News Corp Australia is using integration tools to move a planned 75 per cent of of its applications into the cloud.
But in an interview with The Australian technology deputy editor Fran Foo, chief information officer Tom Quinn says costs of the switch – for which the target is the end of next year – can be high.
Currently 42 per cent of applications are cloud-based, including the publisher’s giant Australia-wide rollout of EidosMedia’s Méthode, for which MuleSoft was the integration tool.
News uses Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Google Enterprise, with Salesforce CRM and Google email among cloud applications used.
Quinn says the strategy was formalized a year ago, and while he would like to see the operation fully cloud-based, some legacy applications have yet to be converted.
“That will take some time and cost too much so when they’re end of life we’ll move over,” he said at a MuleSoft media event.
Its tools connect enterprise applications such as SAP and Oracle to software-as-a-service platforms, enabling News to cut the time taken to integrate Méthode with a new range of tablet apps from 34 weeks to ten weeks.
A downside of developing connectors between applications that you don’t own is that “sometimes you don’t get it perfectly right”, but Quinn says the speed makes it worthwhile: “I’d rather get it 80 per cent right and fix it on the fly and at least have a product to market than polish it to death,” he says.
Integration projects such as linking advertising booking to financials could take up to 18 months, but the rate of change is too great to allow the time to be wasted. And while integration is expensive, it avoids the need for major upgrades. In the old days of using traditional CRM products, an upgraded would take six months and cost “a couple of million bucks”.
“I can’t wait 18 months,” he says. “I need stuff now.”
Pictured: Tom Quinn (picture News Corp Australia)