The gist is that there are tons of applications out there that don’t quite do what you want, and you need something inbetween your various applications that can squish/slice/dice the data to fit each side.
However, what the CEO of Apatar was trying to point out is that sometimes you don’t need full time middleware and that he has a lighter weight variation on the theme called “Apatar”. He described it as a “data mashup tool” that has connectors to a large variety of data sources and action items to manipulate the data in all kinds of weird and wonderful ways.

Last week the world’s largest annual computer expo, the CeBIT conference, was held in Hannover, Germany. This year there was also a focus on the “application development” side of technology, which included a large area devoted to open-source and a number of panels on topics such as Virtual Worlds, Digital Content Distribution, as well as a panel on “Business Solutions with Enterprise Mashups”. Ludmila Radzevich from Apatar (provider of an open-source data integration tool) was on hand to represent data mashups.

You might be able to save up to $100,000 a year by renegotiating your data integration licenses, according to this post published on Apatar's blog. Of course, Apatar is an open source data integration solution provider and has a vested interest in reminding you that you could save on licensing fees. But that number is actually from recent Gartner report, according to the post.

The backup guy, the storage guy, and the virtualization guy are going to quickly become "the guy" in many organizations. Having a separate management and monitoring application for each one of these applications isn't going to cut it any more. Tools will be needed, like those from Tek-Tools and Apatar that offer complete monitoring and reporting of storage management, data protection, and virtualization management in a single console.

This is the second part of my post about building an RSS Reader with Oracle and Apatar. If you have all the prerequisites mentioned in the previous post in place, let's proceed with the database schema. This is enough to define the Apatar transformations which will load RSS posts into the table automatically.

This article considers the example of integrating QuickBooks with salesforce.com. But, there is more to improved QuickBooks and Salesforce integration than just saving time and effort; quality data integration makes for better business processes which helps accelerate sales in various lines of business. On the one hand, you have the sales department that uses Salesforce, which is always updated with customers’ credit and invoice information obtained from the back office’s QuickBooks. On the other hand, your accounting department is guaranteed to keep abreast of the current sales by having their QuickBooks synchronized with Salesforce.

IBM i users can integrate customer data stored within DB2 with SugarCRM or transfer data to and from DB2 to SugarCRM. They can also improve the quality of corporate/customer data stored in DB2 prior to entering SugarCRM, or vice versa.

New Apatar Connector was recently released to aid those struggling with integration of open source suite SugarCRM with third-party applications, databases, flat files, other CRM/ERP applications and Web 2.0 destinations. Apatar claims to be able to do it all "without coding".

Apatar recently announced its official connectivity to the SugarCRM open source suite for the construction of a new SugarCRM connector that can be deployed by all business users with no requirement for coding skills.

Data integration vendor Apatar has introduced a software tool for connecting SugarCRM, an open-source customer relationship management suite, with third party applications.

Apatar, which sells open source software aimed at the data integration market, has officially announced connectivity to the SugarCRM open source suite. Apatar officials say the new SugarCRM connector is designed to integrate data between their customer relation management system and what company officials describe as "a variety of third-party data sources, allowing for this data to be filtered, validated, and cleansed."

Apatar, a vendor of open source tools for data integration, today announced connectivity to the Vertica Analytic Database, a grid-based column-oriented database management system used for analytics and business intelligence.

Apatar Inc., is an industry leader in data integration and data fluidity (made that up) who announced the release of their Apatar On-Demand application to the Salesforce appexchange.  Promising a smoother flow of information between Salesforce Accounts and Quickbooks as well as providing a few other perks like a data quality service.   Apatar’s press release proudly proclaims that all this will decrease deployment time “by a factor of ten”.

Software as a service (SaaS) and open source continue to converge. The latest example is Apatar On-Demand, which now synchronizes Salesforce.com CRM and Intuit QuickBooks accounting software. Apatar specializes in open source tools for data integration. And filling the gap between Salesforce.com and QuickBooks should be of great interest to VARs and managed service providers. Here’s a bit more about some of the trends here.

By Loraine Lawson, July 11, 2008

A fan of QuickBooks and Salesforce.com CRM? Then you might want to check out Apatar OnDemand, a new hosted integration solution that synchronizes data between QuickBooks and Salesforce.com. According to the press release, it’s designed for business users and can be set up within 30 minutes via a browser.

By Direct Magazine, June 20, 2008

Apatar Inc. is working with Cdyne Corp. to offer a Web-based data hygiene service for removing the names of deceased persons from marketing lists and databases. The service verifies Social Security numbers used for customer identification against the U.S. Social Security Death Index database.

By Savio Rodrigues, May 21, 2008

I just spent some time looking at Apatar, a company that's offering an extract, transform, load (ETL) and data integration solution under the GPL (with commercial support subscriptions available also). The really cool thing is that Apatar provides a visual designer and mapping tool in order to hide the complexity of ETL and data integration from the typical (business) user.

By Brad Kenney, May 16, 2008

According to analyst firm Aberdeen Group, 52% of organizations consider the "verification of data accuracy or completeness" to be one of the biggest customer data management challenges. Indeed, the principle of "garbage in, garbage out" is one with which many manufacturing IT managers continually struggle.

By Andy Mulholland, April 21, 2008

As more and more enterprises move to adopt MashUps the question of what content, and from where is it coming, is being asked more and more often. I guess it's part of the move we are all taking part in from using structured data, created by our own computers, to an increasing use of unstructured data, which could be described as created, and used by, people with the resulting ‘inconsistencies’.

26 March , 2008

Despite what many people tend to think, mashups are not just grabbing someone’s Web content. A well-made mashup is actually a brand new information resource, which is unique, genuine, and represents a greater value than its single components. If the mashup fails to meet the above-mentioned conditions, one can write it off as a dustbin full of informational garbage. Users are willing to pay only for those mashups that are of some value either for business or fun. In other words, the resource is worth considering when the idea of a certain mashup, the idea to combine these very components, makes sense. Nobody is interested in a mashup that transforms a number of useful Web sites into a huge useless mess.