Six Mistakes to Avoid when Choosing a Cloud Integration Solution

White Paper

Talend White Paper

Six Mistakes to Avoid when Choosing a Cloud Integration Solution

Table of Contents
Executive Summary ................................................................................. 3 Introduction ........................................................................................ 3 Six Mistakes to Avoid ............................................................................... 5

Mistake #1: Mistaking a Point Solution for an Integration Strategy .......... 5 Mistake #2: Believing Cloud Integration Requires Cloud-Specific Products . 6 Mistake #3: Relying on the Big IT One-Stop Shop ............................ 7 Mistake #4: Defaulting to Integration Leaders for a Cloud Solution ....... 9 Mistake #5: Underestimating the Importance of Vision ....................... 10 Mistake #6: Overlooking Commercial Open Source ............................ 11
Talends Approach to Cloud Integration ...................................................... 13

Talends Vision for Cloud Integration ............................................ 13 Talend Cloud: Data Management and Application Integration for Cloud ............................................ 15 Cloud and Hybrid Deployment Options ........................................... 16 Out-of-the-Box Cloud Integration Support ....................................... 17
Talend for Cloud Integration: Make No Mistake ............................................. 18

Talend, Open Core, and Commercial Open Source ............................. 19 Talends Corporate Viability ....................................................... 20 Easy, Affordable Path to Adoption ................................................ 21 Evaluate Talends Integration Solutions ......................................... 21

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Talend White Paper

Six Mistakes to Avoid when Choosing a Cloud Integration Solution

Executive Summary
Cloud computing poses new operational data integration challenges, and vendors from across the spectrum will be pushing cloud integration solutionsbut many of these solutions typically come up short of expectations. This paper: Summarizes the new integration requirements brought by the cloud Examine six seemingly obvious cloud integration choices and explains how they come up short Lays out Talends approach to data integration for the cloud

Introduction
Cloud computing is a reality that any senior IT manager has to face up to, both because it has become the buzzword of the day, and because it refers to several real inflection points in the evolution of computing. Cloud computing can deliver computing services in any of the following modes: Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), such as Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) and Amazon Simple Storage Server (S3) Platform as a Service (PaaS), such as Amazon Elastic MapReduce, Windows Azure Platform, and Google App Engine

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Talend White Paper

Six Mistakes to Avoid when Choosing a Cloud Integration Solution

Software as a Service, such as SalesForce.com and NetSuite Public cloud offerings such as Elastic MapReduce have in turn opened up Big Data options for crunching data on hundreds or thousands of nodes without a long-term investment in infrastructure. Organizations of all sizes can benefitincluding small and medium sized businesses for which such technology would be out of reach. However, as organizations adopt cloud-based solutions alongside their existing on-premise systems, they face the following realities: Greater numbers of separate systems (e.g. databases and applications) More heterogeneous systems (e.g. databases, services and applications from different vendors, built on different technologies) More heterogeneous technologies for developers and administrators to learn and manage Multiplying points of integration among such systems Hybrid environments, that include private-cloud, public-cloud, on-premise components and Software as a Service Latency, bandwidth and security issues

Effective integration solutions can make the difference between just creating a series of new silos and turning cloud investments into operational advantages. Without

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Talend White Paper

Six Mistakes to Avoid when Choosing a Cloud Integration Solution

them, though, the benefits of cloud computing may still be out of reach. Established integration vendors, newcomers and cloud providers themselves have flooded the market with new integration options aimed at cloud customers. many options, the challenge is to narrow the field. With so

Six Mistakes to Avoid

One way to find a cloud integration solution that works is to rule out the ones that dontto look at choices that seem obvious, but that can go wrong in the long term (or, for that matter, in the short term).

# 1

Mistake #1: Mistaking a Point Solution for an Integration Strategy A cloud vendor will often offer easy-to-implement point solutions for integrating their products with your onpremise technology. For example, Salesforce.com and other SaaS providers offer free or low-cost connectors from their environment to on-premise and cloud applications and databases. No doubt, such targeted offerings can provide effective tactical solutions for the problems they are intended to solve. However, they are not in themselves a step towards or a substitute for an integration strategy, and they can

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Talend White Paper

Six Mistakes to Avoid when Choosing a Cloud Integration Solution

add new complexity and moving parts that make an ad hoc integration environment even harder to manage. A point solution can certainly fit in around the edges of an existing integration solution and provide a quick win, but it means compromises on requirements like modeling, transformation design, orchestration, traceability and

# 2

metadata. It is not a real answer for the long term. Mistake #2: Believing Cloud Integration Requires CloudSpecific Products Pure cloud integration vendors position their solutions as the best way to integrate from on-premise to the cloud, or among cloud services and applications. They support cloud-specific integrations out of the box, and some are delivered as cloud-hosted services themselves; these features may make initial adoption more convenient. Some even offer some on-premise integration functionality. However, such offerings are not likely to match fullfeatured integration tools for the on-premise case. Ongoing investment in pure cloud integration products leads away from any holistic integration solution. In this respect, they are little better than the point solutions from the SaaS and PaaS vendors.

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Talend White Paper

Six Mistakes to Avoid when Choosing a Cloud Integration Solution

#3

Mistake #3: Relying on the Big IT One-Stop Shop If there is no magic dust for cloud integration, then the old-line, established IT vendors with integration offerings become worth consideringbut this too may not work out as well as one would hope. The vendor who wants to sell you their whole stack possibly including on-premise hardware, virtualization, databases, applications and middlewareprobably has integration solutions in their product portfolio that can cover the whole checklist of functionality, and even include a cloud integration story. The fundamental problem with relying on these is an inherent conflict of interest: selling integration may primarily be a way to enable a broader strategy of driving adoption of their software stack and services. Data integration is a minor driver of revenue for a vendor with such broad offerings. Integration customers may pay high licensing costs, and yet find their requirements are only of secondary concern. This problem can manifest in many ways: From a technical standpoint, development resources will be focused first on functionality that enables the rest of the stack. Support for other use cases

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Talend White Paper

Six Mistakes to Avoid when Choosing a Cloud Integration Solution

may be compromised, and keeping up with industry trends is less important. Sales, consulting and support will most likely be knowledgeable about their own products. When you need help with a mix of offerings from different vendors, the required depth may not be there. The vendor may be less than fully committed to supporting customers who have chosen third-party cloud offerings for mission-critical roles. A secondary issue is that components of these offerings may not be well integrated. Some vendors fill out their product portfolios by reselling third party solutions for such critical functions as data profiling, data quality or master data management. Integration among these offerings may be spotty, and product direction may be unclear and frequently in flux, because of the number of moving parts and constituencies involved. Companies that have acquired a full range of such products still may not have built a unified platform from them. Finally, long big bang release cycles and roadmap reversals can make it hard to respond to fast-moving technology developmentswhich in a space evolving as quickly as cloud computing is a major liability.

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Talend White Paper

Six Mistakes to Avoid when Choosing a Cloud Integration Solution

# 4

Mistake #4: Defaulting to Integration Leaders for a Cloud Solution Established leaders in the integration space have moved to offer cloud-oriented extensions to existing products, or purely cloud-focused or even cloud-based offerings that can tie back to their existing solutions for on-premise integration. While such vendors may have solid solutions, the chief issue here is the hidden costs. One cloud computing myth is that it can replace big-ticket fixed licensing costs for enterprise hardware and software with usage-based pricing. To be sure, leading vendors cloud-based or cloud-oriented integration offerings can offer attractive pricing to get started. But in the face of realistic usage volumes and topologies, pay-as-you-go can still add up. Ongoing expenses based on growing data volumes and numbers of sources and connectors become a kind of Data Tax. And when the limited features of the pay-as-you-go offering are no longer enough, vendor lock-in means that the only choices are to pay for the full-featured on-premise offering, or to start over again with a new vendor.

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Talend White Paper

Six Mistakes to Avoid when Choosing a Cloud Integration Solution

# 5

Mistake #5: Underestimating the Importance of Vision Briefly put, vision mattersa companys vision of the integration market, its vision of cloud computing, and its vision of itself and its customers. This argument is actually at the root of all the othersmisalignment between vendors and customers vision can set the stage for frustration and failure. This is especially likely to happen with long-established vendors, whose vision may be obscured by successes in the rear-view mirror. For example, a company long experience serving high-end customers with big-budget hardware and software and high-touch consulting services may actually be well-prepared to sell an entire private cloud, but may not be well-prepared to serve smaller customers. Likewise, new entrants coming from the cloud integration space have probably not defined their corporate mission around serving the requirements of on-premise data management. Their roadmap may not take into account requirements like modeling and lifecycle management, much less capabilities like data quality or master data management.

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Talend White Paper

Six Mistakes to Avoid when Choosing a Cloud Integration Solution

# 6

Mistake #6: Overlooking Commercial Open Source For customers looking for relief from the Data Tax, evaluating open source offerings is a natural choice. Because open source software is free to deploy, it eliminates variable costs as environments and data volumes scale. Many open source components are widely used as the foundation of enterprise software and cloud efforts: Linux, virtualization alternatives such as Xen and KVM, cloud operating systems and infrastructure layers, databases and application servers, and the Hadoop framework. Open source offerings progressively democratize every market they enter. A much broader group of developers and organizations gets access to enterprise-grade products. Open source products can develop more quickly in response to the communitys changing requirements. Release cycles are shorter, feedback loops between users and developers are tighter, and development of new features and fixes is more transparent. Open source creates an economy of abundance adoption costs are so low that effective solutions can be applied everywhere that they can add value.

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Talend White Paper

Six Mistakes to Avoid when Choosing a Cloud Integration Solution

Customers still not used to open source may have reservations about using free products for missioncritical roles. To some, open source implies crowdsourced best-effort development and support, lack of polish, and, worst of all, a product roadmap subject to the whims of the community, or left to follow trends rather than set them. Commercial open source vendors like Talend are able to address such concerns. Innovations in pricing, business model and the companys structure make it possible to run an open source company as a successful business. Experimentation, evaluation and incremental adoption are also easierrather than a long sales cycle with a vendor, customers are free to simply take the open source versions of the software and try it. (In fact, Talend, like other open source vendors, often finds that customers have successful internal deployments of Talend open source products long before IT decision-makers have Talend on their radar).

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Talend White Paper

Six Mistakes to Avoid when Choosing a Cloud Integration Solution

Talends Approach to Cloud Integration

Talend is the Open Source Integration Company. The companys mission is to democratize integrationto bring enterprise-grade integration technologies to as broad a customer base as possible. Talend has a distinct vision for the evolution of integration, including cloud integration. This vision is reflected in Talends products and in its business model. Talends Vision for Cloud Integration At Talend, the basic assumptions about integration and cloud integration are as follows: Data integration and application integration, which have long been treated as separate problem areas, will increasingly converge. The shift to PaaS and SaaS as part of the uptake of cloud will be one driver for this change. Integration for the cloud is a subset of the general integration problem. It adds some new requirements, but it still requires meeting the requirements of SaaS and PaaS integration as well as classic data integration use cases. A viable integration offering should address the spectrum of data management needs (data integration, data quality and master data management) as well as enabling application

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Talend White Paper

Six Mistakes to Avoid when Choosing a Cloud Integration Solution

integration and easy creation of data services (an enterprise service bus). Pure cloud deployments will be relatively rare, as most customers have on-premise investments. Incremental and experimental adoption will continue to be very common, and hybrid environments will be the norm. Some use cases will require processes run local to the sources or targetswhether that means running on premise, or in private or public clouds, in EL-T mode in a large target database, or distributed across many on-premise or cloud hosts as in Big Data use cases. This will require flexible deployment options. Effective integration solutions must address a wide range of requirements: Metadata and data modeling across multiple sources and targets A range of batch and real-time data delivery options Data transformation capabilities A consistent design and development environment Management of diverse hybrid topologies Centralized administration for deployment and execution of processes Life cycle management options

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Talend White Paper

Six Mistakes to Avoid when Choosing a Cloud Integration Solution

Talend Cloud: Data Management and Application Integration for Cloud Talend Cloud is a comprehensive, unified platform for data integration, data quality, master data management and application integration, which serves traditional onpremise, cloud-to-cloud and hybrid use cases. All products that constitute the Talend Unified Platform are cloud ready: Data Integration: Talend Open Studio and Talend Integration Suite Data Quality: Talend Open Profiler and Talend Data Quality Master Data Management: Talend MDM Enterprise Service Bus: Talend ESB

All of Talends products are built on the foundation of Talends Unified Platform, with: A single development environment based on Eclipse A shared metadata repository A common deployment capability A unified runtime environment A common monitoring framework

They offer the benefits that are the hallmark of Talends solutions:

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Talend White Paper

Six Mistakes to Avoid when Choosing a Cloud Integration Solution

Widely used and familiar to developers and administrators Consistent across products, and across on-premise and cloud-based deployment modes Validated and field-tested through hundreds of thousands of deployments worldwide

Together, they provide a high-value, comprehensive and unified data management platform for the cloud, that seamlessly integrates hybrid deployments of on-premise, public and private cloud, and SaaS applications. Cloud and Hybrid Deployment Options Talend Cloud provides complete deployment flexibility. Any combination of components - data integration, data quality, MDM and ESB - can be installed fully in the cloud, fully on premise, or in any needed hybrid combination. Components can be deployed and run inside any mainstream virtualization solutions. Components deployed in the cloud fully benefit from the flexibility and elasticity of the cloud. Components communicate using various standard cloud-friendly protocols to ensure the overall orchestration and integrity of the integration processes in a secure environment.

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Talend White Paper

Six Mistakes to Avoid when Choosing a Cloud Integration Solution

Talends solutions deliver the following benefits when used in cloud and hybrid deployments: Elasticity: Talend Cloud is lightweight and easily embedded into applications, and supports the ability to expand and contract deployments as required. Performance: Talends data-oriented integration services, when situated in the cloud, can be located near cloud-based sources or targets as needed to reduce latency and maximize performance. Ubiquity: Talends support for standard Web services and REST integration approaches makes resources easily accessible by myriad platforms and devices. Extensibility: Talends modular architecture and open source model allows organizations to add, modify or remove functionality as requirements change over time. Security & reliability: Talends products can maintain security and reliability of applications down to the individual message level, allowing organizations to meet customer SLAs.

Out-of-the-Box Cloud Integration Support Talend Cloud provides a series of connectors and

components specific to Cloud and SaaS applications and technologies. Out of the box, Talend includes over 500 components for all IT technologies such as databases, packaged applications. Cloud-specific connectors include:

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Talend White Paper

Six Mistakes to Avoid when Choosing a Cloud Integration Solution

Salesforce.com NetSuite SugarCRM BIRT OnDemand Marketo Amazon RDS Amazon S3 Database.com Google Applications Google Analytics Twitter Hadoop These provide native connectivity and support for platformspecific integration operations, encapsulating any complex, vendor-specific APIs. There is no per-connector cost - as with other Talend connectors, everything is included. New and enhanced connectors and components are added on a regular basis by Talends R&D organization and by open source community members. The Talend Exchange provides the latest connectors, which can be downloaded and installed directly from within the Talend Studio.

Talend for Cloud Integration: Make No Mistake

Talends approach to commercial open source, its

resources, its customers and its backers prove it can meet

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Talend White Paper

Six Mistakes to Avoid when Choosing a Cloud Integration Solution

your comprehensive integration needs, including cloud integration, now and for the long term. Talend, Open Core, and Commercial Open Source Talends Open Core model is based on offering a core open source product line as well as a line of commercial extensions to these products, provided as a commercial subscription. The open source editions contain all essential functionality for ready production deploymentsfor example, Talend Open Studio includes all the connectors and transformations available with the Talend Integration Suite product. Even cloud integration functionality is available in Talend Open Studio. Pricing on Talends integration offerings are not dependent on metrics such as number of sources, variety of connectors, or number of hosts running the software. For example, Talend Integration Suites price is based on the number of developers using the product. This means that pricing is predictable, even in elastic cloud deployments. With input from the community, Talends product management drive the development of Talend products. Community members help setting the directions but Talend has control over the innovation and consistency of the product, and moves quickly to

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Talend White Paper

Six Mistakes to Avoid when Choosing a Cloud Integration Solution

address evolving markets like cloud integration with disruptive, democratizing innovations in technology and business. Professional support, services and training are available globally from Talend and partners. Open source products are supported through Talends active discussion forums, where Talend employees and the Talend user community actively participate daily. Professional support is included with the product subscriptions, and can also be purchased for the open source products. Talends Corporate Viability Talend has become the recognized market leader in open source integration. Talend brings the democratizing force of open source to the integration market, while making sure that its offerings can meet the needs of the most demanding enterprise customers. Talend has a fast-growing customer base (over 2500 paying customers, and over 15 million product downloads), spanning all geographies, multiple industries and companies large and small. Talend has attracted several rounds of venture funding from leading technology investors, including Silver Lake Sumeru, Balderton Capital, and Idinvest Partners, and used them to fuel growth and make strategic acquisitions.

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Talend White Paper

Six Mistakes to Avoid when Choosing a Cloud Integration Solution

Talend has the resources and track record to meet customers integration needs now and for the long term. Easy, Affordable Path to Adoption Talends open core model, versatile technology and flexible, affordable subscription options mean that you can incrementally adopt Talend as you extend your environment with cloud-based elements, rather than going for some big-bang redesign of your entire integration landscape. You can start with individual Talend products when and where your business needs dictate and when time-to-value makes sense, but know that whatever direction you take, Talend will have the integration capabilities you need. Evaluate Talends Integration Solutions When you are ready to see how Talends integration solutions can fit your specific plans for adopting cloud computing, visit http://www.talend.com/cloud to find out more.

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