SaaS Adoption & Integration
More than 95 percent of organizations expect to maintain or grow their use of Software as a Service (SaaS), according to a recent survey. SaaS is clearly no longer seen as a new deployment model, rather as points on the adoption curve – ranging from process redesign to implementation to integration. The scope of functionality of available SaaS applications has also broadened significantly and incorporated leading practices for industry-specific processes, beyond the more common e-mail, financial management, sales force automation and customer service, and expense management.
Even with this explosive growth, most companies still don’t have policies governing the evaluation and use of SaaS. Often, SaaS selection and implementation happens “outside” of accepted enterprise decision-making channels and processes. If your organization would benefit from better planning and integration of SaaS initiatives within your business technology framework, Enable can help with leading practices for SaaS adoption.
Enable has the right combination of experience with both “traditional” on-premise systems integration and Cloud-based architecture and development. We can help you to realize the benefits and simplicity of SaaS by complementing existing systems and data in a more seamless environment. Enable can provide hands-on assistance with leading SaaS applications and development platforms, including Force.com and Microsoft Azure.
Plan
SaaS RO/TCO Analysis – Initial enthusiasm over the low capex of SaaS is waning as the total cost of ownership becomes more clear. Given the realities of longer-term subscription costs, security and availability monitoring, integration and risk factors – we can help you to assemble the full economic picture of a targeted SaaS solution.
Prototyping – The SaaS application model is conducive to rapid proofs of concept and pilot programs. We can quickly prototype a single application in 2 to 4 weeks for you to validate your assumptions or create a sandbox for further evaluation and to gain user acceptance.
SaaS Vendor Selection – Traditional product selection techniques are not sufficient when moving the responsibility for running critical business systems outside of your premises. Enable has extended our selection methodology to account for vendor reliability, cloud performance considerations, data availability and other factors unique to the Cloud.
Business Process Modeling - Implementing SaaS applications on an enterprise scale presents new opportunities to streamline and integrate processes and systems. We can help you to multiply the benefits of the SaaS model by re-examining existing process and optimizing the intersection of your business with this technology.
Design
SaaS Migration - Existing systems contain a variety of legacy processes and information that require a detailed baseline understanding and determination of necessary migration tasks, while simultaneously applying leading practices of the new platform to introduce improvements. We have helped our clients through this process by efficiently collecting existing and new requirements, analyzing current systems and integration needs, inventorying and documenting existing data models, and developing complete migration plans.
SaaS Integration - One of the trends we’re seeing recently is a growing business need for integrating internal business applications and data with cloud-based applications. SOA is the de facto standard for integration with most cloud-based applications and many businesses already expose much of their internal data through SOA. Some control over security and data integrity is surely relinquished when pushing applications and data into the cloud. However, Enable can assist with planning and design to enforce security and reliability.
Governance Models – SaaS puts powerful and flexible capabilities into the hands of non-IT people to manage application changes through user friendly configuration tools. This is an attractive proposition to functional areas of the businesses as they can rapidly adjust applications to meet business need without the cost or time required in more traditional IT models. The results could be disastrous without discipline and appropriate governance rules to guide changes and to communicate the results. Enable has experience specific to SaaS change management and governance using release oriented models.
Build
Custom Development – Enable has a strong application development history and employs rapid development approaches like Agile to engage with key users and deliver results quickly. The key to our development approach is that all are involved and see results before they go live to ensure that changes or adjustments can be made long before there s significant project impact. Our experience includes both development of large social networking sites and also delivery of organizational tools on platforms like SharePoint.
Integration – Implementing SaaS effectively requires integration with other enterprise applications and data sources. Where there are gaps, Enable can help with the development of a new service considering security models, business and workflow rules, performance considerations and other aspects. Enable’s experience in system and data integration has allowed us to effectively deliver SaaS-to-enterprise integration solutions using a variety of techniques including batch, SOA and process orchestration tools.