SaaS Integration – Key to Success
It’s no surprise that Software as a Service (SaaS) continues to gain adoption, forecasted to more than double as a percentage of overall software spending between 2010 and 2013, according to Forrester Research in Tuesday’s article on CIO.com, “How SaaS will Impact 6 Key Software Categories.” ePurchasing/eProcurement in particular was called out as having “greatly shifted over to SaaS in new product categories like services procurement…” SaaS software has large benefits for clients, including fast time to value, higher usability, and (for true SaaS offerings) automatic worry-free upgrades.
What is essential for success for services procurement is integration – integrating with the clients’ financial systems, HR systems, security systems and many others to keep data consistent, enforce policies and provide end-to-end automation. Global enterprises sometimes require more than a dozen integrations to get going.
With system integrations, the devil is in the details, and integration specifics aren’t typically finalized until after the vendor is selected. So clients should look for the most flexible and fastest provider when it comes to integrating with their systems, who can easily adopt to the client’s already existing formats, messaging protocols, and security approaches.
By choosing a provider with a proven track record of delivering integrations quickly and correctly to a broad diversity of client systems, clients can get full value from their services procurement program and avoid the painful operational headaches of incorrect, inconsistent data from lack of integration.
