Having publicly launched the company at the DEMO conference back in February, Jitterbit is now officially releasing version 1.0 of a product that is supposed to make EAI a point and click matter for the rest of us.
Jitterbit provides a core framework that packages wizards for connecting to common sources like relational databases, web services, or FTP. Its connectors identify the source, so that if you are connecting to an Oracle or SQL Server database, the wizard prompts the user for choices as to which tables you would like to connect. Similarly, if it were a WSDL web service definition, the wizard would step you through making connections to a particular service.
Once you’ve developed an integration, you can package it as a Jitter Pack that can be deployed to a web server where it could be shared with the community or sold. Offering its IP under the Mozilla license, open source customers are allowed to sell whatever customizations they make.
The business model is straight from the Red Boss (Red Hat/JBoss) playbook: offer free downloads plus support subscriptions and custom consulting options for paying customers. It leverages formal and de facto standards, encourages the community to rapidly discover, patch, or contribute enhancements, and hopes that the word will spread through viral marketing.
Since announcing the company in February, Jitterbit accumulated roughly a hundred members to its forum and reported 3400 downloads. Since the announcement of official release 1, 1800 more downloads have been made.
Significantly, two of its three initial reference customers, who are paid subscribers, found Jitterbit after doing a Google search on Open Source EAI.
Admittedly, the company is shooting for the SMB market whose integration needs are typically simpler than those of Global 2000 with high-end ERP and other sophisticated transaction and messaging systems.
Even within the SMB market, we don’t have to solve everybody’s problems, said Sharam Sasson, president & CEO. But if we can solve half their problems with a simple tool, we’re in good shape.
So far, Jitterbit has tested its connectors against various versions of Oracle and SQL Server databases, and it has tested connections against web services exposed by Salesforce, SugarCRM, Amazon, and Google.
At this point, the company is not yet officially certifying any of the connections, but says that formally documented links to the most popular targets will be one of the next major action items.
In the next minor release, Jitterbit will add support for SMTP mail integration, and for the next major release, it will probably tackle BPEL web services orchestration. And they’re looking at other modes of distribution, one of which might be Salesforce.com’s new OEM offering.
The cofounders of the 10-person company came from Scopus, the Israeli CRM company that was acquired by Siebel for $460 million back in 1998. The company is primarily self-funded with some contributions from angel investors.
Given the open source nature of the company, it is releasing product and marketing itself at a much earlier stage than is customary for commercial vendors. Consequently, Jitterbit is very much a work in progress.
