Free Webinar on Cloud Computing, Data Integration, and RIAs Next Week, July 9th at 1PM EST

Next week I’ll be participating in a webinar with one of our clients, SnapLogic, on data integration in the cloud and with RIAs. Originally, we’d billed this as being about RIA’s and data integration, but there’s been so much interest in getting data integration in the cloud that we’ve expanded the scope a tad, which suits me just fine.

Adding Data-Meat to the RIA Skeleton

I’ve been fond of pointing out that content (a consumer friendly word for “data”) is still king in the land of RIAs, and the same holds for cloud computing. Being able to pull in data to RIA is key: you’ve got to have some reason to use them other than watching videos.

More importantly, from the business side of the house, there are piles and piles of “dark data” out there in business systems waiting to be used in new and exciting ways: think of how much use we get out of maps now that all that geo-data is wired up, or how sites like Zillow that finally pulled together mounds of public data to do something useful and delightful. Businesses have similar reams of data that are just looking for a simple and pleasing interface.

Middleware for the Cloud

In my view, RIAs (along with plain old web applications) are part of the thin layer of frosting on-top of most cloud computing: they provide the application layer where people actually do things. Running around right below them is the layer of cloud middleware where components like SnapLogic’s “really simple integration” open source stack helps wire things up.

This idea of using cloud computing for applications isn’t an exclusive claim to how the cloud can be used, of course: clearly, there are headless, batch-jobs (more akin to grid-think of old) that cloud computing can be used for as well. There’s the now canonical NYTimes/EC2 example.

Sign up!

Most of the webinar will simply be a conversation on this topic – laced in with some slides – along with a small demo from SnapLogic and Q&A at the end. If this general topic seems interesting, <a href="you can sign up for it for free and come join the fun next Wednesday, July 9th at 1PM Eastern/12PM Central/10PM Pacific.

Disclaimer: SnapLogic is a client and is paying for my participation in this webinar.