Java platform service provider CloudBees has acquired FoxWeave, a provider of cloud-based data integration services, with the intent of adding FoxWeave’s data integration technology to its own growing stack of cloud services.
FoxWeave’s technology can be especially useful in aiding developers who are building applications on a PaaS (platform as a service), said Steve Harris, CloudBees senior vice president of products.
Based outside of Dublin, FoxWeave was a startup with less than a dozen employees. Founder Tom Fennelly will lead further development of the FoxWeave technology for CloudBees.
CloudBees will add FoxWeave’s data migration and synchronization services to the CloudBees portfolio of application services. CloudBees already has a beta of the FoxWeave service available—which has been renamed to Weave Cloud—and plans to offer it as a full-fledged commercial product by the end of September. Pricing has not yet been finalized.
FoxWeave technology is useful because today’s cloud applications rarely act alone—often they need to be linked with other services and applications, Harris explained.
“You have an application—your own code—and it interacts with the database, with Salesforce, with a location service and with a support service like Zendesk. This is the reality of people building cloud apps. They weave across hosted data services and cloud services in all kinds of ways,” Harris said. “FoxWeave allows you to connect the data in between the services, and trigger events between them very easy.”
For cloud-based applications, FoxWeave provided a lower cost and easier-to-use alternative to traditional ETL (extract transform and load) and ESB (enterprise service bus) software, Harris said.
Easy linking of services
Like other Web 2.0-styled data integration services, such as the consumer-oriented IFTTT (If This Then That) and Dell’s corporate-oriented Boomi, FoxWeave minimized the amount of coding that needed to be done to link services, thereby making it usable not only by IT staff, but even by business managers.
FoxWeave can coordinate data on more than 20 hosted services and software platforms, including Salesforce, Zoura, Zendesk, the MySQL database and Cloudant. Customers can also create their own custom connections.
An early user of FoxWeave’s service, which was only offered in beta, has been the Amsterdam-based Olery, which collates online social media reviews for the hotel industry. For its sales and marketing employees, the company used FoxWeave to orchestrate data exchanges among its accounts on Salesforce.com, Google Gmail, and the Unbounce and Wufoo online marketing services.
CloudBees was founded in 2010 by Sacha Labourey, who was the former chief technology officer of the JBoss open-source middleware company, purchased by Red Hat in 2006. Customers of its services include Cisco, Collabnet, Digg, Barclays, Hewlett-Packard, Intel, Intuit and Netflix.
Terms of the acquisition were not disclosed.