What? No Poll?
I have heard from several of you that while they found the weekly polls entertaining they were more interested in what we are doing.
As you all know, for the last 18 months we (Pervasive DataSolutions) have been focused on delivering our own solutions (Pervasive DataSynch for QuickBooks and Salesforce as a flagship example). Mainly the solutions have come in the form of a value-add integration service. Our success has been fun, in fact we enjoy the notoriety as having one (Pervasive DataSynch) of the most proliferated integration add-on applications for salesforce.com and QuickBooks with 150 customers and counting. We’ve also received the QuickBooks Gold certification for add on applications and have the highest number of reviews for a QuickBooks integration on salesforce.com’s AppExchange site. But where do we go from here?
We have always said we could build these types of packaged integrations for the next 100 years and not solve 1/10th of the world’s integration issues. We needed help. The DataCloud was created as a by-product of needing to build our own products more rapidly and efficiently, but we were the only ones building them. That is until another Pervasive division approached us to build a product for them. We didn’t have the bandwidth to squeeze in another product, but realized if we could expose our web services to them, they could build the product themselves. The division, Pervasive DataRush, and one of their partners, Aha! Software, recently released a beta of this new service, deployed on our own Pervasive DataCloud. The service, called Strato-Studio, is a MonteCarlo simulation that does predictive analysis. What does that mean? Well, you feed Strato-Studio some predictive modeling data, it crunches it many times, really fast, and then gives you pretty good idea where things are headed. That’s the quick version, but you get the idea. So where does Pervasive DataSolutions fit?
The DataSolutions platform (Pervasive DataCloud) is implemented on Amazon’s elastic cloud services layer. Services can run on just about any hardware and software combination and are billed by usage. The value for Strato-Studio is that Monte Carlo Simulations are very machine intensive, and the bigger the machine the better the analysis. It also requires some parallel processing power that is rare, but is available in the Pervasive DataRush engine. These requirements present a challenge for businesses that do not have (machine or programming) resources readily available. By empowering the Pervasive DataRush team and Aha! to build their simulations on the Pervasive DataCloud, they are able to leverage both in a very repeatable and scalable model. Consumers of their service can enjoy the benefits of a powerful computer plus sophisticated software and only pay for what they use!
This is exciting news. By creating an API for our existing infrastructure, not only do we enable other divisions within Pervasive the ability to develop services on the DataCloud, but anyone and everyone who wants to publish their own services. This marks a new era in the availability of data services and the power that can be delivered. But most importantly is how quickly the services can be delivered. Pervasive has always been able to help innovators implement data services, with its multiple data processing engines (transformation, process flow, parallel process flow, profiling, etc.), and now those same services can be exposed in the form of consumable web services. Platforms that never before had direct access, or limited access and required dedicated hosted hardware can access data services on demand. Developers on force.com, Intuit Partner Platform, Amazon AWS, Microsoft Azure, e-commerce sites, or any process that can call a web service (SOAP or REST), can leverage the power of a data service running on the Pervasive DataCloud.
Over the course of the next few months we will be rolling out documentation on how to design, deploy and manage the services from a developer’s perspective. And we will also be posting examples of how to consume the services already running on the Pervasive DataCloud. We’ll be unveiling more information in the coming weeks ahead so stay tuned.