SaaS, integration and AppExchange

One of the keys to success in adoption of Software as a Service will be ease of integration between web services.  Of course this has always been an IT issue, with users choosing either an ERP style path, or "best of breed" applications.  This is balancing a compromise on functionality versus the support and cost issues of integration.

Salesforce.com is endeavouring to avoid going the way of Siebel in their sector by approaching this issue with their AppExchange.  When they announced it a few months ago they likened it to the eBay and the iTunes of applications.  iTunes is an interesting comparison, but I'm not sure eBay is a particularly positive example.   The idea will definitely foster an ecosystem of add-on and complimentary applications, but I can't see that large volumes of software vendors will want to adopt the Salesforce technology platform as their foundation, in the way that they did with Microsoft to build client/server applications.  Other SaaS vendors are taking an open source style approach to extend their product, like JotSpot encouraging developers to create add-on applications for the whole customer community.

However, the better SaaS offerings will use SOAP, XML and good design to make it easy for customers to take the "best of breed" approach without the integration overhead that we had to live with using client/server applications.

Technorati Tags : SaaS, integration, ERP, Salesforce, AppExchange

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