SaaS Integration:
Integration: The Last Barrier to SaaS
At mid-size companies, SaaS applications usually start off at the departmental or workgroup level. It might be the sales department getting a SaaS solution to manage and monitor the progress of sales opportunities through the pipeline. Soon, other departments in the company—or salespeople in other product groups or divisions—become aware of the new SaaS application and want to use it as well. With few IT resources needed for implementation, it’s easy for these smaller groups to procure and implement a new system.
Vendors of SaaS applications use these entry points and develop strategies that lead to wider adoption across multiple departments. Many vendors now have customers with subscriptions to several hundred seats of their application. Such customers have a plethora of existing applications, including other on-demand applications in addition to on-premise systems. Integration therefore becomes more critical for these customers.
Since SaaS applications offer the same benefits to all customers, any advantages gained at one company are just as easily available to its competitors. SaaS applications by themselves provide little differentiation unless they are integrated with highly customized back-end applications that are core to a company’s operations. Retaining this differentiation and making the enormous quantity of corporate data available to the newer, more cost-effective SaaS systems brings the issue of application integration to the forefront.
While companies of all sizes anticipate easy deployments of SaaS applications, they are overwhelmed by the unexpected complexities of integrating these to their existing systems. There are three key issues to consider:
Getting information into a SaaS system. Back-end systems contain some of the most valuable corporate assets in a company as they often represent many decades of business knowledge and operational experience. For the SaaS system to be useful from the start, the information contained in back-end systems must be migrated to the new SaaS solution.
Synchronizing information between SaaS and back-end systems. Back-end systems are most likely to be the systems of record for critical corporate information about customers, products, orders and more. SaaS solutions need to synchronize information with the systems of record so the company can have a single, accurate and real-time view of customers and products. While dealing with different data formats and complex workflows is challenging, these integrations also must be secure, reliable and provide complete visibility.
Extracting information from a SaaS system. Most companies generate a wide variety of operational and business intelligence (BI) reports based on data from multiple systems. While SaaS solutions offer reporting capability, this functionality is limited. Therefore, information from the new SaaS application must be easily transferable into existing reporting and BI applications.
Given these issues, application integration becomes critical to the success of SaaS solutions.
Traditional Integration Approaches: A Poor Fit for SaaS
Traditionally, companies had just two choices for solving application integration problems—use complex software platforms or write custom code. The platform approach evolved to meet the needs of large enterprises and provides complex functionality to solve BPM, BAM and EAI problems. But this rich functionality makes these platforms very expensive to procure, install, deploy and maintain.
As a consequence, most companies opted to develop custom code for integration, which has become the most widely used integration solution. While custom code provides an immediate fix at a seemingly lower cost, companies quickly realize that maintaining custom code is a laborintensive and time-consuming process and that their “hidden costs” go well beyond the initial coding. Custom code also requires specialized skills that most IT organizations lack or cannot find easily. Finally, custom code requires upfront investments in time and resources that will delay the benefits of using a SaaS application.
Solving integration problems with either of these software-based approaches produces results that contradict the benefits expected by companies when they choose a SaaS solution. These integration solutions substantially undermine the value of choosing a SaaS solution, and frustrate users who expect quick results. The poor fit between traditional integration approaches and the requirements of a SaaS environment have created the need for a new type of integration solution.
