictability and unreliability of the public internet. For what it's worth,
it wasn't entirely the ESB's fault; SOA had a lot to do with it, which leads me
to the next prediction.
2. API management and iPaaS jointly displace Service
Oriented Architecture (SOA) in enterprise IT
API management and integration will join forces to eliminate
SOA from the vocabulary of the enterprise IT professional. In my honest
opinion, the building principles of SOA are timeless and stand valid even
today.However SOA lost its way because it hitched its wagon to the heavy and
unwieldy simple object access protocol (SOAP) protocol. Mobile application
developers, who are the primary consumers of services, demand a lightweight and
flexible protocol that makes them hyper-productive. This mismatch of
expectations resulted into Representative-State Transfer (REST) protocol to
gain popularity. The same APIs that will expose data and business services to
mobile developers will also be doubled up as integration APIs. iPaaS will
emerge as the de facto choice for integrating and orchestrating across these
application and data service APIs.
3. IT dinosaurs face extinction; the citizen
developer emerges
In 2014, we will be one year closer Gartner's prediction
that CMOs will have a larger technology budget than the CIO by 2017. In my
conversations with CIOs, it is clear that the more dynamic and forward-looking
ones are already taking appropriate steps to ensure that they don't become
extinct in the process. However, it's the dinosaurs. who are trying to solve
new age problems (social, mobile, cloud, and analytics) with last generation
tools that need to wake up. The new generation of business analysts (a.k.a.
citizen developers) are quite tech-savvy and have already begun solving
problems with agile new generation without IT's permission. Not only should the
dinosaurs embrace new technologies, but they need to provide easy access to
data and information to analysts via self-service. This trend will result into
a shift of power towards the business users.
4. Digital Marketing platforms take over the
world
Tech-savvy digital marketers are plotting world domination. 2013
saw leading edge marketers building digital marketing platforms that
essentially combine integration technologies and analytics engines. With this
platform they can easily aggregate and analyze customer data in real-time, and
more importantly respond to it with targeted offers. The most effective
integration layer involved in such platforms needs to handle structured and
unstructured data, handle bulk and real-time integrations, and be able to
orchestrate across multiple applications to make this a reality. 2014 will be
the year when such robust platforms go mainstream.
5. The rise of the cloud data warehouse
Amazon Redshift will severely disrupt the EDW market in
2014. 2013 already saw some strong adoption, as customers are looking for a
data warehouse in the cloud that uses a pay-per-use model. 2014 will see full scale
adoption of cloud data warehousing. Cloud and desktop visualization tools such
as Tableau Desktop and Tableau Online will follow suit. ETL technologies that
were purpose-built for on-premise data warehousing will become less relevant in
this new world. At my own company, SnapLogic, we're seeing a high demand among
our customers to load data into and between Redshift and Tableau - and that
demand is poised to grow.
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About the Author
Maneesh
Joshi has over 15 years of experience in the enterprise software space,
primarily in application and data integration. In his current role as Senior
Director of Product Marketing at leading enterprise cloud integration company
SnapLogic, he is responsible for its global go-to market strategy and product
marketing. Prior to this position, Maneesh was the head of platform product
marketing at Informatica. He started his career as a key member of the team
that built Oracle's Service Oriented Architecture and Business Process
Management businesses. Before running product marketing for this group, he
managed product planning, architecture, and engineering operations for Oracle's
integration products.
Maneesh holds a B.S. in Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology,
Kharagpur, where he graduated with honors. He also received an M.S. in
Engineering from the University of California, Davis, and an M.B.A. from The
Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania.