A couple of posts ago, I spoke to the busting of the SaaS Silo with Web Services and the impact that was having on the SaaS industry.  The last post spoke specifically about using Web Services to add functionality to your app.  While adding cool new functionality to the app is big for the product guys and the marketing guys, the interest from the sales side seems to be driven by a whole separate set of concerns, chief among them… Integration.

According to recent research by both Saugatuck and Forrester, integration has surpassed security as the main concern for enterprise implementations of SaaS.  This is actually a great sign for SaaS vendors.  It means that SaaS is extending beyond the departmental sale and making true progress into the enterprise.  It also means that in order to get past this increasingly common sales objection, companies need to figure out how to use Web Services to integrate their SaaS application.

While enterprise adoption of SaaS has been quite good, it’s usually done at the departmental level initially.  That means good SaaS apps appeal to business users with specific problems.  As the adoption of those applications spreads from the department to the whole enterprise, IT gets involved.  And it’s logical to think IT wouldn’t want a separate employee record in its Taleo system than it has in its payroll system.  Solutions such as Boomi’s Atoms help IT shops avoid that problem.

Besides integrating with legacy applications, Web Services are beginning to help companies integrate multiple SaaS applications.  Up to now the most ubiquitous integration problem, user management, has either been ignored by companies using SaaS or has had to be cobbled together by in house teams.  I can tell you, we use everything from SalesForce to NetSuite to RightNow and we’ve had to put some pretty tricky things in to (imperfectly) manage users.  Now we are seeing ready built solutions from TriCipher and Symplified that are making this easier and easier for both the SaaS vendor and the enterprise.

Finally, the integration piece is allowing companies like Astadia to go beyond SalesForce customizations in to the world of really creating custom applications out of many different SaaS apps.   Astadia’s acquisition of Theikos indicates that pre-built custom applications are going to be a big part of their future.

So while integration may be listed as a concern on SaaS adoption in the enterprise, it’s really an opportunity.  An opportunity to expand your app by tying it in to other SaaS apps, to legacy apps, and to even see it as the basis for custom apps.  Next post, we’ll talk about using Web Services to not only to break down customer objections but to actually create new opportunities.

Posted: June 30th, 2008 under Cloud, SaaS - Software As A Service, Uncategorized, Web Services, Web applications.
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