Queplix Links On-Premise Apps To The Cloud

Queplix Corp., which produces the Queplix Virtual Data Manager platform - a software framework that lets users extract data and metadata from certain source database applications for use in data integration and harmonization with other database applications - has announced an Application Software Blade for Hadoop. Support for Hadoop means that the Virtual Data Manager now supports Hive, HBase and Cassandra.

Hadoop joins other Application Software Blades such as customer relationship management applications Siebel and SalesForce.com, as well as social media sites such as Facebook and LinkedIn. The company is also planning to announce an Application Software Blade for NetSuite.

Enterprise storage application network vendor Coraid Inc., based in Redwood City, Calif., has been using Queplix to integrate the company's NetSuite manufacturing and financial data with the SalesForce data it was acquiring through sales operations and marketing, says Carl Wright, executive vice president of sales and business development.

The company had been using the two different applications, but after a year, he discovered that the data he had for the same customers in both NetSuite and SalesForce didn't always match up, he says. For example, support functionality was managed out of SalesForce, but the entitlement portion was in NetSuite. While the company had attempted to use the Boomi AtomSphere product to create a connector between the two databases, he essentially had to do it on a field-by-field basis, which didn't work well with relational databases, he said.

Queplix, which uses crawlers in a read-only account that also keeps account security in mind, completed the integration in less than a week with almost no interaction with staff, he said. While as a technologist he thinks the Hadoop integration is "very cool," it's not something his company is doing anything with, though he will integrate with Microsoft Exchange next.The software provides a lightweight way for organizations to bring together disparate data sources into a centralized access system, says Mark Cashman, chief executive officer of the Sunnyvale, Calif., company. Being able to bridge between the relational databases used by an increasing number of applications, and perform analytics on their data, is key to a corporation's success, he says.

So-called "big data" platforms are getting a great deal of hype, but typically they are still silos rather than being integrated with the rest of the organization, says Julie Lockner, senior analyst and vice president for the data management market segment at Enterprise Strategy Group, a Milford, Mass., consultancy. When organizations have the desire to implement a master data management plan using multiple applications - without having to perform a forklift upgrade -- products like those from Queplix offer a good approach without the heavy lifting of tools such as scripting and hand-coding, she says.

The NetSuite blade is currently available and the Hadoop blades are scheduled to be available on May 1. Enterprise deployments cost $50,000, with blades ranging from $15,000 to $25,000; both Hadoop and NetSuite are on the lower end of that range. The company is also planning to offer a cloud-based service for $1,000 per month.

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