Software as a service offers incredible business value in terms of speed, flexibility, and simplicity—but it takes only a short history lesson to realize that SaaS is not something to implement in a vacuum.
Remember those early rogue SaaS implementations from line of business departments that bypassed the stodgy IT department?
Today, many companies are struggling to integrate that isolated SaaS data into larger corporate systems, or pull pieces into a mobile or cloud-based app.
In fact, a survey about the cloud conducted by Harvard Business Review Analytic Services sponsored by Oracle found that 43% of companies that implemented shadow IT projects found that the inability to integrate new cloud services with other applications was a drawback to going around IT.
And in a digital economy that relies on how well companies simplify information flow and access, companies must heed those early lessons about integrating cloud services, both SaaS and PaaS.
Simpler Information Flow
In fact, any cloud-based conversation should take place within the larger goal of simplifying information flow and access, says Tom Fisher, CIO of Oracle Managed Cloud Services.
“The truth is, software as a service providers in the cloud started out in niche frameworks—not because of their technology, but because they were selling to a particular line of business,” says Fisher. “Those days are pretty much over, because those lines of business have to talk to a broader set of business systems.”
While today’s modern cloud has evolved specifically to support the need to share SaaS data across applications and platforms (both on premises and in the cloud), it needs to go one step further: As companies move to a more centralized and overarching cloud strategy, many need services that can integrate throughout the enterprise and work across a standardized platform.
“Absolutely without a doubt, the integration of a suite always wins. I think it’s more important than any given function,” says Mark Sunday, CIO of Oracle.
That means, says Sunday, that if your company is evaluating a cloud solution for one part of the business—HR, for example—you also must consider its impact on be other parts of the business before you pull the trigger.
“If you think HCM stands alone as a silo inside of an enterprise, you’re nuts,” he says. Just for starters, HCM data becomes the input for expenses, which it feeds to the corporate finance system.
HCM should also accept information from the CRM system to support sales force commissions, and interface back into the finance system because it’s how payroll gets run.
“This notion that you can just buy a single provider and run that standalone has been proven to be false,” agrees Fisher. “As we learned in the early days of ERP software, finance doesn’t stand alone.”
And that’s how service orchestration got started in Oracle’s E-Business Suite, he says. “They added on supply chain and manufacturing capabilities and HCM capabilities. It naturally grows, and the same holds true in the cloud.”
As a result, says the HBR Analytics report, line of business executives are taking a far more active role in cloud decisions. The survey found that nearly half of respondents said that IT and business leaders worked equally to determine requirements and select cloud services, and a quarter said the same about cloud service integration.
PaaS and Saas Integration
As companies focus on information integration across the cloud and on-premises systems, the importance of integration between SaaS and PaaS services will naturally surface.
“The fact is, even in the cloud no one provides all the necessary features and functionality,” says Fisher. “So, the question becomes, if you have add-on requirements, how do you seamlessly do that? That’s why it’s so important to find a PaaS that gives you the flexibility to add capabilities or specific functionality to the application.”
It’s a pretty safe bet that cloud growth will continue; 85% of the HBR Analytics survey respondents expect the number of cloud services they personally use at work to increase over the next few years.
Managing that growth successfully requires companies to examine cloud programs holistically to make sure that information flows easily across each service and platform. It’s not a small concern, says Fisher.
“If you’re considering a cloud provider that doesn’t have that tight integration with those other components, you’re going to be making a very, very bad tactical decision,” says Fisher. “You’ll be one of those CIOs that has an 18-month career path.”
No pressure, though.