Imagining a data integration toolset sitting on top of Amazon’s E2 service will be a good starting point to understanding what DataCloud2 from Pervasive is setting out to offer users. And by the beginning of next year, the company expects to see it available to a wide range of service providers as a value-add service they can offer their customers.
Normally, integrating increasingly large amounts of data within a cloud environment requires the services of at least a systems administrator, a factor which can be the one step of awkwardness that negates the potential benefits of making the move to the cloud.
DataCloud2 sets out to simplify this process by creating a cloud-based integration platform that can be used by people such as business analysts. As Bill Jacaruso, Pervasive’s Senior Director of Data Solutions, the division that has created DataCloud2, said: “we wanted to create something that could be used directly by the people who are closer to the problem that needs to be solved.”
In its initial form, DataCloud2 has only been available as a data integration tool on Amazon, where it is primarily aimed at the developer community looking to build cloud-based applications and services. But as Jacaruso indicated, Pervasive is also now working to develop the package so it is more widely available. “We are set to gain independence from the Amazon queuing service in September, and from the Amazon Persistence platform within six months,” he said. “That will create an independent architecture that can drop onto any platform which can support Java.”
He indicated that the company is also working closely with Microsoft on current experiments to port DataCloud2 to the Azure platform. “It is not quite 100% there at the moment,” he said, “but it is close. This is definitely an important target platform for us and a version should be appearing soon.”
Marketing an integrations suite to the wider service provider market has its underlying problems, particularly in terms of over-complicating the basic sales message. Jacaruso is well aware of this, particularly as Pervasive has a 20-year history of white-labelling products with vendor partners. So when DataCloud2 becomes available to the service providers they will have the opportunity to take it and brand it as an integral part of their own offerings.
Pervasive is already working with some large enterprises building their own virtualised datacentres, providing them with the integration tools for extending on-premise infrastructures into cloud architected environments – both in-house and using external resources. As Jacaruso put it, “this saves them having to build their own. For enterprise users integration used to require the development of custom code, but now they can do it within a browser, so they can do it anywhere.”
With development work much easier to undertake there is an obvious danger of untested developments making it through to the production environment. To protect enterprise business systems from this eventuality the company provides a sandbox environment for DataCloud2. All new developments are automatically directed to this for testing purposes. Nothing is allowed near any production systems until it has passed through this process.
The company is also following an increasingly common trend as the scope and capabilities of cloud platforms start to firm up. This is a Repository Service where developers that have engineered data integration tools and utilities that have a wider market opportunity than the task for which they were developed can find a marketing vehicle. Pervasive will be offering joint marketing opportunities for such developers, as well as promoting the repository with both enterprise and service provider customers.
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