Data integration – it’s the elephant in the room when it comes to the adoption of cloud solutions. While a plethora of best of breed solutions might provide the best functional fit in specific areas, that only works when the solutions themselves work together seamlessly – which is where the data integrators come in. Vendors like Dell Boomi, SnapLogic, Informatica and Scribe aim to tie different solutions together and, to an extent, provide cloud vendors with an alternative to the monolithic suite offerings.

Scribe has just released its own enhanced platform which aims to make data integration quicker, easier and in my view most importantly, available to others than the usual technical elite. Scribe is already fairly well known in the CRM integration space – it has 12000 or so customers worldwide and spans integration requirements in the cloud, on-premise and of a hybrid nature.

The interesting thing about Scribe is that is uses a pretty innovative visual design environment that was actually inspired by Scratch, the MIT Media Lab developed programming language that was created in order to help children learn to program. Scribe has an interesting take therefore, it hides all the complexity far into the background, and offers up a highly visual environment for business people to create their custom integrations.

Scribe IS screenshot

Scribe also offers pre-built solutions for commonly used integration needs (for example specific integration tasks for Microsoft Dynamics, Salesforce, ExactTarget, Marketo and QuickBooks). They’re also strongly set up for ISVs to use their platform, Scribe enables solution bundling and distribution via the Scribe marketplace, a trait that is occurring more often as vendors see to find low-cost ways of distributing their product – allowing third parties to monetize on your platform is well established in the consumer space (iTunes or Google Play anyone) and is becoming more so in the enterprise space.

So what can customer’s do with Scribe? Using Scribe’s Integration and Replication Services, Connectors and pre-built solutions, customers and partners can:

  • Replicate cloud data to a local database for reporting, analytics or backup
  • Integrate key customer data (e.g., sales data, contact information) across critical business systems such as CRM, Marketing Automation, ERP and support
  • Connect on-premise and cloud-based CRM and ERP to everyday applications such as Marketo, ExactTarget, GoToWebinar and QuickBooks quickly and easily

The idea of enabling third parties to build specific integration functionality and sell it on the Scribe platform is, while not novel, interesting and should help the company gain more market share. I really like their super easy visual approach to creating custom integrations – it’s a democratization of integration that will only do good things for a deeper adoption of cloud tools.

Ben Kepes

Ben Kepes is a technology evangelist, an investor, a commentator and a business adviser. Ben covers the convergence of technology, mobile, ubiquity and agility, all enabled by the Cloud. His areas of interest extend to enterprise software, software integration, financial/accounting software, platforms and infrastructure as well as articulating technology simply for everyday users.

1 Comment
  • If you want a different take on integration, specifically those integrations that are driven by EDI, you might consider checking out my company. EDI based application connectors are rapidly developing portion of our business.

Leave a Reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.