Is it Time to Downsize Your Integration Efforts?

John Joseph is VP of Marketing at Scribe Software.

The shift to cloud applications created a proliferation of data silos that seemed to set us back to square one in our efforts to integrate enterprise data.  But now more cloud application providers are improving their apps’ ability to connect to both on-premises and cloud applications.  It is a reflection of the growing importance of data integration. It represents a milestone in the evolution of cloud applications, as they become more connected out of the box as a way to differentiate the application, and it’s an opportunity for business users to rethink their data integration strategy as cloud-based data integration alternatives become the norm. But, does it mean that an enterprise can start to think about shrinking their data integration efforts?

For SaaS providers, the pressure is increasing to add more out of the box connectivity. Whether the application itself is mature or emerging, how well the application connects to other cloud applications and on-premises applications has become a primary evaluation criterion when businesses purchase SaaS applications. Until recently, integration was usually addressed as a “phase 2 requirement” – after the software or service was purchased and in use. It meant that when businesses purchased SaaS applications, such as social media platforms or sales productivity tools, the burden was on them to figure out how to get them connected to the rest of their cloud and on-premises systems.

That is changing. Increasingly SaaS providers are deciding to solve their integration challenges by embedding a commercially available cloud-based integration platform, or integration platform as a service (iPaaS), with their own applications.

For businesses that may purchase a variety of SaaS applications this is a great opportunity to re-evaluate their own integration strategies. They need to add more integration capabilities, therefore, to keep pace with the rate of SaaS adoption – especially they need to add agile integration capabilities to address the needs for customer-facing teams to change applications, fields, and aggregations.

Consider what’s happening to the application landscape, where there is an explosion in the number and variety of applications available and in use at a single enterprise.  Some research organizations have reported that a single enterprise can be have hundreds of SaaS applications in use within their walls. Plus, with innovations such as the Internet of Things promising to spur new application needs, you should expect the number of applications you use to continue to rise. There is a clear and present need, therefore, to integrate more apps and to deal with the complexities of applications and APIs from different manufacturers.

So as you think about your integration approach moving forward, you should evaluate your options on these points:

It is likely that you will answer these questions differently when considering your CRM, ERP, or other applications. So your aggregate integration approach may end up being a well-thought out mix of approaches. You may rely on an out-of-the-box integration from your marketing automation system to connect to your social media platform because the fields you need integrated are few and won’t change, but use a third-party platform for integrations to connect your marketing automation and CRM systems because of the need to continuously update fields and workflows based on those systems.

Opinions expressed in the article above do not necessarily reflect the opinions of Data Center Knowledge and Penton.

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