Vendors always like to say that their SAAS products and technologies are flawless, and if you look at each SaaS technology independently, it does. But they ignore the challenge of application development, how to integrate different SaaS applications from multiple vendors to create a comprehensive, seamless user experience. The silos of information that existed in local deployments for many years have not disappeared. Instead, they have entered the cloud along with the company's business.
The multi-SaaS integration model may be a standard for users to carefully select and combine a system that best suits their needs from different vendors. Many business line departments, sometimes in order to complete their work independently, will cross the IT department to apply SaaS products. This has led to the emergence of multiple application examples, but these instances often fail to communicate with each other. At the same time, ongoing mergers and acquisitions between companies have created more integration challenges for SaaS developers.
Continuously hot SaaS
Of course, this wave of SaaS and cloud computing is still difficult to retreat. In October of this year, Gartner research found that global SaaS related revenues in 2016 were 48.2 billion US dollars, and will surge to 99.7 billion US dollars by 2020, with a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 15.6%.
In fact, this prediction is an upward adjustment of Gartner's previous predictions. In the forecast released in February this year, Gartner predicted a CAGR of 14%, which predicts that the use of SaaS financial applications will continue to increase, while those of more mature categories of SaaS applications (especially HCM and CRM) may have Slowed down.
Why is cloud service so attractive?
The benefits that cloud computing and SaaS originally promised, such as simplifying IT and reducing costs, have not been fully confirmed, at least not yet. Ed Featherston, chief architect of Cloud Technology Partner, a cloud migration and management services provider from Boston, said: "The ideal is full, but the reality is very skinny."
Featherston believes that when migrating those clients and servers and related technologies from the 1990s to the cloud, people will always forget the "detailed features and applications that need to be connected to each other." The end result is that we don't see a complete system in the cloud, but a mess of pieces.
According to Carl Lehmann, principal analyst for enterprise architecture, integration and process management at 451 Research, the foundation for a complete cloud system requires companies to recognize the simplicity of operation of cloud-based services and the associated cost benefits. This may also be one of the reasons why many users can't fully play the power of cloud computing, they can't correctly recognize the value of the cloud.
However, we still cannot deny the charm of the cloud and its appeal.
In the cloud service mode, when a customer makes an online purchase of a product, he or she can complete the signing through the marketing tool, and the purchase can be completed only by credit card. “Suddenly, we have more platforms,†Lehmann said. “Because the importance of business processes has outweighed those implementations.â€
Graeme Thompson, CIO of Informatica, a provider of SaaS integration technology and tools, agrees. The charm of the cloud is irresistible. Following the client-server revolution in the 1990s and the integration of CRM and ERP vendors in early 2000, Oracle acquired Peoplesoft in 2005 and acquired Siebel in 2006, and Microsoft also in 2001. Great Plains Software was acquired in the year. Thompson said that people have never been so simple about the consumption of these things, these applications are easy to deploy, and the landscapes presented are also beautiful.
In Lehmann's view, what is certain is that the success of these cloud computing services depends on a complete system that is closely linked. As the company's cloud service technology matures, the number of cloud services they use will increase, requiring IT to glue different cloud services together.
Where is the key to the problem?
For users, the key to the problem is not to establish channels on different cloud service islands, but how to observe and understand the results of system integration in an easy-to-understand way.
Without a proper interface design and presentation, the process of using multiple SaaS applications to handle a single task can be a headache for users. In April, Forrester analyst Randy Heffner wrote in a SaaS integration strategy report, "Customer service personnel may need to find orders in e-commerce software, then open marketing software to view promotions and then go to financial software. Check customer credits and finally record relevant information in CRM software." This is a very unsatisfactory situation.
In an interview, Heffner also said: "No supplier can meet all your needs. Heffner believes that SaaS vendors always promise not to install any software or programs to attract customers, it seems that this is indeed the original intention of Salesforce without software. The same, so the user will have the idea that "this sounds good, it is easy to do, let's try it."
But reality is not always that good, Heffner points out that 52% of software decision makers believe that SaaS technology integration is a challenge. This concern includes not only the integration of SaaS with SaaS, but also the integration of SaaS with traditional in-house applications.
Even at the top of Oracle's internal level, concerns about SaaS application integration issues are obvious. Ashish Mohindroo, vice president of Oracle Cloud, said that not only is the number of cloud services common in the business so widespread, but people can't simply integrate these services from different technology platforms through a common API. Whether it's the local deployment era or the cloud era, the purchases seem to have not changed, just from the purchase of closed software to the purchase of closed services.
Michael Day, chief database engineer for product lifecycle management services, IoT convergence and augmented reality service provider PTC, believes that while we are all trying to get developers to solve integration problems simply through integration platforms and APIs, this is too idealistic. Performance, network latency, and data retention issues can present additional challenges and challenges for users and vendors.
“We have a lot of computationally intensive processes and database services, so we have a lot of input and output of information,†Day said. “If you’re in a traditional system, you don’t have to worry about latency, but when you move your application to the cloud, you need Consider this question."
For example, in a weather analysis system, it may take only a millisecond to send a large amount of data. For applications running in different geographic regions and different technology stacks, there may be extremely high latency associated with data transmission, which is clearly not conducive to business, Day added.
Just as important as database performance is data governance. "If you want to be secure in data movement, then you must confirm your directory to know where the data is currently located, where it was created, and who has access to the data." Day said.
The subscription model itself has become an original sin?
Another big attraction in the SaaS or cloud service model comes from its simple subscription model, which takes only a few minutes and a credit card for the entire purchase process. Heffner said, "You will often find that multiple buyers are from the same company, they just want to keep up with the trend of SaaS and bring something new to their department."
Other Gartner analysts also said that it is not uncommon for a company to run 15 different Salesforce instances simultaneously. By definition, multiple instances of any SaaS application can run on a single technology platform and use the same set of APIs. This situation may eventually be perceived by the CFO who is responsible for paying the monthly bill, and will eventually require the developer to merge the business.
It is not uncommon for such a need to integrate multiple instances. Liz Herbert, vice president and principal analyst at Forrester, points out that companies often want to integrate projects for CRM, logistics, payroll, inventory and other different systems. Situations like the emergence of more than a dozen Salesforce use cases are often the result of separate actions by different business units.
The merger and acquisition and the integration of SaaS applications constitute another existence scenario. Even if the SaaS products of both the acquirer and the acquired party are built on the same technology platform, integration is not a simple task. The acquirer's application developers and operators need to analyze the different structures in the two databases and remap the fields to synchronize the business between the two parties.
In summary, even in the cloud, the problem of data silos and information silos has not been resolved. Integration remains a top challenge for many SaaS users and suppliers. The good news, however, is that there are a lot of vendors working on this, and they are trying to help users integrate different applications. Among these vendors, Oracle, Informatica, Dell, IBM, MuleSoft, SAS, and TIBCO are among the major players, and Cloud Elements, Jitterbit, Kloud Connectors, OneSaas, Scribe, SnapLogic, Tray.io, and Zapier are also increasingly crowded. Participants in the market.
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