Integrating data for cloud and core apps: the task is to make it ‘suck less’

Grazed from VentureBeat. Author: Dean Takahashi.

Corporate interest in software-as-a-service apps continues to grow, particularly in the era of cloud computing. But integrating those apps with the data in core systems of a business isn’t easy. And a number of companies are working on how to make integration “suck less.”

That was the topic of discussion for a breakout session at VentureBeat’s CloudBeat 2012 conference today in Redwood City, Calif. The goal is to make data integration “lightweight,” or easy enough to be done in an automated way, said Sam Ramji (pictured second from right), vice president of strategy at Apigee, a company that sells its applications programming interface (API) platform to big corporations…

“Apps were never built to be shared, and it’s like prying information out of folks who are unwilling to share it,” Ramji said. “Our goal is to make it suck less.” Core databases from Oracle are used to run corporate functions, but enterprises are embracing apps in a big way. Developers can write apps that run on those systems, but only if there are APIs to make the data flow back and forth. The data have to be shared in a secure way, Ramji said…

Read more from the source @ http://venturebeat.com/2012/11/28/integrating-data-for-cloud-and-core-apps-the-task-is-to-make-it-suck-less/