A Hitchhiker’s Guide to Integration as a Service

Posted by Sean on March 10, 2010

In “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” (a great book by Douglas Adams), our Galaxy is inhabited by thousands of intelligent species, who all communicate in unique ways and in different languages.  However, these species are able to communicate with each other thanks to a small creature called a babel fish.  The babel fish feeds off the sound waves generated by speaking and emits brain waves that enable the person with the babel fish to understand what the other speaker is saying. 

In the Software as a Service (SaaS) galaxy, Integration as a Service (or IaaS) is a babel fish for business documents and messages.  You communicate to the cloud-based IaaS platform in your native language (such as an SAP iDOC or an ANSI X12 810 invoice), and the IaaS solution then sends that message to your intended receiver in the language they require. 

A full-blown IaaS implementation mediates not only data formats but also transport protocols, delivery schedules, business rules and logic, security polices and other business process definitions.  This would be the equivalent of the babel fish not only translating the words but also mediating the cultural nuances, personality idiosyncrasies and other differences between two species.

Hubspan provides this level of comprehensive integration delivered as a managed service, so you and all of your partners and customers can exchange information quickly via the cloud and all work from your existing systems. You could think of Hubspan as the uber babel fish for business integration.

Tags: Business Integration, Cloud Integration Platform, IaaS, SaaS

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