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.

##

About the Author