Hubspan Does Cloud Integration but Does NOT Compete with Boomi
Posted by Margaret Dawson on November 3, 2010
With the recent media coverage on Dell’s acquisition of Boomi, an old theme has raised its head – that Hubspan competes against Boomi and other similar solutions. Hubspan does have a cloud-based integration platform, but the problem we solve for companies is different than what Boomi or a Cast Iron does.
Boomi does application-to-application (A2A) integration, helping move and syncronize data between two intra-enterprise systems or applications (sometimes called Enterprise Application Integration or EAI). For example, you need to sync your customer master data file between your Salesforce.com application (SaaS-based app) and your on-premise SAP system. Boomi’s appliance or cloud-based solution would “sit” between these two applications, handling extract, load, basic transformation and delivery of the customer data, so these two apps are working from a common set of data. You might do this data sync on a daily or more frequent basis.
Cast Iron, recently acquired by IBM, does basically the same thing. Informatica, who has also been brought up as a Boomi compete can do this, but Informatica’s sweet spot is really in broader master data management (MDM), which is a more complex issue of managing data overall across an enterprise.
Hubspan, on the other hand, is focused on business-to-business (B2B) multi-enterprise integration. We EXTEND data from one company’s application or system, either cloud or on-premise, beyond the “firewall” to external business communities or corporate divisions. We also operate at the business process layer, managing information exchange as part of a complete business process, such as procurement, eCommerce, order management, logistics optimization, and others, between companies.
Unlike traditional B2B integration (aka EDI VANs), we also excel at real-time information queries and responses, going beyond static message exchange. Rather than a once-a-day execution, our communities are exchanging thousands of messages every day as part of business critical processes.
All integration solutions focus on the data, but A2A and B2B integration solutions resolve different challenges. They complement each other, and in fact, we often extend on-premise application integration products, but they do NOT compete against one another.
Increasingly, you will see these different integration solutions merge capability, so you will be able to purchase a single or bundled solution to manage both A2A and B2B integration.
Congrats to Boomi!
Tags: Application Integration, B2B Integration, Boomi, Cast Iron Systems, Dell, IBM
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