Beyond the buzzword: SaaS and integration

I've written a great deal (as have others) about the benefits of SaaS in the email archiving and Microsoft Exchange hosting worlds in terms of usability (here and here), deployment times, storage management and innovation.

But all of those points above are very IT-centric, since on-premise software is inherently IT-centric.

What I've found is that senior business leadership at companies (e.g., how I think about my company) don't think in terms of technology or systems - they think about business problems they are trying to solve. One of the fundamental challenges for IT since the dawn of time (or at least the mainframe) has been to connect systems together so that technology aligns with business processes and business value.

The problem is that when your technologies are running on-premise, this is really difficult. Each technology has different architectures, interfaces, infrastructure and teams to manage it and customers end up deploying NEW systems (remember Enterprise Application Integration?) to connect those silos together. What a mess!

One of the benefits of software-as-a-service that's only getting attention recently is that customers running their applications "in the cloud" can also connect those applications together more easily to mirror their business processes.

Phil Wainewright at ZDNet has a great post on his SaaS blog about this trend in general ("SaaS mashups" as he describes them). In particular, he highlights an innovative vendor Xactly that recently announced a 5-way SaaS integration:

As a case in point, take Xactly's 5-way mashup, announced Monday (image courtesy of Xactly). Using Salesforce.com's Force.com platform as the foundation, the SaaS vendor has mashed up its own sales compensation application with Amazon.com's retail catalog, the Paypal payment system and an iGoogle gadget. The mashup creates an enterprise-class incentive rewards management and fulfilment application that at the same time is economical enough to be affordable for smaller businesses - subscriptions will be $10 per user per month, at the end of a 90-day free-of-charge launch window that ends December 1st.

So how could an email SaaS platform tie into the other SaaS business applications organizations are using like online CRM, HR and accounting packages?  More to come on that...