In Integration-as-a-Service Heats Up I talked about the cloud integration space and mentioned three companies: SnapLogic, Cast Iron Systems and Boomi. Well, I guess I was right about it heating up because on May 3 IBM announced its plan to acquire Cast Iron.
It's important to note the difference between the three companies. Among the three, Boomi is the only one that has taken a pure cloud approach and provides its product solely as a web service. Cast Iron had started as an on-premise appliance play (virtual or physical) and recently added Cloud2, which they describe as a "multi-tenant integration-as-a-service cloud offering." SnapLogic is a downloadable product that needs to be installed on-premise or deployed by the customer in a public cloud environment such as Amazon Web Services.
[For more on application delivery models see Software Delivery Models in the Era of Cloud Computing].
Besides writing this post to say "I told you so" :-), I wanted to call attention to the debate about the appliance versus the pure cloud service approaches. In a blog post entitled Why Integration Appliances Won't Scale for Cloud Computing, Boomi CEO Bob Moul essentially slams Cast Iron's approach (although he is very gracious about the acquisition). The title of the post pretty much says it all, but you can read the details on their blog.
To me this is part of a bigger debate that is going on, and that is the fate of the notion of internal clouds (infrastructure-as-a-service and platform-as-a-service environments that run in the company's own data center).
Several of the large vendors, such as IBM -- as well as many startups such as Eucalyptus -- are pushing the notion of internal clouds. And they are gaining some traction. From the customer perspective the idea of internal clouds resonates because they want to provide their development teams with the flexibility of public clouds such as AWS, but without the huge headaches of governance, security, migration, lock-in and other problems associated today with external public clouds.
And then of course, there is the idea of a hybrid environment -- where some aspects of IT are run in-house and others in a public cloud or as software-as-a-service, which is where an offering such as Cast Iron's comes in.
But at the end of the day, Boomi's Moul has got it right. It is a model that won't scale. "Pure" cloud will win this war. Internal clouds will be a temporary stop-gap during the next 2-3 years, but will eventually settle as a small niche.
