Which is appropriate for my journey West, because I'm going to be attending SaaSCon in Santa Clara where I'll be learning about who is using SaaS and Cloud platforms, and how they are making the best use of what's available. While I'm there, I'll be participating in a series of video interviews that my fearless editor, Scott Koegler will be making. I'm not entirely certain why he's asked me to be a guest, as he's lined up several of the conference speakers to get their opinions.

SaaSCon is not all about EDI, of course. In fact, I'm guessing that less than 10% of the attendees are even tangentially involved with EDI. But I do know that the number and volume of applications migrating to online platforms is growing at what seems to be exponential rates.

What interests me about this kind of activity is the way these applications are connecting to each other. The historically Herculean tasks required to accomplish effective application integration are disappearing quickly. In a world where every locally installed instance of an application required the IT staff's efforts to develop application data exchanges between the various applications and data stores in the enterprise, complete integration was a pipe dream.

However, when the single instance of an application like Salesforce.com can be programmed to connect with a number of similar multi tenant applications, enterprise integration becomes a new reality. One that can be accomplished with a check mark on an option page in the application itself.

OK, maybe it isn't always that simple, but in many cases, it is. And more will follow. The clients I'll be seeing in the next few weeks are on their way to taking advantage of this new reality and the business advantages it offers.

If you're planning to attend SaaSCon, look me up, or let Scott know. If you're playing in the SaaS / Cloud arena already, or just evaluating the options, I'm sure he'd be interested in interviewing you while you're there.

Cheers!
Cecil