Cape Clear 7 ESB for SaaS
The bell curve for SaaS integration
The spectrum of division of labour in creating and maintaining these ‘mediations’ flows from at one extreme a totally WSDL-savvy client who can create well-formed SOAP messages to drive remote services, and at the other extreme a client who wants nothing to do with WSDL and will just periodically email spreadsheets to you. Addressing this spectrum in an efficient manner is a major challenge, and it’s one that the Cape Clear ESB addresses.
Browser-based interactions with SaaS systems are typically short, fast and disorderly. Underlying these interactions, there is a need to enable a variety of business processes which are durable, long-running, and inherently orderly. For example, think of the difference in workday between checking if payroll has arrived for a given employee (simple, browser-based), versus structuring and conducting a payroll run for a 1000-employee company.
To perform the latter task requires a set of complex, stateful interactions over time between customer-side applications, the hosted application at workday, and the payroll provider (eg ADP or Payforce) with whom workday interact. This is a different class of problem to that of browser-based interaction. This is true both for the initial data load (configure 1000 employees before the first payroll run), as well as for ongoing runs (every month, a number of employees join and leave, get pay rises, change tax status, receive expense payments, get paid in different currencies etc.).
So how do these interactions actually happen? How, where and by whom do they get defined? And what does the runtime architecture look like?
