Cloud To Cloud ETL / Integration: The Next EAI?

Today, my good address book and my Plaxo address book are synced with each other.  But I do it the old fashioned way: through my PC.  Though both services are in the cloud, they come together in the address book on my Mac.    In reality, though, there's no need for that.  Cloud services can and should sync together through the cloud.  Indeed, Plaxo has a beta Google contact sync, but it doesn't work yet (at least not with any reliability).

What's true for consumers today will be true for more and more enterprises in the future:  cloud services will increasingly need to sync  with each other.  And there's no point in routing the data through the enterprise for the sake of clogging your bandwidth or slowing your cycle time.

The need for cloud-to-cloud integration will range from the mundane (sync your salesforece.com contacts with your LotusLive mail application) to the very complex: verifying delivery addresses and inventory availability with your cloud-based ERP and your cloud-based eCommerce, both managed by different vendors.

Today, most cloud users are consumers or enterprise that have one small cloud app hanging off their big fat local ERP.  That's going to change in the future. As more and more companies grow and mature into networks of cloud applications, they will still need ETL and EAI as much as they did before.  But where to it and how to manage it?

Smart cloud apps with implement their own inter-app linkages.  Salesforece.com to and from lots of related applications.  The problem: enterprises no longer have visibility to how that information is being transferred and managed.  That could present challenges in managing enterprise master data.  So, is there an opportunity to create an a kind of cloud-based EAI solution - managing and tracking integration and master data for enterprises between different cloud applications?  I think there's a market for this, getting bigger by the day.

Cloud To Cloud Integration could be powerful.  Photo Flickr CC.