Its been a long time that I stopped blogging. I always wanted to ,but was so much busy that was unable to spend time on recollecting and writing it down. Its always good to be back. :)
I have been working with iPaas platforms for sometime now. Its really interesting to see that so many cloud based iPaas solutions are competing with the on-premise solutions. To work in cloud based solution is different from working on robust on-premise solution. The vast array of options available in the tech stack is always good to have when you are having complex integration's in house. But once your cloud presence increases the no.of connectors and flexibility you have with the on-premise solution decreases leaving the architects and dev team to worry about how to implement these integration. According to the new research there are 2500+ SAAS applications and the list keeps growing , the only way to keep up pace with these many no.of applications is to have a cloud based solution for integration and thats where IPaas solutions start adding value. Informatica's Informatica cloud ,Dell bhoomi, Mulesoft ,snaplogic, Jitterbit and now oracle ICS, SOACS are competing with each other for their share of business. I loved the way informatica cloud has evolved. Even though their initial focus was on salesforce, they have build lot of capabilities around other SAAS applciations as well. One of the things I feel that informatica can improve on is the High availability feature where currently the cloud Agent architecture will fail if the agent is down. If they can build in that high availability feature it can add alue to their selling point. Informatica cloud brings ETL capability which they are famous for in Mapping designer and Active-VOS BPEL/BPM feature into informatica process designer /guide designer. The salesforce app exchange plugin for guide desiger also helps customers to create workflows in salesforce and not to move into informatica cloud console. Informatica still lacks a good API gateway. If they are able to build in that capability it will be able to compete with Mulesoft and Oracle in all fronts. The connector concept is similar in all iPaas vendors moving away from adapter which tightly couples the object as well. The connector gives access to all objects which makes it easier to configure and setup the process. Mulesoft integration platform needs more of java programming background as its more on a sprig based application framework. Informatica has been able to bring in more of drag and drop and zero programming model in their cloud products. More focus has been on configurations. I will write more in detail on how the ther iPaas vendors compete and their positives in future blogs.
