The Relevance of a Data Integration Platform for SaaS Companies

In the past few years, the go-to delivery model to provide businesses with software capabilities is SaaS or software-as-a-service. SaaS solutions provide less capital infrastructure outlay, an operating cost model that’s scalable, and specialized features, and robust capabilities, which business stakeholders crave. In most instances, businesses find it faster, safer, and cheaper to implement a SaaS solution instead of internally building something or even installing off-the-shelf solutions.

However, as SaaS offerings expand, SaaS vendors seek out new ways of distinguishing offerings from the competition. A lot of SaaS organizations are thinking about including integration capabilities to their offerings to make more extensive and appealing solutions to customers.

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Many factors impact the productivity of an eCommerce business. One of the major reasons why it may seem that it’s hindering your progress is the lack of data integration. Without out, things could keep on scattering and messing your system, and it would be harder to access those things, and later on, managing those things could be more difficult. 

An online business has considerably bigger data, and thus any organization would want users to reach that data without hardships. Here we’ll discuss several benefits that come with data integration. Rolling out an extensive data integration strategy for a software-as-a-service company has numerous benefits. Here are some of them. 

1. Enabling Big Data

The main driver for integration capabilities is Big Data, which is all about aggregating all the available data within the organization to enhance decision making. For a SaaS company, considering SharePoint with Big Data Analytics is the best bet. In today’s present tech evolution and landscape, Big Data and SharePoint development are being merged with gigantic data amount, giving rise to more effective and scalable SharePoint solutions development. 

For organizations seeking SharePoint solutions, there are so many SharePoint developers and vendors that could meet various requirements. The staggering data analytics growth is common nowadays. Many industry analysts nevertheless fail to see how the growth of the platform, as well as the coding language of SharePoint, reflects data growth. 

The relevance of the next-generation analytics offering of SharePoint created on the platform of Big Data should not be ignored. SharePoint development is just one aspect wherein data analytics provide impact. Without a doubt, interpreting, analyzing, and gaining from their benefits would help companies gain a lot in the coming years. 

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2. Cloud, all about Connections

Cloud apps are all about connections. For some time now, long discussions on whether an organization should invest in an integrated suite, which does everything, or a best-of-breed approach in which numerous niche tools are combined to create an overall marketing stack. Today, the reality is you need both. 

Organizations need a central, extensive marketing automation suite, and more specialized tools to handle different aspects, which include mobile marketing, social media marketing, and retargeting, among others. Niche marketing tools should provide integration capabilities, or they could turn into a data silo within the organization of a customer. On the other hand, marketing automation suites should enable the integration of data with niche tools, to let customer fulfill their needs. 

3. Artificial Intelligence Application

In every industry, AI and machine learning have made their introduction. Typically, machine learning algorithms should be ‘trained’ on the available data of a company. The algorithm, once trained, could make some kind of prediction that’s based on incoming new data. 

Take for instance predicting which visitor is likely to make a purchase, based on his/her behavior on the brand website. Here, data integrations play a major role, such as enabling easy data sources connection with specialized machine learning services, like the machine learning of Amazon AWS. 

4. Democratizing Data

The word Data democratization recently was introduced to express the need to make data accessible to everybody in a company. Consider behavior data, which is gathered in different SaaS apps used within an eCommerce brand. Engineers could utilize data for process optimization. 

The same data could be useful for marketing, sales, finance, and anyone within the company. Moreover, data could also be exposed in a controlled manner to the tech audience within the organization, like software developers and engineers, and non-tech audiences such as the marketing team. Operations are enhanced as everyone would have a controlled, easy, and secure access to data that they need. 

Democratizing data is a recent evolution that expresses the need to make data available to all in an organization. Engineers could use APIs, while visual tools for data access could be used by citizen users. 

5. Being part of the ecosystems

Providers of SaaS solutions consider growing their integration capabilities and be part of the strategic ecosystems. Ecosystems could be critical leads’ source. For instance, niche SaaS players could be part of the Salesforce ecosystem. There are of course a lot of ecosystems available, such as those within the IoT movement, as well as personal assistant ecosystems like Alexa by Amazon. 

6. Becoming an ‘integration first’ organization

A couple of years back, SaaS organizations need to be ‘mobile-first’ meaning that they should optimize the UI for mobile devices, like smartphones and tablets, without losing sight of the classic computer screen size. Today, in the same way, the ‘integration first’ paradigm is equally becoming more important. 

In the previous paradigm analogy, software apps should be designed keeping in mind data integration, right from the very beginning. API’s are not only an add-on to the architecture overall, they’re also vital corner-store of every SaaS app. An ‘integration first’ company means being flexible and act fast on new opportunities that will surface. 

7. Evolving into a micro-service architecture

If your company is ‘integration first’, chances are that you’d be evolving into a micro-service architecture. In this architecture, smaller logic units run as stand-alone’, with a clear interface. In most instances, the micro-service interface is an API. 

There are numerous benefits to micro-services, particularly since they keep clear the borderlines of the different parts of the platform overall. Furthermore, they enable replacing one unit without impacting other parts of the app. 

Conclusion

Oftentimes, organizations have to scale up or down on the number of users that use the portal. With major shifts in an organization, this could mean adding big user amounts to the portal and changing the SaaS Solution scaling package. The process could be made seamless with SaaS analytics solutions that could support small to medium businesses, and huge enterprise traffic volumes as well. 

All are at stake when it comes to data integration, including business intelligence, competitive advantages, and analytics. Thus, having full access to every set of data from every source is paramount. 

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