SaaS Integration: Blackboard

Blackboard: On-Demand Educational Software

While a majority of Software as a Service (SaaS) vendors offer business software to private enterprises, Blackboard Inc. is leading the way in the educational software market. Used by over 3,700 educational institutions (including major universities, career colleges, and K-12 schools) in 60 different countries, Blackboard’s products have changed the way educators and students engage the learning process through innovative technologies.

Blackboard offers a range of products that are delivered on-demand according to the SaaS model. The Learn platform is a learning management system (LMS) that supports course management, a community and portal system for student access, and content management. Instructors can use the learn platform to manage course enrollment and grades, create discussion forums, respond to student questions, and share resources and course material.

Blackboard customers can also facilitate and enhance communication between administrators, instructors and students by leveraging the Connect platform to send campus-wide announcements and the Collaborate module to support virtual classrooms, web conferencing and instant messaging. To streamline financial transactions, ranging from student aid disbursements to e-commerce activities, Blackboard offers the Transact platform. Finally, Blackboard provides customers with enhanced accessibility through its Mobile platform and the ability to glean insights from data through the Analytics platform.

Widely used among educational institutions, Blackboard’s products have also been deployed by corporations, non-profit organizations, government offices and the military, exemplifying the broad applicability of educational software.

SaaS Integration Challenges

Although SaaS applications like Blackboard’s various products offer advantages such as greater flexibility and lower costs over traditional software, they also present new integration challenges. With the procurement and deployment of each new SaaS application, data and logic become segregated into disparate cloud silos. 

In order to minimize the effect of cloud silos and derive maximum business value from individual SaaS offerings, organizations need to integrate across the cloud and enterprise. For instance, educational institutions currently deploying Blackboard products can leverage the following integration strategies:

• Connecting Blackboard Learn with other content management systems, multimedia sites, and university registrars;
• Connecting Blackboard Collaborate with support and help desk software; and
• Using Blackboard Connect with automated e-mail software.

Custom Integrations

A common approach to integration among many SaaS users is to build custom connectors. With this approach, companies have their in-house developers or external integration consultants write customized integration code to connect applications.

Although this approach enables companies to connect SaaS applications quickly and easily for specific use cases, such as Ultimate Software integration and RightNow integration, it also has several disadvantages: 

• Time and Cost: A custom integration approach tends to work best for small companies with only a few components to connect. As new systems are added however, custom integration projects become much more difficult since a connector is needed for each pair of components in the system. This requires significant time investments and can lead to skyrocketing costs when working with integration consultants.
• Flexibility: An effective integration strategy is one that can scale up seamlessly as businesses expand. Because a custom integration approach creates tight dependencies between systems, making changes to the integration architecture is a complex and time-consuming process. For high growth companies with constantly changing business needs, a custom integration strategy results in a rigid architecture that limits agility.
• Maintenance and Upgrades: In order for custom integrations to run at an optimal level, ongoing maintenance and upgrades are required. The burdens of performance monitoring, bug fixing, and testing quickly become apparent when deploying a custom integration strategy, especially since visibility into applications can be limited.

iON: Integration for the Cloud Era

Mule iON has emerged as a packaged integration solution for quickly and easily breaking down cloud silos. As an Integration Platform as a Service (iPaaS), Mule iON is changing the way companies connect SaaS applications, social media services and on-premise legacy systems.

Delivering integration on demand, Mule iON features the following:

• Cloud Connectors: With cloud connectors, Mule iON users can integrate popular SaaS applications without developing custom code. Mule iON’s library of cloud connectors includes out-of-the-box solutions for Salesforce.com, Magento, Sugar CRM and more. Simple to configure and deploy, cloud connectors enable non-technical users to implement integration solutions without extensive integration expertise. 
• Development Toolkit: In situations where custom integrations are required, Mule iON includes an easy-to-use development toolkit for building your own connectors. Using Mule Studio, developers can build integration applications (iApps) and share them with other users. Taking a configuration approach to integration, developers can build and deploy custom connectors without writing extensive code.
• Secure Data Gateway: An effective SaaS integration strategy not only connects different cloud services, but also SaaS and legacy applications. Mule iON features the Secure Data Gateway, a secure channel for accessing data residing behind the firewall without compromising security.
• Management Portal: A crucial aspect of managing and maintaining integrations is visibility. Mule iON includes a browser-based management portal that provides deep visibility into integration flows, enabling users to monitor runtime performance, identify bugs and errors and quickly develop a course of action. And since the management portal is entirely browser based, there is no need to download, configure, or install additional software.
• Core Cloud Features: Because Mule iON is a cloud-based integration service, users can expect to find the following cloud essentials: an elastic and flexible architecture, multi-tenancy for security and data isolation, self-service provisioning, and a flexible pricing model.