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Breaking into the cloud: Enterprise public cloud adoption

Enterprise cloud adoption growing rapidly

CIOs are starting to view their role differently in today's business environment. Historically focused on compliance and risk aversion, these IT executives are now choosing to carefully apply technologies for strategic needs. This means CIOs are no longer willing to implement applications that require high price tags, multi-year rollouts, and experience high failure rates. And as a result, many of these executives are forgoing on-site deployment initiatives, and instead are turning to enterprise cloud applications.

In turn, enterprise public cloud adoption is growing rapidly. Analyst firm Gartner Group has forecast double-digit growth across all major cloud categories (e.g., SaaS, PaaS, IaaS) . The growth signals increased trust in the public cloud by the enterprise community. This transition provides a significant opportunity for independent software vendors (ISV), but also introduces a new wave of obstacles.

 

Integration largest barrier to cloud adoption

For years, cloud security has been the enterprise's dominant concern, but as this industry matures and global standards are established, executives are pivoting their attention to application integration. Enterprises, as potential buyers of SaaS applications, require open APIs and prebuilt connectivity for cloud integration before deployment. This ensures the enterprise the strategic ability to scale their cloud infrastructure as they add additional applications.

For SaaS vendors, integration concerns have become the leading barrier to sales; to overcome this hurdle they will need to provide seamless integration as part of their offering. By including pre-packaged integration, ISVs remove the customer’s “cloud silos” concern and align themselves with the strategic mindset of the new enterprise. Their SaaS product becomes more flexible, and can be easily positioned within the enterprise’s larger infrastructure, while also lending itself to advanced workflows.

Overcome integration barriers with iPaaS

Integration Platform as a Service (iPaaS) fulfills the vital need to integrate SaaS applications within the larger enterprise architecture. iPaaS is the next generation integration platform that enables ISVs to offer a pre-packaged offering for enterprise clients. A strong iPaaS provides both cloud-to-cloud and cloud-to-ground integrations and fulfills the following criteria:

  • Prebuilt connectivity. Extensive, connectivity options, with off-the-shelf connectors to popular SaaS/Cloud and on-premises applications, an easy to develop new connectors, and capabilities to integrate with legacy data and systems through the database or flat file.
  • Seamless experience. Cloud-based and seamless with the application experience, as opposed to separate third-party tools.
  • Strong & flexible. Agile and robust enough to handle more complex integration challenges, beyond simple data synchronization.
  • Packaged solutions. Packaged solutions that can be easily configured, maintained, and supported, rather than brittle and expensive point-to-point custom code

These prerequisites set the bar high, but the best iPaaS offerings will live up to and exceed these requirements. In fact, Gartner sees iPaaS emerging as the next-generation integration technology, gradually replacing traditional forms of integration middleware. In coming years, iPaaS will provide the last essential component for enterprises to realize the benefits of cloud architecture.

iPaaS: CloudHub from MuleSoft

CloudHub is the leading iPaaS solution, providing customers and vendors alike a strategic advantage in this new business environment. It is a fully cloud-based solution, enabling customers to take advantage of the economic and elasticity of the cloud for their integration infrastructure. Unlike other integration providers, CloudHub provides monitoring and management tools specifically designed with the SaaS provider in mind. Leveraging leading Mule technology, it provides a true platform for developers to build packaged integration applications, putting specific integration solutions in the hands of ISVs. The platform is open enough that integration apps can be customized by technical or architectural leads to address complex integration scenarios, but are simple enough for non-technical or line of business to configure and administer connectivity on their own.

With CloudHub, developers can be up and running in hours, while ensuring that they have the scalability, flexibility, and manageability that thousands of leading enterprises have come to expect from MuleSoft. CloudHub also offers users a library of out-of-the-box cloud connectors to integrate with popular SaaS offerings, cloud services, integration apps, and social media platforms.

The iPaaS approach offered by CloudHub offers "no-brainer" benefits for SaaS vendors and end-user organizations alike. SaaS vendors can address their #1 barrier to sales: integration. With the CloudHub platform, there is no need to develop, maintain, or support custom integration code. Some SaaS vendors may offer integration apps as an add-on service to their core offering, creating an incremental revenue stream, increasing customer stickiness and lowering customer churn. Finally, with CloudHub, SaaS vendors gain a critical edge over competitors, as they can dramatically reduce implementation times and offer the fastest "go-live."

Ready to get started? Sign up for CloudHub and contact an expert to see how CloudHub can help drive new business.