Jitterbit 4.0 - self service tools making hybrid clouds work for business analysts

Ilan Sehayek, Jitterbit's CTO, reached out to bring me up to date on Jitterbit 4.0. The company appears focused on making it easy for  an organization's IT and Business Analysts integrate on-premise processing and cloud computing. Their goal is integrating a large number of enterprise applications with resources offered by cloud computing suppliers.  At this point, over 10,000 organizations have deployed Jitterbit's tools.

Here's what Jitterbit has to say about 4.0

Jitterbit 4.0 new features and functionality provide:

• Business and IT Collaboration – a completely revamped user interface with new features that enhance integration productivity and enable collaboration between business analysts and IT to define and complete complex integration projects. New features include automated data mapping tools, “no coding” transformation and formula wizards, and “business analyst” and “developer” modes.
• Simplified Cloud Integration – Easy to use Jitterbit ConnectTM wizards allow non-technical users to quickly configure integrations between their cloud and on-premise applications using Web services, XML, databases and flat files. The Jitterbit Connect for Salesforce wizard has been updated to support Create, Update, Upsert, and Query calls.
• Support for Global & Big Data – Jitterbit features new levels of performance power to scale for complex, high volume integration while simplifying testing of large data sets. Unicode support allows Jitterbit to connect any data from any language or country. Global search and replace allows for one-click edits across large integration projects. ”Our mission is to simplify complex integration challenges,” said Sharam Sasson, CEO and founder of Jitterbit. “Jitterbit 4.0 takes enterprise integration to the next level by allowing IT managers and business analysts to collaborate on large on-premise and cloud integration projects.”

Snapshot analysis

Organizations have long sought tools that would help business analysts solve their own computing problems rather than calling in a team of developers to address their requirements. This approach, it is hoped, would lower the organization's overall costs of IT while also making the company more agile. No longer would it be necessary for analysts to play the "telephone" game with IT in order to do the type of analysis that might allow the organization to enter new lines of business rapidly, better determine customer requirements or make lines of business more efficient.

In the past, business analysts would have to carefully explain what they wanted systems to do to IT analysts and developers who knew systems and development inside and out, but may not have had the same level of business experience, training or expertise. Quite often, the systems that were developed didn't provide the needed information, the systems were hard for the business people to use and understand or the development period meant that the information was provided too late to be of much use.

Database and development tool suppliers have been trying to attack this problem for quite some time. For quite a while "fourth generation" languages were offered precisely to address this need. The industry has also offered tools that allowed an analyst to create what appeared to be a flowchart on the screen and programs would be developed behind the scenes. We've also seen graphical tools that were based upon other metaphors, such as mind maps, tables and other planning tools with which a business analyst might be somewhat familiar.

Jitterbit 4 takes this idea a step further by providing the tools that work with large, multi-system computational and database environments. The final environment might be able to use parallel processing techniques that extend on-premise computing resources out into the resources offered by cloud computing suppliers.

While it is clear that small and medium size businesses might not have a great deal of need for Jitterbit 4.0, it is likely that this tool could be of great assistance to larger organizations.