Integration Featured at SaaS Slam 2009 in Boston

Was in Boston yesterday for the SaaS 2G and Slam 2009 conference which was put on by Software Business.  I was there to moderate a panel on integration and how it has become one of the major barriers to SaaS adoption.  I was really looking forward to the conference because for once integration was being featured as the main event on day one (right after a great keynote presentation by Mark Trang, director of ISV marketing for salesforce.com on "the seven habits of highly successful SaaS companies").  I joked with the audience that normally when I present on integration at a conference it's at the very end of day two or day three and only the really hardcore integration junkies or people with nowhere else to go attend...  :-)

I was a little concerned at first whether we would be able to fill the 50 minutes with stimulating discussion on integration but I have to say I was pleasantly surprised.  To begin with, we had a very strong panel:  Mark Trang joined us as well as Chris Cabrera, founder and CEO of Xactly, and Tien Zhou, founder and CEO of Zuora.  We explored a range of topics from the need for integration, to customer concerns and expectations to strategies for dealing with the integration challenge.

Here are what I thought were some of the more interesting comments/observations from the panel:

1. Integration is a vital and integral part of their applications.  These guys need to connect on average with about 5 applications for a given customer.  Chris said he's had to integrate with as many as 25 applications for one customer.  The ability to do so is expected by end customers.
2. A quick informal poll of the audience, by the way, showed that the vast majority were using at least one SaaS application and many were using between two and four.
3. Attitudes of SaaS ISVs are dramatically different from their enterprise counterparts when it comes to opening their applications and providing APIs.  The benefits and advantages of being open and accessible far outweigh the concerns such as the potential for competitors to reverse engineer their apps.
4. The ability to quickly and easily integrate was unanimously viewed as a competitive advantage.
5. There is a trend where SaaS consumers more and more are expecting the SaaS ISV to handle the integration challenge on behalf of the end customer - at least for common use cases - and "bundle" the integration with the application.
6. Unanimous agreement that security and privacy concerns have largely dissipated.  By one estimate "it comes up in 2 out of 100 cases now."
7. Unanimous agreement that SaaS integration is actually easier than enterprise integration due to the single-instance nature of the apps and better documentation of APIs.  Credit was also given to third-party integration players like Boomi (full disclosure: SFDC and Zuora are customers) who are simplifying integration with SaaS integration platforms.
8. Unanimous agreement that we will continue to see a "point solution" approach by SaaS ISVs as opposed to trying to build monolithic suites.  Apps will be focused but deep and rich in functionality and integration will continue to play a vital role in unifying the end user experience.

In the end, we had to cut the audience Q&A short as we were out of time...  If any readers were there, drop a line and let me know what you thought.

Comments

[Pat Murphy]

Good session Bob. It was informative to hear other ISVs with similar experiences. Nice to meet you at the event.