In the movie Shawshank Redemption, Andy DuFresne is wrongly imprisoned and spends the next 27 years tunneling out with the only tool he had available – a simple rock hammer. 27 years! What if Andy had a more modern and powerful tool?
When it comes to today’s enterprise IT organization, most companies are also “Innocent Prisoners” to their legacy integration tools. Leading tools in the traditional ETL and ESB marketplace are now almost 27 years old – built in the 1990’s. Yet companies are still saddled with the “legacy technical debt” of choices made 5, 10 or sometimes even 20 years ago. The good news is that more and more companies are finally realizing that their technology vendors can’t just iterate out old technology by releasing a few new features, or coming out with a watered down “cloudified” version of their software.
In 2015, over 50% of your data is coming from new sources- created in the last 3- years as your data and applications are moving to the cloud and new big data sources emerge. How many software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications are you running today? How many will you have in place next year? At SnapLogic alone we have over 30 SaaS applications and we are not a $1B company (not yet ).
HR and Marketing departments seems to buy next SaaS application every month without involving IT. And while C-level executives and industry analyst firms like Gartner may mandate that you move your apps and analytics to the cloud, but most IT and line of business organizations continue to be hampered by their existing application and data integration tools.
Your applications and your data is moving to the cloud – why isn’t your Integration Platform? I have met few people who debate this fact – but many continue to be paralyzed to move because they are chained to legacy integration tools that are slow, complicated and were built before SaaS, JSON, REST and Big Data were even considerations.
So you agree, but how do you get started?
- Find a small project and get started. With a cloud-to-cloud integration scenario – you don’t even need to install software – it’s all in the cloud. You could be integrating Salesforce and Eloqua or pulling data out of Workday and loading it into Amazon Redshift before you leave the office tonight!
- Don’t be afraid to fail fast. I have several customers who can attempt BI projects in a day or 2 just to see if they will be successful. Most successful teams are willing to try new things.
So the bottom line? Don’t be like Andy, find a modern project like SaaS-to-SaaS integration and get started today. There are modern integration tools out there to help.
This post originally appeared on LinkedIn. Louis Hausle has worked with Integration tools since 1999, working at companies such as Informatica, IBM, Acta and SnapLogic.
