Roger Sippl, who co-founded Informix a generation ago, then Vantive and Visigenic, all acquired after going public, is staging a comeback with new database widgetry that does real-time data integration from multiple sources in the cloud.

He's been working on it for four years recruiting along the way 20 guys from the old days who are already rich thanks to Roger but still want to be "useful."

Elastic Intelligence, the company he started a few years ago, is going to productize this newfangled virtual relational database technology as Connection Cloud, a real-time data connection service infrastructure and all.

It's a PaaS.

It's supposed to resolve the messy scramble of cloud-based data retrieval and bridge the new silos of information created by SaaS companies like Salesforce, NetSuite and Zuora.

You might, for instance, want to know who your best customers are. They're over there in Salesforce. The invoices, however, are in Zuora. Roger estimates that it could cost a company $500,000 to a million dollars and a lot of pain to integrate that data. And some larger firms have.

The Connection Cloud service is supposed to make the data that resides on Salesforce or Zuora look like it exists in a company's own local SQL-compliant database - it doesn't really - the data warehouse is all virtual like a mirage - but it'll bring the data together so it makes sense.

It promises to let any SQL-capable application, business tool or development language fetch SaaS data from any source and integrate it quickly. It's got about a dozen connectors, which it calls Liberators, now and people working to produce 50 by Christmas.

It works with Excel, Jaspersoft, Tableau and Yellowfin targeting Salesforce, Zuora, Netsuite, Zendesk, Intacct and Eloqua.

The Menlo Park start-up says the data is accessed from its native source. "This puts an end to expensive data integration products that only provide access to ‘copies' of the data in data warehouses. Other SaaS data integration solutions require that data must be moved and consolidated before trying to make use of it. This pre-staging of the data requires a lot of work to extract, transform, and load the data before use."

The multiple integrations were hard. Elastic Intelligence created proprietary widgetry called wSQL that does the virtualization.

Roger expects the queries to start off simple just using one source and as people realize what they can do he says they'll be 30% composite by Christmas,

The lead architect of Connection Cloud, Sippl calls Elastic Intelligence the culmination of his long career and expects Connection Cloud to set the standard in cloud data access and integration.

Incorporated in 2008, Elastic Intelligence also develops and markets the Data Liberator Toolkit, a free open source toolkit that lets SaaS vendors enable their applications on the Connection Cloud.

Elastic Intelligence didn't start out to do Connection Cloud. It was supposed to create a "Salesforce-like" report writer - and did in fact create the one that's in Zuora and a few other less notable SaaS operations - so it's got a revenue stream. Then it realized it could be ever so much more useful. So to speak.

That's how Connection Cloud, which is still in beta, got started. Roger says he knows it works because Zuora users have been unconsciously using its base technology - without having access to Connection Cloud - for the last year or so.

Connection Cloud will be free to users initially - forever actually for those who only use it occasionally. Fifty queries, however, will cost a single user $99 a month. Corporate users can get in touch with Elastic Intelligence for a quote.

Roger expects to have hundreds of thousands of users in no time. They're expected to be what are called real people, not geeks.

He wants to grow the company and says that it's a lot harder nowadays - and ever so much more expensive what with all the fees - to go public and be a public company. So it may be more practical in the long run to get bought. He rattled off a list of brand names like Oracle and Amazon - you know them all - that might be interested.

Elastic Intelligence has been operating on investments of $6.5 million: $3 million odd from Roger and another $3.4 million back in 2010 from Alsop Louie Partners and CAP Idea. It's rounding another couple million now for sales and marketing, half of it from Roger. It'll go out later - but not that much later - for a serious round, say, $8 million from the more seasoned firms that fancy later-stage start-ups.