With the accelerating growth of Cloud Computing, many companies are getting stuck in migrating, integrating and extracting information from their on-premise to their cloud environment and vice versa.

Given these concerns regarding integration, it is not surprising that many IT organizations have felt hesitation if not outright rejection of Cloud applications. According to a Gartner study conducted in 2009 on why many CIO’s were actually transitioning away from Cloud deployments, 56% responded it was due to the impact of integration requirements on their systems. So, we can see the complexity of integrating applications has obviously been a driving factor for adoption and implementation of Cloud solutions.

To realize the full power of force.com, integration with on-premise databases and other Cloud-based solutions must be simple yet complete.  It must be possible to implement solutions in days, not weeks or months. At the same time, the solution needs the sophistication required to harmonize business processes across multiple cloud and on-premise applications. The integration solution should be able to run anywhere, connect applications deployed anywhere, be managed from anywhere and require limited specialist integration skills or IT infrastructure. These solutions must be easily configurable, flexible and scalable, meaning no coding.

Below are some of the integration challenges that customers face when integrating on-premise applications with Cloud applications:

• Firewall mediation – How do you open up the firewall for integrating force.com applications with on-premise apps?
• Security – How do you encrypt and otherwise protect sensitive information, stored or on the move, Cloud or on-premise?
• Semantic mediation – How do you account for differences in data structure between the source and target?
• Performance required – How fast do you need to move data and how quickly does data transformation and routing mechanisms need to function?
• Data integrity – How do you make sure the right data is delivered to the right target at the right time? This includes ensuring that the data is clean when it arrives at the target database.
• Maintenance and upgrades – How do you support new Cloud or enterprise system interfaces as they evolve?
• Governance – How do you monitor all points of integration and log the data being synchronized?

The following options are available:

Option	Pros	Cons
Custom development	If an organization has enough IT resources and programmers to create a one-off custom integration, this can often be a viable solution.	A number of resource-intensive hidden costs in maintenance, support, and any future changes should the need arise to grow the solution to integrate more applications.
On-demand solution specializing in cloud-to-cloud connectivity	Low-cost alternative for simple cloud integration projects.	Scalability and functionality to address on-premise or hybrid scenarios. Pure on-demand point solutions are not equipped to handle complex processes and back office applications.
Traditional on-premise solution	Based on a more classic ETL architecture, designed for extracting, processing and storing large quantities of data.	Longer install and implementation time as well as a much larger IT footprint. Companies may end up purchasing and maintaining two or more complex systems to solve one problem.

The following are examples of the force.com integration tools available:

• Pervasive Data Integrator
• WebSphere Cast Iron Appliance
• Informatica Cloud Services
• Dell Boomi

Pervasive Data Cloud

Pervasive offers highly efficient and reliable force.com integration with ERP, HR and other systems without custom coding, extensive software libraries or a big price tag.

Pervasive can connect force.com  to all your data – integrate with your accounting, ERP, SaaS, MIS and any other mission critical business application. Pervasive can connect/migrate/integrate your data and provide flexible delivery options.

When to choose Pervasive:

• Data migration
• Batch/Real-time processing integration
• Advanced workflow

When not to choose Pervasive:

• Limited deployment models  as Pervasive cloud offering is not multi-tenant
• Limited design capability in the cloud and also no secure connector to on-premise applications.
• Limited API’s made available for 3^rd party product integration.

WebSphere Cast Iron

Many enterprises need to synchronize a master list of their current customers, products, prices and all their transaction history between force.com and corporate on-premise systems. WebSphere Cast Iron integration for force.com is a fast, simple solution specifically for integrating force.com with other applications. With a few clicks and configurations you can migrate and integrate your current on-premise applications with force.com.

WebSphere Cast Iron has multiple force.com adapters that provide the capability to migrate, integrate or extract information in a fast and secure manner. WebSphere Cast Iron provides the following options for data migration and data quality:

• Data profiling – Asses the quality of the data before migrating it.
• Data cleansing – Remove duplicates from various sources and setup validation rules.
• Data enrichment – Perform lookups with external providers to enrich data.

It provides the following options for integration and extraction.

• Connectivity – Configurable connectivity between on-premise applications and Sales force.
• Transformation – Drag and drop user interface for data transformation.
• Workflow – Visual interface for designing workflow rules.
• Management – Easy manageability through a single web-based console.

When to use WebSphere Cast Iron:

• Implementing multiple deployment models
• Batch/Real time process integration
• Enterprise connectivity – multiple enterprise adapters for popular enterprise software.
• UI Mashup
• Template Development Kit

When not to use WebSphere Cast Iron:

• Limited data migration functionality  which can only migrate data to and from specific software and not all
• Limited data quality functionality to clean data to and from the cloud

Informatica Cloud Services

Informatica Cloud Services are specifically designed to meet the data integration needs of line-of-business users requirements. Informatica Cloud Services are based entirely “in the cloud” which makes integrating cloud-based to force.com data quick and easy. It can also be used to synchronize and replicate data between local databases and files.

Informatica Cloud Services can be used to integrate SaaS applications with a variety of common on-premise systems and databases. The tools to build a cloud service requiring very little training to set up and administer.

When to use Informatica Cloud Services:

• Batch processing
• High availability
• Web Service Integration
• Advance Workflow

When not to use Informatica Cloud Services:

• Real-time integration is needed
• Security agent is necessary for secure cloud connection.
• Multiple deployment models
• UI Mashup
• Multiple environments

Dell Boomi

The Dell IT group used the Boomi AtomSphere® application to unify the force.com .com instances, enabling fully integrated and synchronized customer information across sales groups and businesses processes.

When you choose Dell Boomi you get:

• Batch Process Integration
• Real-time Process Integration
• Data Migration
• Advance Workflow
• Web Services
• High Availability

Integration Vendor Comparison Chart

This table below gives a breakdown comparison of the different force.com Integration software’s that is available:

Capabilities	Pervasive	WebSphere Cast Iron	Informatica Cloud Services	Boomi
Multiple Deployment Models		x
Data Migration	x	x	x	x
Batch Process Integration	x	x	x	x
Real-time Process Integration	x	x	x	x
Workflow	x	x		x
Enterprise Connectivity	x	x		x
Data Quality	x	x	x	x
UI Mashup	x	x		x
Multiple environments	x	x
Template Development Kit		x
Web Service API Gateway	x	x		x
Management APIs		x		x
High Availability	x	x	x	x

Below are some of the evaluating factors that need to be considered when choosing an integration solution:

Cloud Area	Pervasive Data Cloud	WebSphere Cast Iron	Informatica Cloud Service	Boomi
Design in the Cloud		x	x	x
Manage in the Cloud	x	x	x	x
Run in the Cloud	x	x	x	x
Multi-tenant Cloud platform		x	x	x
Cloud to on-premise data		x	x
APIs for the Cloud	x	x
Connector kit		x		x

To get the most value out of your current IT investments, you need to be able to integrate existing applications with force.com applications.

The solutions described above meet the need of today’s businesses by providing a simplified, fast, and low-cost approach to integration projects, with the flexibility to deploy integrations in the cloud or on premise, and the option to change form factors if needed.