SaaS Integration: Cornerstone OnDemand

Cornerstone OnDemand is a business software provider that delivers its products entirely on demand as Software as a Service (SaaS). With over 6 million subscribers in various industries, including business and financial services, healthcare, K-12 education, higher education, non-profit, local and state government, technology and media, and retail and travel, Cornerstone OnDemand is fast becoming a major player in the SaaS market.

Cornerstone’s product suite consists of 5 integrated platforms: Cornerstone Learning, Cornerstone Connect, Cornerstone Performance, Cornerstone Succession, and Cornerstone Extended Enterprise.

With Cornerstone Learning, companies can leverage a full Learning Management System (LMS) to deliver targeted training to meet specific needs. The learning platform supports e-Learning delivery, instructor-led training, virtual classrooms, and content management to help companies bring employees up to speed with the latest skills and knowledge. Customers can augment the learning platform with Cornerstone Connect, which facilitates employee collaboration, social learning and professional networking through rich user profiles, discussion forums, and content sharing tools such as blogs and wikis.

Cornerstone also supports employee performance management with Cornerstone Performance. Featuring goal setting tools, performance reviews, competency assessments and automated development planning, Cornerstone Performance allows customers to align business processes with departmental and organizational goals. Cornerstone Succession further supports organizational goals through succession management. With tools for talent pooling and internal recruiting, organizational charting, and career management, Cornerstone Succession enables both senior managers and employees to take active roles in succession planning. Rounding out the Cornerstone product suite is Cornerstone Extended Learning, a platform that enables companies to deliver training, knowledge, and resources to partner enterprises, suppliers, resellers and customers. Companies can create custom portals for specific audiences, train customers, certify partners and connect their entire network.

SaaS Integration Challenges

While Cornerstone’s SaaS products offer several advantages over traditional enterprise applications, including greater elasticity and scalability, flexible pricing, and on-demand provisioning, the growing use of SaaS and other cloud services leads to new integration challenges.

As companies deploy new SaaS applications, data becomes fragmented into disparate cloud silos. Rather than making business processes more effective, SaaS applications can create inefficiencies in the absence of an effective integration strategy. To minimize the impact of cloud silos and increase the business value of Cornerstone products and other SaaS applications, enterprises need to integrate across the cloud and enterprise.

Cornerstone customers, for instance, might consider the following integration use cases:

• Integration with other SaaS applications such as Kenexa integration and LogMeIn integration;
• Integration with social networking services such as Twitter and Facebook; and
• Integration with on-premise legacy systems and databases

Integration: The Custom Code Strategy

h emerged during the early days of SaaS when few packaged integration solutions were available, is to build custom integrations to connect different SaaS applications. With this approach, companies have in-house developers or hire integration consultants to write custom integration code.

The advantage of a custom integration approach is that companies can tailor ntegrations to suit particular business needs. However, this approach also has several disadvantages:

• Time and Cost: In situations where only 2 or 3 systems need to be integrated, a custom approach provides a quick and relatively simple solution. Unfortunately, the complexity of custom integration projects increases exponentially as additional systems are added. This requires substantial time investments from in-house developers, who are left with little time to devote to other IT projects. Costs can also increase rapidly when working with consultants.
• Flexibility: While custom integrations allow companies to tailor connectors to specific business needs, they result in less flexibility as a long-term strategy. Because a custom integration approach creates dependencies between systems, changes and upgrades to individual systems require modifications to other applications as well. The difficulty of modifying large scale custom integrations means that companies are less agile when it comes to meeting changing business needs.
• Maintenance and Upgrades: Once the connectors are coded, companies still have to manage and maintain custom integrations to ensure that they operate properly. This entails performance monitoring, troubleshooting bugs and errors, multiple rounds of testing, and redeployment, all of which require further time and resources.

iON: Integration for the Cloud Era

To make cloud integration easier, Mule iON has emerged as a packaged solution for eliminating cloud silos. An Integration Platform as a Service (iPaaS), Mule iON delivers integration on demand and eliminates the need for custom coding.

iON comes with a robust set of capabilities, including:

• Cloud Connectors:iON comes with a library of out-of-the-box connectors that enable users to quickly connect the most popular SaaS applications, including Salesforce.com, NetSuite, Magento and Sugar CRM. Cloud connectors are easy to use and simple to configure, which means that even non-technical use Mule iON to implement integrations in no time.
• Development Toolkit: In situations where existing cloud connectors can’t resolve an integration problem, users can also take advantage of the Mule iON platform to build custom integrations. With Studio, an Eclipse-based flow designer, developers can build custom integration applications (iApps) using drag-and-drop configuration tools and share them with other users. Reducing the need for custom coding, Mule iON speeds up the integration development cycle and results in faster go-live times.
• Secure Data Gateway: In addition to integrating various SaaS and cloud services, Mule iON also enables SaaS to enterprise integration. With the Secure Data Gateway, Mule iON users can connect SaaS applications with on-premise legacy systems to access data residing behind the firewall in a secure fashion.
• Management Portal: Mule iON includes a browser-based management portal that provides deep visibility into integration flows, enabling users to monitor performance, quickly identify bugs and errors, and develop a course of action. Since the management portal is browser-based, there is no need to download or install additional software.
• Cloud Essentials: As a cloud-based platform, Mule iON includes all the essential cloud features, including elasticity, scalable architecture, self-service provisioning, and flexible pricing.