How Many Cloud Integration Technologies Do You Need?

The business application landscape has become a hybrid one. Some 24% of enterprises have already implemented or plan to implement closely integrated business processes that run partly on-premises and partly in the cloud. Clearly, that hybrid scenario represents a major challenge for traditional — i.e., on-premises — integration tools. Over the past 15 years, CIOs have built the required skills, acquired the necessary number of software licenses, and adopted best practices for traditional application and data integration tools. Obviously, they want to leverage these investments now for their cloud integration challenges rather than buying yet another tool. This report explores the variety of options available to CIOs to connect SaaS applications to on-premises enterprise applications. We offer guidance on finding the right balance — be that stretching existing tools into the cloud, acquiring new native cloud-based integration (CBI) tools, or even using integration-centric platform-as-a-service (PaaS).