Can online CRM truly provide the Integration Power that Customers require

Here is my experience and findings so far:

The answer is - Yes and no..

Yes, if the online solution is already married to your back-end ERP or accounting solution, and well done. No, if it is not - just pass on the product.

Development time and the security of knowing you are not the first Guinea pig is important.

Reliability and sustainability are key assurances that you can always depend on the solution and the integration.

With regards to your comment "Recent experience with Hosting providers leads me to believe that we are not there yet?": I would have to agree.

From what I have seen, there are two possibilities:

1. The major SaaS apps have links to many different apps. However, these tend to be expensive to very expensive.
2. The other players don't have the depth of third party apps available so integration requires customization. Again, expensive ... and time-consuming!

To me, that's the worst of both worlds!

If you are looking for links between a CRM app and another specific application (perhaps a vertical app for your type of business), best to find out what CRM's lins to your app and then test those out. Otherwise, to paraphrase the ads on TV "how full is your wallet"!

John

The greatest benefits of SaaS are pay-as-you-go subscription and a vendor-neutrality - if you don't like the software or the vendor's service, you can move on pretty easily. But as soon as you invest heavily in customization, you're just as locked in as if it were behind your firewall.

At this point in time, SaaS' strength is ancillary applications, not core business apps, because core business apps need to be fully integrated in order to streamline core business processes.

R Ray Wang, analyst at the Software Insider, blogged about the challenges of integrating multiple SaaS applications not long ago. Take a read to understand the risk: http://tinyurl.com/24e9yyn.

Susan

Jonathan,

I concur with John on the expensive part of integration with most vendors so our team created a Matrix for our members to begin the process of elimination as we love to do @cazoomi : http://cazoomi.com/comparison-chart/

We usually see 2-3 of the vendors listed in the matrix in deals yet depending on the target systems involved our recommendation to our members will vary, as vendor neutrality is why they come to us.

Some of the newer entrants over the last few years have robust solutions which won't break the bank so check them out.

~Clint

Susan,

Some good points on customization and your firewall analogy resonates well with many Cazoomi.com members looking for solutions which will not create vendor lock-in.

Our team is now in the middle of writing a white paper about what we call "The SaaS Trap and your Cloud Strategy" from our time this year creating "Snaps", on SnapLogic.com and our own custom integrations over the years.

Recently, our teams have customized 3-4 SaaS apps quite heavily on NetSuite.com (financial), SAP.com (ERP) and Salesforce.com side (CRM & FinancialForce.com) which are pretty core business applications many of our members use to run their entire business.

If you peruse the adoption numbers out there (7k or so + clients for NetSuite & much less for the FinancialForce + Salesforce.com combo) running on these SaaS apps, compared to SAP or others, they do fall short in clients on a percentage basis so I can see your "ancillary" remark has some validity to it.

However, If I look at Mr. Wang's SaaS analogy "Integration and How To Make A Peanut Butter And Jelly Sandwich In The Cloud" and take the exact example he used I can tell you, from our team's experience, that you could easily Unite the applications I have marked below "Yes" using the simple SnapLogic.com framework and the others you could create in 1-2 weeks each on SnapLogic.

To avoid any "SaaS Trap", if you also don't like the SaaS application vendor after a while you could just create a new "Snap", using SnapLogic, for your SaaS vendor of choice and move off easily since your data is backed up using the SnapLogic.com backup feature and the data is easily transferable to the new application. (Think huge savings in IT CapEx & disruptive technology)

Now taking this real-life example at a hypothetical global pharma from Mr. Wang's blog:

* SAP financials (on-premise) - Yes + 2 weeks
* Oracle JD Edwards manufacturing (on-premise) - Yes
* Salesforce.com CRM (SaaS) - Yes
* Workday HR and Payroll (SaaS) - Yes
* Concur Expense Management (SaaS) - Create in 2 weeks
* Xactly Incentive Comp (SaaS) - Create in 2 weeks
* NetSuite OpenAir Project Management (SaaS) - Yes
* Ariba Spend Management (SaaS) - Create in 2 weeks
* Gmail and Google Docs(SaaS) - Yes + 1 week
* Jive Community Platforms (SaaS) - Create in 2 weeks
* SocialText (SaaS) - Create in 1 week
* WebEx (SaaS) - Create in 1 week

So to Unite all these systems using the SnapLogic framework would be about 12-13 weeks plus the standard 42 hour Cazoomi set-up fee for more than 4 applications and the client would, at the end of the 12-13 weeks own the integrations and only pay for the SnapLogic license of $832/month for Unlimited data and integration points.

Well, I guess this is why SnapLogic is still around since 2006 as Mr. Wang just gave the perfect scenario in late 2009 which proves out their business model.

"Peanut Butter And Jelly Sandwiches are pretty easy to make in real life and not much harder to make in the Cloud with SnapLogic's revolutionary DataFlow Framework." ~Cazoomi

Feel free to try it out for 14 days with all the applications here:

http://bit.ly/SnapLogicTrialFocus

~Clint
@cazoomi

PS: our team loves your blog:)