FOR APPlICATIOn DEVElOPMEnT & DElIVERy PROFESSIOnAlS
Brief: Address Today’s SaaS Integration
Challenges To Increase Business Value
Fixing The Dark Side Of SaaS Adoption
by liz Herbert and Randy Heffner
December 11, 2015 | Updated: December 30, 2015
Why Read This Brief Key Takeaways
Software-as-a-service (SaaS)-based business Assess Integration Capabilities During SaaS
applications promise fast time-to-deploy and an Selection
Agile, iterative approach to improving business Focus on investigating integration capabilities
results. But try-and-buy, under-the-radar self- when selecting a SaaS solution; they will be a
provisioning, and incremental rollouts have a key differentiator in user experience (UX) and
major downside: Solutions are fragmented, with business results. Be on the same page with your
integration too often an afterthought. As a result, business buyers about how critical integration is
business value suffers — due to fragmented user and reach out to educate them.
experiences, siloed data, and breaks in business
Focus On UX Integration -- Not Just Data And
process flow. This report surveys the state of
Process Integration
SaaS integration and identifies best practices for
App users need a cohesive user experience,
AD&D pros for fixing common issues.
not an array of fragmented SaaS silos. Build a
custom UX for each role or drive SaaS vendors
to prioritize UX-level integration as an essential
component of their offering.
The Future Is Prebuilt Integration
Choose solutions with tight integration between
SaaS players and major marketplaces to avoid
the challenges of building custom integration with
web services. Moving forward, look for increasing
prebuilt integration between these small SaaS
vendors and existing platforms.
[Link]
For Application Development & Delivery Professionals
Brief: Address Today’s SaaS Integration Challenges To Increase
Business Value
Fixing The Dark Side Of SaaS Adoption
by Liz Herbert and Randy Heffner
with Christopher Mines, Claudia Tajima, and Rachel Birrell
December 11, 2015 | Updated: December 30, 2015
SaaS’s Fast, Self-Service Nature Is A Double-Edged Sword For Value
Software-as-a-service (SaaS)-based business applications have a deep heritage of adoption by
empowered business users, achieved by lowering purchasing barriers through try-and-buy, credit card
purchasing, and self-service. But these buying patterns that attract users to SaaS also wreak havoc
on subsequent integration efforts because companies end up with a portfolio of disconnected apps,
bought with little or no provision for integration.
This creates two significant problems: 1) Buyers skimp on due diligence, choosing SaaS solutions
before fully assessing their integration needs and SaaS apps’ integration capabilities and 2) SaaS
integration is left out during technology strategy and enterprise architecture discussions. Even
purchasers who do upfront integration planning face a challenge to achieve coherent business
operations across SaaS apps, since the apps vary widely on the features they provide for integration.
On the plus side, some of the same traits that enable business buyers also ease integration with other
applications. For example, most SaaS apps feature modern architectures born in a services-oriented
era and a “one version” design approach, both of which simplify integration.
SaaS Buying Patterns Create Problems For App Integration
The very traits that have made SaaS so appealing to business users exacerbate integration issues as
SaaS adoption grows.1 Specifically:
›› Try-and-buy purchases grow into real usage without considering architecture strategy. SaaS
buying is like a small chip in a car windshield; it starts off too small to notice or properly address —
but can soon grow into an unwieldy problem. Many SaaS purchases are “just for a few users” or
“just for a short time” — but then grow to become important, entrenched enterprise solutions. For
example, we commonly speak with clients who are dealing with multiple (sometimes 10 or more!)
Salesforce deployments that are disconnected from other apps because line-of-business buyers
have self-provisioned the technology to solve a short-term need — with little or no eye to data
integration or technology architecture strategy.
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For Application Development & Delivery Professionals December 11, 2015 | Updated: December 30, 2015
Brief: Address Today’s SaaS Integration Challenges To Increase Business Value
Fixing The Dark Side Of SaaS Adoption
›› Business users skimp on due diligence. SaaS vendors have a long track record of appealing to
and selling directly to business users. They show sleek demos and boast about great integration and
platform capabilities. But business buyers rarely do the proper due diligence to understand technical
integration capabilities, technical or contractual limitations, developer resources, or skill requirements.
One SaaS buyer we interviewed remarked that, “Going from the dog and pony show and then putting
it in, we realized that we couldn’t do half of what we wanted.” Even when they know they will need
integration, business buyers fail to do the requisite due diligence during vendor selection.
›› The fragmented landscape of point solutions amplifies integration issues. The current state of
the SaaS vendor landscape further complicates integration scenarios.2 The world of SaaS consists
of hundreds of niche solutions, few of which are built on the same platforms. It’s not uncommon
for a large enterprise to be running dozens of SaaS solutions. Even buyers that opt for multiple
SaaS solutions from a major vendor like IBM, Oracle, or SAP still face diverse architectures and
integration challenges due to the layers of acquisitions that built up the SaaS portfolios at those
larger software firms. There are still no true end-to-end SaaS suites for large enterprises, despite
continued momentum in that direction.3
›› SaaS apps vary widely in the integration features they provide. If the majority of SaaS apps
provided a rich portfolio of options for integration, it would simplify your SaaS integration
strategy — but they don’t. The wide variation across SaaS app integration support exacerbates
integration difficulties. The most widely available integration mechanism, data import/export,
provides a minimal (though important) level of integration. Many SaaS apps provide for inbound
API calls, which is a step better, but API designs vary widely. Advanced mechanisms like UX-
level integration are spotty at best.4
But The Standardized “One Version” Approach Gives SaaS Some Integration Advantages
The news is not all bad for SaaS integration. Several traits of SaaS solutions can help with integration,
including:
›› An API-centric, web services approach — at least inbound to SaaS. Unlike older bespoke
and packaged applications that grew up before web services became prevalent, today’s leading
SaaS solutions were born in the era of service-oriented design. This means that most SaaS apps
have inbound access in the form of APIs (REST, SOAP, and others) or data services (e.g., OData).
Using these services makes it easier, for example, to update the customer master and trigger an
update to the corresponding customer record in a leading SaaS app. But buyers beware: Not all
SaaS apps have these capabilities, and some may still rely on more resource-intensive polling
for changes. And the story about outbound integration is typically weaker than inbound; it is less
common for SaaS apps to have rich support for outbound service calls. This means that updates
made in the SaaS app may not trigger changes or alerts in other systems, and thus data can get
out of sync.
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For Application Development & Delivery Professionals December 11, 2015 | Updated: December 30, 2015
Brief: Address Today’s SaaS Integration Challenges To Increase Business Value
Fixing The Dark Side Of SaaS Adoption
›› The prevalence of open standards. SaaS apps have also grown up in an era of broad adoption of
selected open standards and data interchange formats — including HTTP, XML, JSON, SOAP, and
comma separated values (CSV) — which are commonly the foundation of SaaS app integration.
This means that the skills that app owners need for integration will be easier to come by — whether
in your own technology management team or in the third-party ecosystem. On the other hand,
SaaS vendors use these lower-level standards in widely varying ways, so teams will still have to
adapt to each vendor’s design models.
›› A growing focus on app stores and ecosystems. Leading SaaS vendors know that their buyers’
technology strategy increasingly revolves around ecosystems of add-on software solutions,
services partners, and developer components.5 Some SaaS vendors — such as Intuit, NetSuite,
and Salesforce — have been beefing up their own ISV community and app stores. Other SaaS
vendors, particularly smaller and industry-specific ones, have started offering their solutions in app
stores like Salesforce’s AppExchange and SAP’s Hana App Center. Often, important app-to-app
integration code is prebuilt and available in an app store.
Five Best Practices For SaaS Integration
The negative impact of siloed SaaS application portfolios can be severe — ranging from “swivel chair”
user experiences, where users have to swing between multiple apps to accomplish a single task, to
broken business processes or to redundant and conflicting data. We have identified five best practices
for AD&D leaders to stop the bleeding and get ahead of the SaaS integration problem.
1. Get real about SaaS ROI and the business value lost due to integration issues. SaaS ROI has
long been a hot topic, but looking at the ROI of a single SaaS app in a vacuum is a dangerous
local optimization. Optimizing SaaS ROI more globally requires assessing how business processes
flow across multiple SaaS apps; when buyers get into the real integration work (versus the vendor
demos), unforeseen limitations often diminish business results. Account for the extra costs of
integration to fix or work around such problems as: 1) technical limitations, such as the limited APIs
exposed to you; 2) contractual limitations, such as limits on the number of API calls within a time
frame; and 3) network limitations, as real-time integration of large amounts of data can be slow in
even the most bandwidth-rich countries.
2. Educate business buyers on integration needs, strategy, and issues. AD&D pros can avoid or
reduce many of the integration issues arising from business-led SaaS purchasing if they make their
business counterparts more aware of the need for integration. For example, sharing a few horror
stories of SaaS solutions that couldn’t support late-breaking integration requirements can go a long
way in getting business buyers to think about integration and “true” ROI before jumping in.
3. Proactively support business-led SaaS selection. Enterprise architects and application
development pros should create tools and checklists that outline integration considerations. Insist
on answers to questions about end-to-end process flows, user experiences, desired insights, and
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For Application Development & Delivery Professionals December 11, 2015 | Updated: December 30, 2015
Brief: Address Today’s SaaS Integration Challenges To Increase Business Value
Fixing The Dark Side Of SaaS Adoption
other factors that drive business effectiveness, and use those answers to derive requirements for
SaaS integration. It’s unlikely that business execs will be equipped to confirm these requirements
on their own, so technology management must make resources available to help the business here.
4. Evaluate integration before making (or continuing) significant SaaS investments. Make
integration a focus of SaaS selection criteria. It might lack the appeal of a sleek UI or cool mobile
app — but it will make a huge difference in user experience and business results. Where SaaS is
already in place, examine integration tools before signing any renewals — addressing issues or
exiting relationships as necessary.
5. Re-evaluate your cloud strategy to reduce the fragmentation. A SaaS strategy that is too
fragmented is a challenge for many reasons, not just integration. A proliferation of vendors and
SaaS apps requires too much costly vendor management and monitoring in areas such as pricing,
security, and new feature rollout. AD&D pros should work with key business stakeholders to
constantly re-evaluate the overall SaaS/cloud road map.6 Standardizing as much as possible on the
same platform (such as [Link] or AWS) or the same vendor (such as IBM, Oracle, Salesforce,
or SAP) simplifies not only the integration approach but also other vendor management challenges.
What It Means
Integration Will Be A Differentiator For SaaS Apps
SaaS applications are here to stay — and are only growing in number and scale. This increasing SaaS
adoption will bring the integration issue front and center for customers, SaaS vendors, SaaS integration
tool vendors, and the third-party services vendors that support them. For AD&D pros, this means that:
1. SaaS integration complexity will drive buyers toward the major marketplaces. As SaaS
adoption grows and enterprises experience more of the integration issues associated with
SaaS silos, they will recognize the value of prebuilt integration with the major SaaS apps and
marketplaces. This will drive smaller SaaS players to prebuild integration with the majors and
to list themselves in their app stores, which expands the business value of both the smaller
SaaS players as well as the majors. For even tighter integration, some smaller SaaS vendors will
build fully on top of an existing SaaS platform rather than rely on web services integration. For
example, [Link] and Kenandy have built directly on top of Salesforce [Link],
which means tighter integration rather than web services calls outside the platform.
2. Nondifferentiating SaaS apps will be commoditized, but integration to them will
not be. Running counter to the trend of prebuilt integration will be a new perspective on
nondifferentiating apps. We often hear CIOs say that they will acquire nondifferentiating apps
like finance or purchasing and build other apps in-house for competitive advantage, such as
customer engagement.7 That said, while an optimized business process may not need a custom
general ledger, it may require specialized accounting: For example, private aircraft management
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For Application Development & Delivery Professionals December 11, 2015 | Updated: December 30, 2015
Brief: Address Today’s SaaS Integration Challenges To Increase Business Value
Fixing The Dark Side Of SaaS Adoption
firm Solairus Aviation accounts for each jet as a project and each flight as a task within that
project. Requirements like this will add new value to rich integration between “custom” and
“commodity” SaaS apps.
3. The UX-level integration of SaaS apps will become increasingly important. Demo after
demo at tech conferences shows the creation of a compelling UX for an isolated need like
sales analysis. But what application users need is not a growing array of disconnected user
experiences but rather a small set of integrated, contextual, and multitouchpoint tools. To fight
back against UX fracturing across SaaS silos, AD&D pros can either build a custom UX for each
role, live with swivel-chair UXes, or push SaaS vendors to enhance their capabilities for UX-level
integration. For example, Salesforce makes it possible to integrate apps built on [Link]
directly into the Salesforce UX, such as through a custom tab that has the same look and feel as
the rest of the Salesforce UX.
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For Application Development & Delivery Professionals December 11, 2015 | Updated: December 30, 2015
Brief: Address Today’s SaaS Integration Challenges To Increase Business Value
Fixing The Dark Side Of SaaS Adoption
Supplemental Material
Companies Contributing To This Report
ClickSoftware Marketo
Concur Technologies NetSuite
Coupa Salesforce
CrownPeak ServiceNow
Keste SugarCRM
KPMG
Endnotes
1
SaaS apps still carry substantial risks — which will only magnify as SaaS gains adoption and SaaS vendors get bigger.
See the “Four Reasons CIOs Should Still Hedge Their SaaS Bets” Forrester report.
Nearly 15 years after the appearance of software-as-a-service (SaaS) startups such as Salesforce, NetSuite, and
2
Google, software-as-a-service is nearing its tipping point. With the greater prevalence of SaaS across applications
categories, technology sourcing executives must help with researching solutions, piloting and purchasing them, and
contract negotiations. For more information, see the “TechRadar™: Software-As-A-Service, Q1 2014” Forrester report.
3
Major ISVs — IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, and SAP — are racing to enable a broad suite of SaaS solutions, but they still
have a way to go to offer a true end-to-end SaaS portfolio. Today, Salesforce remains the behemoth of the SaaS
world. See the “Salesforce Is Bidding To Be Your Strategic Customer Platform; Should You Accept?” Forrester report.
4
To connect across the silos and recover coherent business operations, AD&D pros must sort through each of their
SaaS vendors’ distinct features for integration and decide how best to use each. To facilitate this process, Forrester
reveals the integration mechanisms commonly provided by SaaS applications as well as our guidance on key usage
scenarios for each type of mechanism. See the “Options For Integrating SaaS Applications” Forrester report.
5
Today’s SaaS app stores come in a variety of flavors. For more details about the types of app stores, see the “Market
Overview: Service App Stores” Forrester report.
6
The SaaS landscape continues to move quickly, with SaaS pure plays such as Coupa, Salesforce, and Workday
continuing to grow. SaaS buyers should also keep a close eye on the major ISVs, which are all reinventing themselves
to be SaaS vendors. For more information, see the “Are The Biggest Enterprise Software Vendors Now The Best Cloud
Platform Bets?” Forrester report.
Nimble customer engagement apps and analytics must activate customer experience ecosystems — the web of
7
relations among all aspects of a company that determine the quality of its customers’ experience. To learn more, see
the “Crafting Software For Your Firm’s Customer Experience Ecosystem” Forrester report.
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