SaaS Integration: Convio

One of the first companies to offer Software as a Service (SaaS), Convio has become a leading provider of relationship management and marketing solutions for non-profit organizations. Convio’s on-demand products enable users to better reach donors and support fundraising and advocacy initiatives through a Constituent Relationship Management (CRM) platform and other technologies.

Convio’s customers include charities, educational institutions, and political advocacy groups who rely on the company’s products to manage donors and gifts and make fundraising processes more efficient.

Designed to meet the needs of small to mid-sized non-profits, Convio Common Ground supports comprehensive CRM, providing users with 360-degree views of constituents, donors, and gifts. Marketing, communications, and fundraising tools are integrated to automate processes while events and volunteer management solutions round out Convio Common Ground’s functions. Users can also customize online forms, fields and reports to suit particular needs and make decisions based on Convio Common Ground’s metrics tools and single system of record.

For larger organizations and other enterprise non-profits, Convio offers Convio Luminate, which combines a CRM platform with a wide range of online tools. Convio’s CRM platform supports prospecting activities, fundraising registration, and gift processing with 360-degree views of constituent records. Users can also leverage Convio’s online marketing and fundraising tools, content management system, advocacy system, and group fundraising software to create a comprehensive CRM solution.

The Integration Challenges of SaaS

Many companies choose to deploy SaaS products over traditional licensed software to take advantage of the many benefits that cloud computing offers, including minimal maintenance requirements, low start-up costs, flexible pricing, and worldwide on-demand accessibility.

At the same time, the growing use of SaaS applications creates new IT challenges as enterprises put more of their data into the cloud. This results in the proliferation of cloud silos and the scattering of data across different SaaS applications. Enterprises need to synchronize and combine siloed data in order to maintain optimal business performance. Moreover, recent trends in app development using web services and reusable components demand seamless integration across the cloud and enterprise.

Among a wide range of integration use cases, existing and prospective Convio users might consider the following:

• Integration with other SaaS applications, such as Vocus integration or Athenahealth integration
• Integration with on-premise, legacy systems
• Integration with social media platforms
• Integration with desktop applications

Custom Integration Solutions

Although cloud integration has become a mission-critical priority for many organizations, there have been relatively few packaged integration solutions that fully meet user needs. Several black-box solutions have emerged, providing users with quick solutions to simple integration problems. Unfortunately, they lack full capabilities for tackling more complex integration scenarios and provide little to no visibility of runtime performance.

Many companies have instead opted for a custom approach to integration, hiring systems integration consultants or relying on in-house developers to write integration code from scratch. The advantage of such an approach is that companies can tailor integrations to specific needs, but custom solutions also pose several disadvantages:

• Time and Cost: Custom integration projects are quick and easy to implement when you have a simple architecture with only 2 or 3 systems to connect, but become much more complex and time-consuming as you add more systems. Moreover, writing custom code for large-scale integration projects prevents in-house developers from working on other projects and drives up consulting fees when working with system integrators.
• Maintenance Burdens: In addition to building the connectors, a custom integration approach requires regular upgrades and maintenance. To ensure that connectors function properly, companies need to monitor integration flows, troubleshoot bugs and errors, and test and deploy modifications. This requires additional time and resources and can become a huge burden over time.
• Flexibility: Although custom integrations allow you to tailor solutions to meet particular needs, they become increasingly difficult to modify as your architecture increases in complexity and size. Custom connectors typically create tight dependencies between systems, which means that changes to one application require changes to all other systems connected to it in a domino-like effect. This lack of flexibility hampers the ability of companies to respond changing business needs in an agile manner.

iON: Integration for the Cloud Era

Mule iON is a cloud-based Integration Platform as a Service (iPaaS) designed to make cloud integration problems easier to solve. Mule iON enables users to quickly integrate applications across the cloud and enterprise without the need for extensive custom coding.

iON comes with a comprehensive set of features, including:

• Cloud Connectors: Cloud Connectors are out-of-the-box solutions that Mule iON users can deploy to quickly integrate the most popular SaaS applications, such as Salesforce.com, NetSuite, Marketo, and many others. Cloud connectors are simple to use, enabling non-technical users to perform integrations without coding expertise.
• Development Toolkit: Users can also leverage Mule iON’s platform and development toolkit to create and share custom integration applications (iApps). With Mule Studio, an Eclipse-based flow designer, users can build integrations through drag-and-drop configuration--not-coding--and “go live” more quickly.
• Secure Data Gateway: Besides connecting SaaS-to-SaaS, Mule iON also supports SaaS-to-enterprise integration through the Secure Data Gateway. The Secure Data Gateway enables users to access data residing behind the firewall in legacy applications without compromising security.
• Management Portal: Providing deep visibility into integration flows and runtime performance, Mule iON comes with a browser-based management portal that gives users actionable information for managing and controlling integrations. Best of all, the management portal is entirely browser-based, eliminating the need for downloading and installing additional software.
• Cloud Essentials: As a cloud-based platform, Mule iON includes essential cloud features such as multi-tenancy for data isolation and security, flexible pricing and self-service provisioning, and an elastic and scalable architecture.