Middleware is dead. Long live the cloud data platform!

In this cloud era, not only are new possibilities continually being created, but existing activities become easier and less expensive. Whenever a new paradigm emerges, those products not only disrupt their direct competitors, but often enable a wave of change in adjacent markets.

I’ll be upfront; this is one of those architecture articles that ends with a product that: a) enables the solution to solving the problem it describes, and b) the author happens to have a stake in. But in my defense, the article wasn’t written retrospectively to promote the product, the product was built to help define a new category of SaaS-native integration, and has a natural fit in the new world of the cloud data platform.

With that said, let’s open with a couple of bold statements.

First, unless you have an extremely rare flavor of production database, you are running out of excuses to not have reliable, low latency data pipelines feeding an elastic cloud warehouse like Snowflake. Why? Well, the mechanism has been commoditized, the price of entry is low, and every business needs to be data driven to at least some extent.

Second, you should be running your business apps in public cloud. Ideally SaaS, like Salesforce. Why? This lets you outsource the common traditional system administration tasks, and allows your technology teams to focus on improving the way your business operates.

If you’re on board with both those statements, you’re in good company:

1. The cloud data replication market has been continuing to heating up the past few years, with Stitch and Alooma being acquired by Talend and Google respectively, Fivetran going on to become a unicorn, and Amazon and Microsoft continuing to develop their own offerings.
2. According to Gartner, around 75% of CRM spend has been on SaaS offerings last year, and trending upward.

So with a centralized, highly available and scalable data platform running right alongside your CRM in the cloud, why should you be brokering an integration back to all the various source systems with an expensive, unnecessary extra piece of infrastructure?

The good news is that you don’t need to anymore. With Omnata’s new Snowflake for Salesforce product, the whole Salesforce platform can retrieve data directly from Snowflake, down to the individual record among billions of others.

It’s really quick and easy to get started by installing a trial from the AppExchange, just follow the link on the product page.

P.S. This pattern is coming to other cloud data warehouses and other SaaS applications soon, so stay tuned!