SaaS integration: Tricky, but manageable

Spotlight

• SaaS broadens appeal, gains customization
• SaaS integration: Tricky, but manageable
• SaaS puts focus on functionality
• PaaS gives developers a virtual toolbox
• Opinion: 5 SaaS myths busted

Computerworld - It was almost too much of a good thing. When Hines Interests Ltd. launched its real estate investment trust business, Hines Real Estate Securities Inc., as a complement to its real estate development business, it built the IT infrastructure around a bevy of SaaS products. But the need to exchange data between various hosted applications -- transaction processing, CRM, literature-fulfillment, and expense and vendor payment systems -- created a tangled web of integrations linking SaaS to SaaS and SaaS to on-premises applications.

It's the SaaS twist: Add too many applications, and you might to find yourself back in the bad old days, when the various applications in the corporate infrastructure wouldn't talk to one another. "When you're heavily reliant on SaaS, you're putting yourself in the position of siloed data once again," says Benny Lasiter, business systems architect at Hines Real Estate Securities.

At least Lasiter had a plan. In many organizations, SaaS offerings sneak in through the departments within individual business units, often without the knowledge of IT. Rogue projects have become "the profile of SaaS" in the enterprise, says Ron Papas, senior vice president and general manager of Informatica Corp.'s on-demand group.

Later, as those applications multiply and grow, problems arise. "You do it once, twice, and five times later, you have these disparate solutions coming into the IT infrastructure. There's no strategy, no consistency, and there's a problem," says Benoit Lheureux, an analyst at Gartner Inc. "Most companies don't even know that they should have a SaaS integration strategy, let alone align that with their internal B2B integration strategy. That is a huge problem."

But you need not go it alone. As IT executives are working through their SaaS tangles, they're developing fresh integration strategies and getting help from new tools and integration specialists.