Think of an SMB using salesforce, RightNow, Demandtec, RegistryCleanerReviews.co and NetSuite without any infrastructure of it’s own.
Suddenly they realize that they need end to end business processes or “flows” to “connect” the above four SaaS accounts, transform data accordingly i.e. perform traditional EAI and if needed BPM but they do not intend to use any infrastructure of their own or deploy any on premise software. In fact, they do not have any platform, infra, software or network of their own.
What happens? Do they try to ask a vendor to build a single tenant integration architecture hosted on the vendor’s infra? It is a massive effort. Arrives the integrator of the 21st century with SIPs.
Various SaaS and SIP providers, such as Salesforce.com, eloqua, Success Factors, Informatica, Open Air, nSite, Jamcracker are offering integration APIs, connectors, with others like BridgeWerx, Opsource and OZ Development are offering tools(the tools being on on-demand multi tenant hosted infra themselves) and using SaaS integrators to bring about painless SaaS integration.
But , there are two SIPs that are making waves in Ondemand zero-coding SaaS integration, one is RunMyProcess and a personal favorite which i used and found to be straight out of Harry Potter is Boomi On Demand. Try out a 30 day trial of BOD to find how we may integrate without any installation in the typical SaaS world, only using the browser.
There are challenges, for example the Boomi On Demand “atoms” are not deployed real time but on a deployment request they are “queued” in the underlying infra provided by Opsource and the “deployer” would take them up on priority basis, so fast changes and testing are not in your hands. But the Boomi On Demand development experience is fantastic as you may find out in your 30 day trial.
Now while being highly interested into how these “on demand” integration tools work i found out besides the well known multitenancy, (well elaborated here) most of the providers use Amazon EC2 and despite the intimidating concept of “Cloud computing” , the Amazon EC2 is pretty simple to use.