Oracle and Salesforce.com have been competing for business in the cloud services marketplace for the past couple of years since Oracle started its own cloud services division.
As most industry observers know, Oracle has had a hard time cracking the Salesforce nut, to say the least. But as of Jan. 16, Oracle is putting forth an interesting new strategy: enabling secure data exchanges between Oracle SOA Suite and Salesforce.com through a new cloud adapter.
It’s not exactly “if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em,” but it’s an interesting alternative. Oracle shops now don’t have to use workarounds or look the other way—read that shadow IT—to allow Salesforce data streams to be used.
Augmenting its library of more than 300 standards-based integration adapters, Oracle unveiled
the new cloud adapter to integrate applications regardless of deployment location—in the cloud or on-premises. The adapters are to be used with SOA Suite, Oracle’s unified application integration package.
“The goal of this adapter is making developers more efficient and remove the barriers in integrating [on-premises apps] with the cloud,” Oracle Vice President of Product Management Demed L’Her told eWEEK.
“People have been deploying different tools in integrating applications, and this is creating even more integration problems because these tools don’t talk to each other.”
The idea is to give users just one tool to handle all data integration—whether in physical, on-site servers or in a cloud service.
Besides providing a clear path for Salesforce data, Cloud Adapter for Salesforce also minimizes issues often associated with session management, resulting in improved performance and increased efficiency, L’Her said.
To securely exchange data between Oracle SOA Suite and Salesforce.com, the Cloud Adapter uses the Credential Store Framework, which prevents confidential credentials from being exchanged over the network.
Go here for downloads of recent Oracle adapters. Go here for more information on the new Salesforce adapter.