How SaaS Companies Address Compounding Integration Demands

How SaaS Companies Address Compounding Integration Demands

While SaaS companies certainly strive to be innovative and modern, that is often easier said than done in the modern business landscape, especially when it comes to integration.

While these cloud-based organizations are often synonymous with technology and innovation, many of these companies weren’t actually born in the cloud and face the same hybrid integration challenges – connecting on-premise and cloud data sources – that other enterprises’ face. Managing integration services, whether they are custom-developed or pieced together via open-source components, can put a tremendous burden on SaaS organizations, but without successfully meeting integration requirements, SaaS companies cannot adequately serve customers.

These integration challenges create a rippling, snowball effect within an enterprise. Internally, such requirements compound and require large swaths of time and effort to make changes and updates, and they often require new talent to manage the integrations. Externally, it puts pressure on businesses to agilely meet partner and customer demands.

The more a SaaS organization grows, the more its integration and data movement requirements grow with it. Previously, SaaS companies commonly handled these emerging demands with one-off fixes as each communication need came along. But that approach does not scale well in the modern enterprise.

Embedded Integration

SaaS solutions are appealing to businesses due to all the cloud-based tools and services that they can provide, which means taking solution management and maintenance out of the equation for a regular business. But someone (the SaaS vendor) does have to maintain the solution and must have the ability to do so. To deliver the results and service that customers demand, these SaaS companies require strong integration and connectivity capabilities.

That’s because with each new customer, the need to support different file formats and protocols grows, and it’s imperative for SaaS companies to give customers a full range of protocols, connectors, approaches, and data formats to get data into and out of the solution. And that’s what makes integration so integral to cloud-services.

Those companies with disparate integration tools often get so overwhelmed by the amount of maintenance required that they cannot focus on improving core business services. Leveraging an embedded integration solution, however, allows business to drive better value and deliver SaaS tools.

A modern embedded integration platform enables SaaS companies to serve their new customers and integrations without the complicated and messy infrastructure that comes along with it. An embedded integration solution, built right into the SaaS platform, will streamline a cloud-based company’s business processes and improve productivity via faster onboarding, SLA management, governance, and tight compliance capabilities.

The Need for Reliability, Scalability

JDA Software is a SaaS-based supply chain management giant and it transmits more than 2 million files each day. JDA required more flexibility and agility, however, in order to onboard new customers quickly. JDA has a half-dozen data centers around the world, and its customer base was expanding rapidly, so it turned to a modern integration solution to consolidate all of its disparate technologies onto a centralized platform which automates customer data flows.

JDA deployed a reliable, scalable solution to support its aggressive growth, complete with easy load balancing implementation and multiple secure protocols inside and outside the enterprise to ensure customer connectivity. JDA can onboard new customers faster, exceed its customer SLAs, and meet the demanding scalability requirements that challenge cloud-based organizations.

Another company, nVision Global Technology Solutions, is a leading provider of SaaS-based freight, audit, payment, and logistics management solutions and processes 100,000,000 EDI documents annually. Disparate solutions nVision had in place were not conducive to the customer experience the company wanted to deliver. By using embedded integration solutions from Cleo, nVision gained a single platform that supports multiple protocols, transforms data seamlessly, and takes advantage of a comprehensive dashboard to provide true end-to-end visibility.

The ECi Software Solutions group of companies gives customers business and e-commerce solutions both on-premise and in the cloud. ECi exchanges purchase orders, purchase order acknowledgments, electronic invoices, and advanced shipping notices via XML, X12, and additional proprietary formats. ECi leverages a highly available data movement and B2B integration platform that can move 100,000 documents a month at full capacity, and grow 10 percent year-over-year.

For more on how cloud-services organizations can manage their growing integration requirements to improve their offerings, check out the white paper “What Every SaaS Company Should Know About Integrating with Its Customers.”

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