A recent Oracle and IDC webcast with Mickey North Rizza, Program Vice President at IDC, and Juergen Lindner, Senior Vice President of Oracle SaaS, explored the challenges and benefits of SaaS integration.

Fully integrated SaaS environments are still rare in today’s workforce. In fact, only 5 percent of large enterprises (defined as 10,000 employees or more) have all of their SaaS applications fully integrated with corporate-wide systems. However, the full integration of SaaS with corporate-wide systems is an important goal for 97 percent of large organizations.

As SaaS integration maturity increases, so does the importance of integration. Tying SaaS to corporate systems is more important than tying to LOB applications. The more mature the organization, the more SaaS integration is considered to be a critical requirement.

SaaS Integration Challenges

SaaS applications are slightly more challenging to integrate with line-of-business (LOB) apps than with corporate-wide systems. The greatest challenge is the integration between SaaS and on-premises applications. According to IDC, 39 percent of organizations find incompatibility between different SaaS providers to be a challenge. However, as more SaaS applications are being added, organizations increasingly find compatibility challenges among the different SaaS providers.

Less-mature organizations are challenges by incompatibility in SaaS applications from the same provider. Due to the complexity of SaaS deployment, 50 percent of organizations find that it causes technology investments to be delayed. However, as organizations become more mature with respect to integration, both types of integrations are far less challenging.

SaaS Integration Benefits

The top five LOB goals include:

1. Improving operational efficiency
2. Improving operational quality
3. Improving customer experience
4. Creating a new competitive advantage
5. Improving the organization’s talent

Mature organizations that have achieved integration between SaaS applications and corporate-wide/LOB applications are able to reap the many benefits and better achieve their goals. The top three benefits of SaaS integration include:

1. Improving efficiency and throughput
2. Increased revenues
3. Increased insights into operations

With SaaS integration, mature organizations believe that they are better able to achieve those three benefits and additionally increase insight into customers, increase market share, and increase budget performance. SaaS integration benefits directly correlate to the focus areas needed to support the business over the next two years.

For more information about how to leverage SaaS, check out the original Oracle blog or the Oracle/IDC webcast, both of which are attached below.