Industry executives and experts share their predictions for 2019. Read them in this 11th annual VMblog.com series exclusive.
Contributed by Betsy Billhorn, SVP Products, Jitterbit
Taking Control of Data Integration with Automation
In the coming year, I believe we will see the automation of
many back-end IT processes to turn them into productivity apps for business
users. In particular, I think data integration will be one of the first
technologies to be simplified for widespread business use.
This shift is in response to the data explosion that has been
discussed for years, but which has really become a factor over the past year or
so. There are explosions of new types of data, new applications, and new
endpoints -- and business users want direct access to all of this in a
user-friendly environment. It's untenable and unrealistic for business users to
rely on busy IT teams to connect them to thousands of data types and services,
and it would distract IT from working on important strategic initiatives where
their expertise is needed.
The answer is to democratize data by automating the process of
integration, to more quickly and easily put information into the hands of every
employee. Just as business users have all become accustomed to using email or
collaboration software as commonplace productivity apps, every business user
should be able to connect disparate data sets, connect apps, or extract
different types of information from back-end systems without having to go to
IT.
By automating the integration of back-end processes and data to
become a self-service task, IT will be able to provide productivity apps that
work just as easily as other common business tools to put the power of
technology into the hands of more end users.
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About the Author
Betsy Billhorn serves as the Senior
Vice President of Products at Jitterbit, where she builds profitable
go-to-market strategies for current and upcoming products. In this role, Betsy draws
on her successful record of conceptualizing, developing and driving successful
SaaS, cloud and platform products, as well as her global management competency,
including organizational development and leadership in startup, turnaround and
enterprise environments. Prior to Jitterbit, Betsy was the Vice President of
Marketing and Product Management at Scribe Software, where she successfully
launched Scribe's award-winning cloud integration platform, API and SaaS
products.