Over at TechRepublic, Alex Khizhnyak has authored an appealing invitation for developers to explore third-party integration aids for salesforce.com data. Some of his points reinforce my own arguments in my white paper on integration of on-demand resources with other IT elements: for example, "clarify the goals."

I want to call particular attention to Alex’s "Web 2.5" thinking about combining the strengths of the salesforce.com API with the raw storage capabilities of other on-demand services, such as Amazon.com’s S3.  Also useful is his emphasis on creating a sustainable process that automates ongoing operations. That’s what it takes to preserve data consistency, and thus to make the system an operational asset rather than just a neat demo.

What sums up the piece, it seemed to me, were these comments near the end:

Integration with salesforce.com may be easier than you think… With today’s data management
solutions, the business user has a powerful toolset not only to manage
data streams within the enterprise, but to join data with the Web, keep
it safely in salesforce.com, and exchange information with partners
globally.

Precisely.