Cloud App Integration .com

The following was contributed by Clark Newby, Senior Vice President of Marketing at SnapLogic.

At SnapLogic, we’re obsessed with the exciting opportunities presented by SaaS applications, and we closely follow how companies are merging these solutions into their IT portfolios. In order to get a quantitative look at the “state of integration” today, we recently commissioned an Application Connection Priorities report, which highlights trends in the integration goals, needs and challenges of companies in 2011 and beyond.

We found that companies are primarily focused on integrating business intelligence and analytics (39 percent), productivity and collaboration (36 percent), sales (34 percent), and financial applications (28 percent) over the next 12 months. This reflects the growing adoption of newer technologies like Birst, Google Apps, Salesforce, and FinancialForce.com. Integration is a key step in the process of replacing cumbersome enterprise application stacks with these flexible SaaS offerings, and it will become even more important as IT portfolios expand to include niche SaaS applications in additional functional areas.

While the most popular application categories for integration aren’t really surprising, it is fascinating to see how much has changed when it comes to realizing ROI for business applications. Forty-five percent of companies say that their biggest roadblock in fully harnessing applications is lack of integration, with 40 percent pointing to data quality challenges. The weight placed on these obstacles indicates their critical role in the adoption of new applications – something I’m sure the readers of CloudApplicationIntegration.com understand all too well.

The connection issue is intensified by the rapid proliferation of new specialized SaaS applications (case in point: our study found that the percentage of companies implementing at least four SaaS applications will double in the next two years). At the same time, the big data spouting from social media and mobile sources is constantly increasing the volumes and varieties of data that companies can connect.

Despite the potential benefits of leveraging these data sources, relatively few companies prioritized application connections with social media (27 percent), mobile (18 percent) or offers data (4 percent) for the next 12 months – most likely due to the perceived difficulties of integration. However, these applications were prioritized higher when we asked people to look 1-3 years out, with over twice as many companies hoping to integrate offers/advertising applications, for example.

All of these data points lead to the conclusion that businesses may not yet be doing all they can with the amazing technologies and data that’s seemingly available to them. In the age of cloud computing and the consumer-ization of IT, it’s troubling that 18% of companies are still laboriously hand-coding their data integrations (according to TDWI Research).

Integration shouldn’t get in the way of adopting new applications, it should be a catalyst that gives businesses free reign to rapidly connect any application or data source and easily orchestrate fast, smart data throughout their business. About half of our survey respondents confirmed that better application connectivity would lead to enhanced time-to-market and competitiveness as well as better business decision-making. Make no mistake – the bigger, and more well-connected a company’s data universe is, the better opportunities that company has to become drastically more adaptive, intelligent, and responsive.

Today’s application connection roadblocks necessitate a new breed of powerful, yet agile and easy-to-use cloud integration solutions to replace the inflexible, rigid integration techniques and tools of the past. We know that everyone wants to benefit from the speed, flexibility and scale of SaaS applications, so why have traditional integration providers been painfully slow to adopt those same attributes?

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