Winning the SaaS Integration Challenge

SaaS offerings are popular because they can be implemented quickly and easily by business units and individual users. What people talk about less though, is the complexity of integration issues that can result when SaaS applications are introduced piecemeal without a cohesive company strategy.  

If your company doesn’t have a smart approach to Enterprise Application Integration (EAI), what you can end up with is a range of “isolated” applications, which are unable to “talk to” each other. This can mean that the agility, collaboration and flexibility you hoped to realize by adopting Saas is not actually achieved. 

Dain Hansen, director of integration product marketing for Oracle, puts it well when he says, "People have been more successful in getting SaaS on board, but not as capable of getting the benefits from SaaS." 

Oracle has recently released a very interesting Whitepaper on 5 Ways to Simplify Cloud Integration. The Oracle Whitepaper describes how to simplify cloud integration as you transition from a complex, application integration architecture to a simple and agile integration platform.

A quick summary of the benefits of using Oracle’s Cloud Integration Services:

1. Get off to a Running Start: You need to be fast, so use pre-built integrations so you don’t have to start from scratch. Oracle Integration Cloud Service lets you take advantage of a growing collection of pre-built integrations, accessible from the Oracle Cloud Marketplace. This will help you avoid a costly development cycle. 
    
2. Don’t re-invent the wheel - Crowd Sourced Recommendations: Within Oracle Integration Cloud Service, you can build on the recommendations and experience of others.  Integration recommendations can come from many sources including Oracle, customers, and partners. The ability of the integration platform to learn best practices based on successful integrations done by other customers and incorporate that crowd sourced insight as guidance into an embedded mapping recommendation capability can really help you to save time and avoid complications.
    
3. The Benefits of using a PaaS & SaaS provider: Oracle’s unique ability as a provider of both PaaS and SaaS means you can leverage your tenant ID to pre-configure connectivity to your SaaS applications into the integration platform. Auto association of Oracle SaaS applications removes the time consuming and error prone step of having to configure your integration platform prior to integrating applications. As a customer of Oracle Cloud Applications such as Oracle Sales Cloud, Oracle Service Cloud, Oracle Marketing Cloud, Oracle CPQ Cloud, Oracle HCM Cloud or others, you have the ability to bypass the complexity of setting up the integration platform for these application
    
4. Intuitive User Experience: Oracle Integration Cloud Service uses a completely new paradigm to simplify integration relying only on knowledge of the application itself and not on complex deep-dive integration knowledge. An entirely new user interface built on top of proven Oracle integration components provides the optimal mix of ease of use combined with mission critical performance and reliability of Oracle SOA Suite.
    
5. Be Future Proof: Public/Private Cloud Portability: Oracle has developed integration solutions that share common architecture, standards, and products between cloud and on-premises solutions. This approach greatly simplifies migration of the integration platform when new business requirements require a shift to the public cloud or on-premises.

So what are you waiting for? Contact us today to find out how we can help you to integrate your JD Edwards ERP with your SaaS applications, how we can help you prepare to take advantage of the Internet of Things (IOT)  and ensure that your on-Premise and hosted solutions talk to each other.

You may also Like | SaaS Integration Resources: 

SaaS Integration Blogs:  

• Simplify SaaS and On-Premises Integration by Using Oracle Fusion Middleware
• Tame the Cloud Integration Beast

SaaS IntegrationWhitepaper:

• Five Ways to Simplify Cloud Integration

Thomas Kurian -- Oracle OpenWorld Keynote 2014

Oracle's Executive Vice President of Product Development, Thomas Kurian, shares his keynote on, "Cloud Services for the Modern Enterprise" at Oracle OpenWorld 2014. In this keynote he talks about three major trends in business and culture:

• Big data
• Mobility
• Cloud

He talks about the Oracle Integration Cloud Service, which enables SaaS-to-SaaS and SaaS-to-on-premises integration, and Oracle Process Cloud Service, which provides cloud-based business process management (BPM) capabilities. This sections starts at 35 minutes.