Product integrations, in context of On-premise and SaaS
Indispensable strategy that’s opening up opportunities
The successful presence of services like Zapier, IFTTT, Jitterbit and many more, is a clear indication on why Integration is an imperative way-to-go strategy for SaaS products and any web based product. The business opportunity stems from the fact that companies who buy web products and most importantly, who get used to the simplicity and flexibility of SaaS products, buy more of them to improve their productivity in various fronts like Marketing, Support, Sales, Development etc. And, as the numbers go up it becomes inefficient to work independently with these apps and there arises a need to have them all integrated with necessary use-cases built around.
But the existing integration technologies do not seem to offer a scalable solution that thrives like that of on-premise solutions.
Integration opportunities that prevailed
Integration is not new to web businesses. It’s beginning would probably date back to when an OS was first invented and companies started developing apps for these Operating systems.
More recently, before the evolution of cloud, integration opportunities led to sprawling new businesses with dependencies on giants like SAP, Oracle, Microsoft etc. who have penetrated deeply into larger organizations with their enterprise solutions. The complexity of these applications naturally warranted a supporting ecosystem that is encouraged, and most of the times sponsored, by the giants themselves. For example, SAP has its own equivalent of API like technology in the form of ALE and BAPI that allowed external solution providers to access SAP data and build services to work with them.
Despite the smaller size of these integration solution providers, the market was so naturally accessible through established sales channels of the giants they work with.
Evolution— Its a different ball game
Now with the continuing legacy of the power of such opportunities, there are quite a number of services being built around SaaS products like Salesforce, Workday and likes. Companies like Salesforce encourage their partners through events like Dreamforce, giving them exposure and visibility.
But the question is,
“Are businesses able to thrive just by contributing to this integration ecosystem, like they do with on-premise?”
Not Yet. Technically and Financially the mode of execution remains inadequate and opportunities remain untapped.
Most SaaS based integrations, including the services listed in the beginning of this article, capitalize API based technology. But functionally it is inadequate to scale. Every service built around this remains limited with performance, data calls, information shared and revenue justification on the investment. Either these integrations work with a delay in data sync between apps or they pose a limit on the volume of data handled. This is even synonymous with products like Google, Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook etc. that are heavily rich and could afford investments on large scale for R&D activities.
Being a non-technical Product Manager I am forced to think if this is due to poor execution of API models or due to the unexplored & yet-to-be invented integration techniques for SaaS development framework.
In the given scenario the SaaS integration ecosystem is majorly driven by the Marketing function in SaaS organizations that look for cross promotional activities and back-linking opportunities.
The Future
The whole nature of the problem presents a huge opportunity for a new technology or service that could overhaul the entire SaaS landscape with seamless integration solutions. Given the advancements that had happened in the software world I am sure it is just a matter of time a technocrat realizes the crux of this problem. Who knows, a solution might just be around the corner waiting to see the light in coming days.
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