My colleague Phil Wainewright recently posted details about Appirio, a service that Gartner analyst Daryl Plummer is calling a cloud service brokerage. As Phil put it: “Appirio has packaged up the plumbing between cloud applications and is offering the plumbing as a service, on the same ready-to-run, pay-as-you-go terms as the applications themselves.”
Where did all those new silos come from?
Clouds have to be connected, just like the enterprise IT silos that we’ve know before. This appears to be one of the biggest thrusts now taking place in the market. It’s no small thing, for example, that IBM bought Cast Iron Systems a few months back — Cast Iron’s solutions offered cloud-to-enterprise integration.
And, as just noted in a post here at this blogsite a few days back, the rise of cloud means lots and lots of new work for integration specialists. More and more applications (and perhaps some data) will reside in places outside the enterprise walls — but that’s creating new silos as well. As Phil so rightly points out: “Integration between cloud applications has remained, with few exceptions, an ugly afterthought, something the customer was always forced to custom-build, which had to make you wonder what was so different after all about this cloud model.”
