Integrating Your Cloud And On-Premises Applications

Here are several excerpts from an informative article by Mathew Schwartz, Integrating Your Cloud And On-Premises Applications:

Most small and midsize businesses are eyeing one or more software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications, yet have already made numerous investments in on-premises software. And despite the potential cost upsides of making the move to SaaS, one crucial success factor for running part or all of your business in the cloud is going to be the ability to tie cloud computing applications to on-premises systems.

Recognizing that obstacle, three software and hardware vendors — Boomi, Cast Iron, and SnapLogic — have their sights set on solving the SaaS integration challenges. While their approaches differ for on-premises software, hosted integrations, and even on-premises appliances, these vendors can all help companies integrate their business software, whether it lives on-premises or “in the clouds.”

Integration: The Achilles’ Heel Of SaaS

The state of integration gives many potential SaaS adopters pause. Indeed, a recent Forrester Research survey of companies’ SaaS attitudes found integration was the most common concern for the 38% of businesses that said they had no plans to adopt SaaS applications.

Furthermore, SaaS applications can’t just go hauling out data from inside your firewall. “You prevent that, just as a policy; never will anyone get through my firewall to my application to access my data,” says Chris Marino, CEO of San Mateo, Calif.-based SnapLogic. But at some point, many companies do want their SaaS applications to communicate with systems located inside the firewall. “How do you solve that problem?” Marino asks. “You need integration technology.

Integration Creates Interdependencies

Just as the typical SaaS application requires a degree of set-up and customization before it can be used, integration tools also require planning. In particular, integration creates interdependencies, and that requires keeping the big picture in mind.

“You can’t just throw applications in there and expect to be able to integrate the data across all the systems,” Awana’s Smith says. “That’s not a shortcoming of Cast Iron — that’s just a limitation of business processes and reality.”

That means setting some ground rules is in order. “The best approach is to try to only have the information on one system and use the integration to only display it on the other system, [and] don’t allow editing in other than the system of record,” she says.

What Application Ecosystems Offer

When it comes to solving SaaS integration, Boomi, Cast Iron, and SnapLogic are not the only players in town. Other approaches include numerous SaaS application ecosystems — collections of applications and add-ons certified to work with the core application. Examples include the open-source SugarCRM SugarExchange, NetSuite NS-BOS, and the Salesforce AppExchange.

Ecosystems, however, play by their own circumscribed rules. “Their approach to solving this integration problem is, ‘We solve the integration problem — just bring your data over here,’” Marino says. “And for some classes of uses, that’s the solution. But it’s not going to work for everybody.

Then there’s the question of pricing. SaaS applications often attract companies looking for a bargain. And perhaps not surprisingly, SaaS integration services do seem priced to appeal to the masses. For example, Boomi charges $65 per month, per connection, to an application such as QuickBooks or Peachtree, and $135 per connection, per month, to the likes of Salesforce, Intaact, or a database. “We wanted the reaction of the customer to the pricing to be, “‘Oh, this is a no-brainer,’” says Rick Nucci, chief technology officer of Boomi.

Finally, SaaS integration providers solve a slightly different challenge. The notion of a business being driven by a set of monolithic applications has begun to change, with mash-ups, widgets, wikis, blogs, and the like heralding a new era of lightweight applications that may just do one thing, albeit extremely well, says Laurent Lachal, research director at London-based Ovum. “The need now is not just to integrate a system, but to integrate a much wider array of systems — from a software-as-a-service to a small Google widget,” Lachal says.

Will Integration Become Baked In?

Today, SaaS applications offer soup-to-nuts software functionality, all hosted in the cloud. In the future, might integration itself become “baked in” to SaaS applications? In fact, that’s exactly what Ovum’s Lachal predicts will happen during the next five years.

In addition, Lachal expects distinctions between on-premises and cloud computing software to become largely irrelevant. “We are entering a hybrid world,” says Lachal, one in which on-premises and cloud computing approaches will co-exist and be offered by the same vendor. Accordingly, “the key is not to say, ‘I want one over the other,’ but determining — based on your own requirements — how you weave the two approaches together,” he says. “And that’s where integration as a service comes into play.”

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Tagged as: Cloud Computing, CRM Technology, Integration