The short answer is “yes”. Connecting on-premise and cloud applications “in minutes” is true…provided you only consider the connectivity subset of integration and have a small number of cloud integration touch points.

At the recent Gartner AADI conference, 230 attendees filled up the Oracle session to get a more comprehensive answer to this question. During the session, titled “Simplifying Integration – The Cloud & Mobile Pre-requisite”, Oracle’s Tim Hall described cloud connectivity and then, equally importantly, the other essential and sometimes overlooked aspects of integration required to ensure a long term application and service integration strategy. To understand the challenges and opportunities faced by cloud integration, the session started off with a slide that describes how connectivity can quickly transition from simplicity to complexity as the number of applications and service vendor instances grows:

Increased complexity puts increased demand on the integration platform

As companies expand from on-premise applications into a hybrid on-premise/cloud infrastructure with support for mobile, cloud, and social, there is a new sense of urgency to implement a unified and comprehensive service integration platform. Without getting this unified platform in place, companies face increased complexity and cost managing a growing patchwork of niche integration toolsets as well as the disparate standards mandated by each SaaS vendor as shown in the image below:

Incomplete and overlapping offerings from a patchwork of niche vendors

Also at Gartner AADI, Oracle SOA Suite customer Geeta Pyne, Director of Middleware at BMC presented their successful strategy on how BMC efficiently manages their cloud integration despite disparate requirements from each vendor. From one of Geeta’s slide:

• Interfaces are dictated by SaaS vendors; wide variety (SOAP, REST, Socket, HTTP/POX, SFTP); Flexibility of Oracle Service Bus/SOA Suite helps to support

• Every vendor has their way to handle Security; WS-Security, Custom Header; Support in Oracle Service Bus helps to adhere to disparate requirements

At BMC, the flexibility of Oracle Service Bus and Oracle SOA Suite allowed them to support the wide variation in the functional requirements as mandated by their SaaS vendors.

In contrast to the patchwork platform approach of escalating complexity from overlapping SaaS toolkits, Oracle’s strategy is to provide a unified platform to support disparate requirements from your SaaS vendors, on-premise apps, legacy apps, and more. Furthermore, Oracle SOA Suite includes the many aspects of comprehensive integration beyond basic connectivity including orchestration, analytics (BAM, events…), service virtualization and more in a single unified interface.

Oracle SOA Suite – Unified and comprehensive

To summarize, yes you can achieve “cloud integration in minutes” when considering the connectivity subset of integration but be sure to look for ways to simplify as you consider a more comprehensive view of integration beyond basic connectivity such as service virtualization, management, event processing and more. And finally, be sure your integration platform has the deep flexibility to handle the requirements of all your future SaaS applications…many of which are unknown to you now.