It was probably inevitable. The emergence of on-demand software has led to the emergence of integration software that connects off-site applications with the traditional on-premises variety. Now the integration software itself has gone on-demand.
If you're feeling a bit lost, you're probably in good company.
The integration challenges of an IT landscape that crisscrosses the firewall are well-documented, and few manufacturers have successfully daisy-chained all of their applications into a neatly functioning unit.
For years now, integration specialists have offered software to connect a company's on-demand and in-house applications. These providers create application integration by way of connectors that can exchange data among applications and keep processes such as the order-to-cash cycle, with all its moving parts, in sync. More recently, some of those specialists have embraced the concept of integration as a service, or IaaS.
The latest of those is Boomi, Inc., which rolled out its Boomi On Demand offering in January. The company has offered its integration software via traditional on-premises delivery since its founding in 2000 and has amassed 350 customers across 11 countries. In 2006, company executives decided to make the leap to SaaS and undertook to rebuild the software for delivery over the Internet.
"Our view is that traditional integration products are actually becoming the Achilles' heel of the SaaS industry because they're just so expensive to implement and to maintain, and a lot of them require developers," says Bob Moul, Boomi's CEO. Of course, Moul's "traditional products" net ensnares his own software, which is still available on-premises. But he expects most of Boomi's customers to move to the On Demand offering.
"The vast majority of our existing customers are SMBs, and I think this will play very nicely in the SMB tier," he says.
Selling this kind of offering directly to manufacturers and other customers is a daunting prospect, according to research firm Gartner. Boomi has sidestepped that challenge by joining forces with on-demand software providers, such as Salesforce.com and NetSuite, to bundle integration software with those vendors' products.
"Boomi is the first vendor to specifically target SaaS vendors as its primary sales channel as a technology partner to facilitate integration," Gartner analyst Benoit Lheureux wrote in a September 2007 research paper, adding that the company has "a narrow window of opportunity to secure a foothold in this particular IaaS market niche."
Instead of the traditional per-user licensing method, Boomi charges customers by the connection. If a company wants to integrate an on-demand Salesforce.com CRM system with on-premise Oracle ERP software and a legacy system, Boomi charges for three connections. Monthly per-connection fees are $65 for a small-business connection such as Quick Books; $135 for standard applications, including Salesforce, NetSuite, and Microsoft Great Plains; and $495 for enterprise connections, including Oracle, SAP, and other backbone systems.
This article originally appeared in the March 2008 issue of Managing Automation.