Pervasive Software, 240-employee data integration firm serving small and medium-sized businesses, has built a data integration platform in the cloud that ties customers' Salesforce.com application data to their QuickBooks accounting data.

In the future, the Pervasive Cloud 2 integration platform, which runs on Amazon Web Services EC2, will be able to integrate data from many different vendors' products, predicted CTO Mike Hoskins, at his firm's West Coast user group meeting in San Jose on Thursday.

"I can run data integration services for all my partners. I can do custom integrations, delivered on the cloud. I can create [data] integration services of any kind," predicted Hoskins in an interview after delivering his opening keynote, "Cloud Proliferation -- The New Laws of Data distribution and Integration."

To create data integrations of any kind will require connectors to specific devices and data sources of any kind, and Hoskins during his keynote acknowledged it's impossible for one vendor to master all of them. "I have hundreds and hundreds. I wish I had millions," he said in that address. So the day of comprehensive, end to end data integration in the cloud is still a ways offs.

Nevertheless, Pervasive over the last two years has put 200 customers into production use of their Salesforce data in their QuickBooks accounting systems. QuickBooks is available both for on-premises installation and as a service. Hoskins said the Pervasive Data Cloud 2 platform can deal with either version. While the cloud is still debated in some quarters, QuickBooks, Salesforce, and Pervasive have been busy illustrating how it can serve as a meeting ground for dissimilar parties who want to work together.

"There's a new sheriff in town. It's the cloud, whether you like it or not," Hoskins warned Pervasive customers in his address. Life will get more difficult for those responsible for data integrations, he added.

For three years, Pervasive has foreseen such a development and taken profits from its enterprise data integration business, which features products such as Data Profiler, Data MatchMerge, Data Integrator, and invested them in its Integration division to develop a cloud integration platform. One outcome of that development is the ability to send a software agent down the wire to a QuickBook customer. The agent detects what type of QuickBooks installation it is dealing with, "sends information back to the Pervasive mothership," then applies the right rules and policies to establish connections that link QuickBooks to the customer's Salesforce.com account. "This little agent has a control unit back in the cloud. The agent asks it, 'Am I up to date? Am I running smoothly?'" Hoskins said in the interview. If the agent needs a patch, the controller sends it down the wire, where it's installed automatically.

The QuickBooks/Salesforce integration service is available for a $75 a month subscription, with technical support.

That approach is different from the traditional Pervasive data integration in an enterprise, where licenses are sold and integration systems installed on-premises. Both Pervasive and enterprise IT staff integration expertise is used in such cases. The goal of the new Pervasive Data Solutions unit inside Pervasive, a sort of faux startup that is isolated on its own floor from other Pervasive integration staff, is to apply a new method of integration, find new customers for it and charge on a subscription rather than a license basis -- a pattern established by other cloud-based services.

"The dream was to offer integration, not as a tool, but as a finished integration service" that didn't require the customer to invest installation time and expertise, Hoskins said.

The process of building out the cloud integration platform is still under way and Hoskins said Pervasive was talking to 25 partners about integrating their product in Pervasive Cloud 2. In addition, he said customers will be able to do custom integrations on the platform, using the agent software development kits supplied by Pervasive.

Data integration remains a hurdle for companies seeking to get into cloud computing, with new challenges on top of those they've already encountered inside the enterprise. "How do we solve integration when customer has half his infrastructure on premises and the other held in the cloud?" Hoskins asked rhetorically during his address.

Pervasive, Oracle, IBM, Microsoft, Business Objects, and Informatica are all likely to be supplying a more complete response over the next two years.

Pervasive has $46 million a year in revenue, Hoskins said.

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