Doing Application Integration on the Cheap

Sometimes, quick-and-easy technology wins the day.

The Marena Group, a Lawrenceville, Ga.-based company that makes specialty support garments for plastic surgery patients, had been doing business electronically with its U.S. distributor for years using custom software that piped electronic data interchange (EDI) documents into its manufacturing system.

But Marena is a small company with just a few dozen employees, and over the long term information-technology director Alex Knezevic decided it would be a mistake to rely on the homegrown software.

“It was not reliable, not an enterprise system, and there were always concerns about what’s going to happen when that breaks,” he says. Problem was, he couldn’t afford to buy the kind of enterprise integration software sold to much larger companies.

So Marena wound up becoming one of the first customers of Jitterbit, an Alameda, Calif.-based company that provides an open-source integration system. The Jitterbit 1.0 software, which was released in May, is available as a free download or in a professional version (which includes technical support and few more features) that starts at $9,995.

Before settling on Jitterbit, Knezevic had been considering Microsoft BizTalk as the integration system with the most reasonable pricing. But when he experimented with BizTalk, he says, it struck him as too complex, perhaps because Microsoft has been adding features to appeal to larger enterprises.

After downloading Jitterbit, he found it offered what he was looking for: the combination of an easy-to-use visual development tool and a server capable of handling the latest eXtensible Markup Language (XML) Web services technologies, as well as more custom database-to-database and file-to-database integration tasks. “Compared to at least what we’ve researched, and compared to regular coding, it’s a lot simpler,” he says.

“The attraction, at first, was that it was free,” Knezevic says. But although the version he started with was immature and the documentation was incomplete, he was impressed by how attentive the vendor was at helping him work through the problems he encountered with his first project, to replace the homegrown EDI integration solution. Since then, Marena has purchased a commercial license and is using Jitterbit for integration with the company’s Web store and with a customer rewards program.

Sharam Sasson, Jitterbit’s president and CEO, says he sees an opportunity in the “underserved market” for small to medium-sized businesses, although his server logs also show downloads from Fortune 500 organizations that are at least checking out the software.

In addition to Marena, Jitterbit claims General Growth Properties, a real estate investment trust and shopping center operator, as another early customer. A General Growth representative, however, said that because of company policy, he could not comment on the use of the software.