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Dan over at Jitterbit has a nice post that I found myself saying “Amen” to with each sentence.

SOA’s [service oriented architecture's] been coming on for quite a few years now, but the early promise hasn’t panned out as much as some people have hoped…My question is why has it been so difficult to connect the dots (so to speak) between all of these applications? SOA was supposed to combine the promise of best of breed within an open framework.

That sure is the promise of software as a service (AKA SaaS). Pick software the is really good at a single area, or core competency. Then integrate all those components together for a complete package that supports the way you do business. That’s what I see as the future of software. I think it’s coming sooner than later. Dan makes a great point about why it hasn’t been sooner:

What we’ve underestimated, I think, is the ability and the willingness for SaaS applications to integrate with each other. We want to have our cake (complete suite) and eat it too (best of breed). Of course, there hasn’t been much incentive for SaaS application companies to make the connections to other apps. They’ve got products to improve and customers to satisfy. Integrating with peripheral competitors falls pretty far down on the to-do list.

We’ve seen the same thing. We use Salesforce.com and we use Democracy in Action. We’d love to see them integrated. Salesforce.com has zero incentive to build an integration, and it turns out Democracy in Action doesn’t have much incentive either. They don’t have many clients who use Salesforce.com, and they have plenty on their plates with their current customers and platform.

That’s why we’re starting to see the connections being made by the end-user, at the organizational or departmental level. The end users are the only ones truly motivated to integrate apps because they have the most to gain…Today, it’s starting to feel like the last of the puzzle pieces are falling into place.

I can start building these integrations as I need them. I built a simple one between Salesforce.com and dotproject. When Democracy in Action’s API becomes a bit more documented and stable I could integrate it with Salesforce.com as well. I wouldn’t need the developer time of either company, just access to their APIs and some decent coding ability.

In the nonprofit sector, people like me are the “users” Dan is talking about. We can build these integrations as we need them. Sometimes they’re ugly, sometimes their elegant. Either way they help us get our work done by connecting software systems together.

Dan says “it’s starting to feel like the last of the puzzle pieces are falling into place,” and I have to agree with him.

This entry was posted on Friday, August 25th, 2006 at 9:08 pm and is filed under CRM, Technology. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.