The challenges of integrating SaaS applications

SaaS sprawl

Today’s enterprises are likely to run dozens, if not hundreds, of separate SaaS applications.

The ease of acquiring and setting up SaaS packages, their self-service nature – often with no need to involve IT – and the understandable desire of departments to buy best-of-breed technology has led to “SaaS sprawl”. And, although departments might see themselves as siloes with their own, specific IT needs, the business as a whole needs common workflows and consistent, shared data.

“These SaaS applications often only specialise in one domain, such as ERP, CRM [customer relationship management] or HR,” notes Steve Deng, senior director analyst at Gartner. “But they don’t work in isolation. Common integration use cases include data synchronisation and orchestration of business processes across these applications.”

As Deng points out, firms need to keep data consistent across all their SaaS applications. This is easier said than done, as applications will typically hold data in their own data stores and on their own cloud infrastructure.

Enterprises need to ensure they use consistent data formats so they can exchange data between SaaS applications and applications run by suppliers and customers. Enterprises need to “gain visibility and insight from data that are distributed across these SaaS applications”, he adds.

“SaaS applications and on-premise applications may represent or store their data under different data models and formats,” cautions Deng. “Many organisations struggle with keeping data consistent across applications in a timely manner.”

Poor quality or inconsistent data can all too easily undermine some of the benefits of buying a best-of-breed SaaS application – and inefficient or broken workflows only add to the problems.

“Enterprises do need to integrate their various systems to be able to produce management reporting or transfer data between systems,” says PA’s Larssen. “If you have a sales system or manufacturing system, you need to transfer data between them. Without being able to do that, you end up with business silos or rekeying data. Data is the lifeblood of a business and it needs to flow around.

“The alternative is the ‘swivel chair’ approach, with users re-keying information between systems. That is time consuming and even more error prone,” he warns.

And integrating SaaS applications is potentially even more important, where organisations want to automate their processes, or use advanced analytics, machine learning or AI.

Integration options

Fortunately, the options for integrating SaaS applications are improving. Application software providers are making their products easier to integrate. As the SaaS market has grown, new entrants have competed, in part, on their ability to work with other software providers and their datasets and workflows. This also allows smaller software firms to offer more specialist, niche applications which can interoperate with the larger, enterprise applications and suites.

“The more forward-thinking vendors would rather have a smaller slice of the pie than none of it, so are much happier to integrate with all sorts of products,” says PA’s Larssen.

Then there are the technical advances in application and data integration. SaaS applications have gone from supporting – often fairly limited – data export to in-depth support for application programming interfaces (APIs), allowing firms to build connections between tools.

Meanwhile, a greater choice of SaaS applications – and the need to integrate with on-premises applications, legacy workflows and external data sources – has created its own marketplace for integration tools.

A number of software providers now offer low-code, no-code or even pre-built, drag and drop methods. These integration-platform-as-a-service (iPaaS) tools are now an industry in their own right, and firms can either use them directly to create their own bespoke workflows, or bring in consultants who have experience of building similar workflows, often in a similar industry.

Some software tools companies specialise in adding events engines and streaming, which allow looser connection between applications than APIs. This can be useful in cases where a delay or disruption to one application would disrupt another, or even cause data loss, in a closely coupled, API-based environment. A further option still is to use the cloud itself, as a basis for integration, with tools such as AWS’ Lamda.

Just as there is only rarely a one-size-fits-all SaaS application that covers all parts of a business, so there is no single best way to integrate different applications.

For some, for example, where applications frequently share data and form part of a closely coupled workflow, API integration may be best. For others, where applications are more independent, and workflows need resilience so that failure or disruption in one SaaS application does not cause disruption to others, an event or streaming based connection might be better.

In some cases, where data sharing is less time sensitive, a conventional batch-based or extract, translate and load (ETL) process could be more appropriate. The cost and effort of connecting APIs might not be justified in a workflow that only needs to run once a week.

However, as PA’s Larssen points out, CIOs may have to pick the best integration method to serve a range of requirements as it makes little sense to run multiple forms of integration between the same applications. “If you have two products you are trying to integrate, it is less work to integrate them all the same way,” he says.

Taking an integration between an HR and an IT system as an example, he points out that although a batch process would work well for adding for new joiners, and an API for locking and unlocking accounts, the smarter option is to use just one method. “You may as well use the APIs for everything,” he says.

Firms’ choices will also be driven by the time, skills and resources they have to integrate their SaaS applications. A high-value, critical or highly custom workflow merits custom coding; a common, utility workflow may well be better achieved through an off-the-shelf tool or iPaaS application.

“Unless you source your applications from a single vendor, sooner or later you will need to integrate applications and data,” says Gartner’s Deng. But whichever option CIOs choose, it should be a more reliable, accurate and efficient option than the “swivel chair” and rekeying data.