SaaS Integration: LivePerson

LivePerson is a SaaS provider that enables online real-time interactions between company representatives and their customers through an intelligent engagement platform. Supporting real-time chat, voice, and click-to-call along with deep web analytics, LivePerson’s technologies allow companies to enhance customer experiences and drive business growth. Companies and organizations from a wide range of industries-including online retail, financial services, high technology, government, higher education, and non-profit--currently use LivePerson’s hosted solutions.

Among the company’s product offerings is LP Chat, which supports real-time chat, co-browsing, and real-time monitoring of visitor activity. LP Chat users can also implement business rules to send chat invitations based on visitor information and behaviors. LP Voice supports live conversations between customers and company representatives through click-to-call technology and a rules-based routing system that directs calls to the appropriate department.

In addition to communication technologies, LivePerson also offers marketing and analytics tools to help enterprise users retain visitors, improve conversions, and increase transaction values. LP Marketer supports audience segmentation and enables users to deliver personalized messaging to individual visitors. Users can also leverage LP Insights to access actionable intelligence derived from both structured and unstructured data, including survey results, performance metrics, customer input and behaviors, and buying patterns.

The Challenges of SaaS Integration

One of the major challenges of deploying SaaS products such as those offered by LivePerson is integration. Without the proper integration of systems, both on-premise and in the cloud, businesses become less efficient and agile at meeting customer demands. Moreover, data becomes scattered across various cloud silos, resulting in redundancies and inaccuracies.

Indeed, for many enterprises, integration has become a mission-critical priority. In some cases, integration challenges even deter companies from deploying SaaS applications in the first place. Given the popularity of SaaS and increasing shift towards cloud-based services, however, integration cannot be overlooked.

To better align IT systems with business goals and increase the business value of SaaS applications, enterprise users should consider the following integration scenarios:

• Integration between SaaS applications, such as Athenahealth integration or Convio integration
• Integration between SaaS and on-premise legacy applications and databases
• Integration between SaaS and social media services
• Integration between SaaS and desktop applications

SaaS Integration Solutions: Building vs. Buying

A common approach to SaaS integration that many companies take is to build their own integration solutions. Whether the work is done by in-house developers or systems integration consultants, building a custom integration solution generally involves writing code, testing connectors, and deploying them.

One of the reasons why some companies prefer to build their own integrations rather than buy packaged solutions is that it allows them to customize and tailor connectors to suit specific business needs. In most cases, custom-built integrations are also quick to implement and cost less than packaged integration solutions, especially for companies already staffed with developers who possess integration expertise.

As a long-term solution, however, building custom integrations becomes a major burden. First, companies that build their own solutions have to maintain a codebase that may not be central to their business, requiring additional time and resources for integration projects. Moreover, as new systems are added, custom-built solutions become very complex, creating a tangled integration architecture that is difficult to modify. The lack of visibility and reporting capabilities further makes it more difficult to maintain custom integrations.

And while custom-built integrations may cost little initially, they can end up costing much more than intended. Custom integrations don’t always work as planned, leading some companies to rip and replace their home-grown solutions for a new one altogether.

Why Buy? Mule iON Advantage

To integrate SaaS applications without the burdens and costs of building custom solutions, companies should consider buying packaged integration solutions. This of course doesn’t mean just any packaged solution, but one that enables users to integrate SaaS as well as on-premise legacy systems in the simplest way possible.

Mule iON is an Integration Platform as a Service (iPaaS) that supports SaaS-to-SaaS and SaaS-to-enterprise integration. Both a platform and a service, Mule iON includes a robust set of features to help you integrate quickly and seamlessly.

As an alternative to custom-built approaches, Mule iON offers the following advantages:

• No coding required: Users can leverage out-of-the-box cloud connectors or drag-and-drop configuration tools to build custom integration applications (iApps). In both cases, no coding is required, resulting in faster deployment times. Easy enough for non-technical employees to use but open enough for developers to build customized integrations, Mule iON can be leveraged to solve a variety of integration problems with minimal coding.
• Hassle-free maintenance: As a fully cloud-based service, Mule iON reduces the burdens of building and maintaining custom integrations. Users can focus on building and deploying their integrations instead of infrastructure, provisioning, scaling, and other common DevOps concerns.
• Scalability: Mule iON scales seamlessly across multiple integration points, allowing you to start small but grow as business needs change. You can quickly on-board new systems without the challenges and difficulties associated with custom-built integrations.
• Visibility and Intelligence: Mule iON includes a management portal that provides deep visibility into integration flows and actionable intelligence for troubleshooting bugs and errors and maintaining optimal performance. Entirely browser-based, you can access the management portal without downloading or configuring additional software.
• Secure Integration: Mule iON supports SaaS-to-enterprise integration through a Secure Data Gateway, enabling users to access data located behind the firewall securely.