It’s hard to overstate the impact that the arrival of Software as a Service had on the CRM world. Spearheaded by Salesforce.com and picked up by almost every other vendor in the CRM space, SaaS made CRM available to virtually every business, and has paved the way for the continued health of the CRM space. It did so by dropping the cost of entry by spreading the costs of buying software.
In the "good old days" we solved the challenges of integration and data access between applications with standards-based approaches to connect. ODBC/JDBC for reporting, as an example. If you needed to create reports that combined data from your CRM and financial systems, you simply pointed your favorite ODBC/JDBC compatible tool at the underlying databases and voila, you could analyze and report on data accordingly. When we moved to SaaS applications, we lost this easy access to the underlying databases. Now they're hidden behind APIs, different authentication methods and so on. Every API is different, so for any enterprise wanting to integrate, it's an engineering effort for each SaaS app. No wonder that departments looking for a quick fix to their business needs put off this integration effort.
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Don't Rebuild Those Silos!
Posted by: Chris Bucholtz March 28, 2013 05:00 AMIt’s hard to overstate the impact that the arrival of Software as a Service had on the CRM world. Spearheaded by Salesforce.com and picked up by almost every other vendor in the CRM space, SaaS made CRM available to virtually every business, and has paved the way for the continued health of the CRM space. It did so by dropping the cost of entry by spreading the costs of buying software.