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A new open-source integration company, Jitterbit, is jostling to distinguish itself in an increasingly crowded marketplace through two factors: published, predefined integration documents, called Jitterpaks; and a focus on small and midsize businesses.
Jitterbit announced May 22 the availability of its namesake Community Edition and Professional Edition suites (the first open source, the second paid for) that provide a relatively simple way to integrate applications, data and Web services using the predefined integration documents.
Available for both Windows and Linux operating systems, Jitterbits software allows users to connect XML, databases and simple and hierarchical files using most major transport protocols.
Users are also able to integrate source and target systems, transform data, and define events and exception handling for tracking purposes, officials said.
The bigger picture, though, is that Jitterbits user community is able to leverage the companys so-called Jitterpaks to get the jump on integration projects.
“In the integration space, one of the biggest issues is no one is sharing integration information,” said Ilan Sehayek, Jitterbits vice president of engineering, in Alameda, Calif.
“Everyone starts integration projects from scratch. Even if there is an introspection tool, it doesnt give you the expertise that is already known about how to talk to systems. Theres a big effort out there today and people dont share it.”
Sehayek said it is a similar scenario with system architectures, where IT professionals consistently find themselves coding from scratch.
“To share code between systems or share code in the database, you have to go in, look at the code, recompile it and test it again. It takes a big effort,” said Sehayek.
“More often than not because of the level of effort, people dont try to figure out what someone elses code is.”
Published to the Jitterbit community, the variety of Jitterpaks available to date is limited—the company is developing documents around Amazon.com and Salesforce.com integrations, but the concept is limitless, according to Sehayek.
“What we are going to do is create some and put them out there, [with users] creating their own, so their communities can use them,” said Sehayek.
An example of a Jitterpaks use is to alleviate an integration request that on-demand CRM (customer relationship management) vendor Salesforce.com gets often: to synchronize customer data across different sales teams in an organization.
“One Jitterpak does all the synchronization across all sales force teams,” said Sehayek. “All a customer would need to do is download Jitterbit, go into the Jitterpak, make [user account, user ID, authorization] changes, and it will do all the work.” Jitterbit also announced May 22 that it has partnered with open- source ERP (enterprise resource planning) software developer OpenMFG.
Together, the two companies plan to create Jitterpaks that focus on the needs of their joint customers.