I was recently asked to deliver a presentation on the topic of SaaS integration. SaaS integrations are necessary because your data is in the cloud. When you use Salesforce.com, NetSuite or RightNow as your CRM, your customer information is stuck there. But what if you need that information to be in your financial application? What can you do to make the CRM and QuickBooks general ledger application talk to each other?
Many software products provide an application programming interface (API). But that isn’t good enough. If you are a small or medium sized business, who are you going to trust to do the programming necessary to make the API’s talk to each other?
There are other options. You can contract a systems integrator to perform the data integration. Aside from the upfront cost of thousands of dollars, who is going to provide the maintenance and support of the integration? If your integration is a custom solution, someone within your business will have to know the logic and code in order to support and maintain it.
An idea that has been suggested by Gartner VP Bob Anderson is to work with Integration as a Service providers. These integrations are products that are maintained by the vendor. The logic and field mapping are stored by the vendor and easily viewable by your team. Because they are not custom solutions, they are not as expensive as the system integrator solution. Many times you can find your integration costs a few hundred dollars or less. Vendors that you should consider are APIGENT and Pervasive Data Solutions to name a few.
Small business may be able to exist with the double-entry into CRM and QuickBooks (or Peachtree), but medium sized businesses that are optimized for quote-to-cash efficiency must consider data integration as a service as a must have along with their other software as a service applications.
Tags: API, APIGENT, cloud computing, Data integration, Pervasive Software, QuickBooks, SaaS, widget
