Pervasive Software, the Austin based application and data integration provider, last week announced the general availability of Pervasive Galaxy, an appstore for integration processes/connectors. I was at their annual Metamorphosis conference (disclaimer: my travel and stay during the conference was taken care off by Pervasive Software) where I had a chance to talk to Pervasive executives, their partners and users. As I have been highlighting here at CloudAve, integration is a hard problem to solve and many companies are taking a shot at it. Pervasive has some unique set of offerings which gives them some advantage over their competitors. The announcement of Pervasive Galaxy nudges them ahead in the highly competitive marketplace. It is clear that appstore concept is crucial for any platform to succeed these days and Pervasive Galaxy is an interesting move in this regard. In this post, I will introduce the company and highlight why I find them interesting in the cloud based world.
Who is Pervasive Software and why they are interesting?
Pervasive has been in existence for more than two decades and they took the current name in 1994. With more than $47 Million in revenue, they are primarily focussed on integration between corporate data, third party applications, custom applications, SaaS, etc. in many verticals. They have more than 4500 customers with companies of all sizes and shapes, from Global 100 to SMB. They offer out of the box adapters for many existing SaaS applications delivering real time integration between SaaS applications and other enterprise applications including integration with data stored inside the corporate firewall. In short, they offer a comprehensive set of end to end integration solutions for on-premise, on-demand, hybrid and embedded deployments.
I got interested in Pervasive’s offerings for two reasons: their cloud based DataCloud solutions and their big data plans using DataRush. I really liked the way DataCloud group and DataRush group operated inside Pervasive. Along with their CTO’s innovation labs where they spend considerable resources hiring researchers checking out newer innovations, DataCloud and DataRush groups worked as startups inside Pervasive. They focussed on innovating for the cloud and big data world. Unlike many companies from the traditional IT world who usually dismiss newer technologies, Pervasive has invested considerable resources many years back to develop solutions for the emerging technologies like cloud computing and big data. This investment is now paying off, positioning themselves to compete hard in today’s world.
Pervasive DataCloud 2, a platform running on top of AWS, is suitable for developers with applications on AWS or other cloud services. This completely lowers the barriers for adding data services, integrating applications, giving the cloud developers wide range of options from point to point integrations to enterprise level solutions. Some of the use cases include: application and data integrations, analytics, data profiling, etc.. For those who are worried about putting their data on public clouds like AWS, they also offer an on-premise version using Eucalyptus cloud platform. Even though they initially partnered with Eucalyptus because of the AWS compatible API available in that platform, they are confident that they can also support other private cloud platforms. Pervasive DataCloud2 complements the services offered by various cloud vendors by helping customers tap into the best of the breed applications suitable for their needs.
Pervasive DataRush, a platform for the big data future, is a java based platform that allows developers to create applications that are data intensive and highly scalable. At the heart of the applications enabled by this platform is the DataRush parallel dataflow engine which completely transforms the way these applications handles data. It takes large volumes of data, processes them by taking advantage of the multicore platforms and offers quality data and analytics. This platform contains data mining algorithms and analytic function libraries which takes the platform into the domain of predictive analytics. The data preparation part of this platform can help in use cases like patient records matching, claims processing, in the health care sector and mortgage analysis, standardizing smart meter data, etc. in other verticals. The analytics part will be useful in fraud detection, cyber security, recommendation engines, etc.. DataRush supports Hadoop platform and, according to Pervasive, it is easy to reduce the complexities of mapreduce by embedding DataRush within Hadoop. This will also add significant performance boost. Alternatively, distributed DataRush can also be used on HDFS to get even better performance.
Competitors
Some of the competitors to Pervasive Software include: Informatica, IBM (Cast Iron), Talend, Dell (Boomi), Jitterbit, SAP, etc..
Conclusion
At the risk of being overly repetitive, I want to highlight once again that integration is hard and cloud integration is even more difficult. As more and more companies move to cloud and as they start to see the advantages in using the best of breed applications, integration becomes the crucial link to any successful cloud implementation. Pervasive management clearly saw the opportunity in this space and are positioning themselves to be a strong player in the space. Pervasive Data Integrator and DataCloud 2 are key pieces to the integration puzzle in the cloud. With the looming big data market rush, DataRush can put Pervasive take advantage of the open field as more and more organizations tap into big data. Pervasive is an interesting company to watch in the cloud integration space and I will keep a close watch as they evolve themselves to meet the new age challenges.
Related articles
- Interesting idea: integration apps marketplace (zdnet.com)
- Pervasive Software Joins Database Race (blogs.sitepoint.com)
- Head in the Cloud (jeffnolan.com)
- TDWI Q&A: Data Integration and Cloud Computing (cloudintegration.wordpress.com)
- Hubspan and Netsuite Join Hands To Offer B2B Integration (cloudave.com)
- How to Integrate With the Cloud (pcworld.com)
- The Vendor Landscape of BI and Analytics (practicalanalytics.wordpress.com)
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