SaaS Integration: Responsys
Originally a manufacturer of email marketing software, Responsys has become a leading provider of SaaS solutions for creating and executing integrated marketing campaigns across multiple channels. Responsys is an avid proponent “New School Marketing,” which emphasizes digital interaction with prospects and customers through email, mobile, social, and web channels over one-way communication via traditional media such as television, radio, and print.
Businesses in various industries, including retail, travel and hospitality, financial services, and high technology, currently use Responsys’ software products to drive marketing initiatives. The company’s Interact suite provides a range of on-demand marketing applications. Interact Program allows users to design and automate various marketing programs with drag and drop tools, a template library, and business rule configuration. Interact Program also provides centralized views for real-time monitoring and cross channel execution.
Users can also leverage Interact Campaign to create, target, and test marketing campaigns. Interact Campaign includes tools that support centralized management, targeting and segmentation, dynamic content assembly, and visual reporting. The Interact product suite further includes Interact Team, which enables group collaboration and approval-to-launch automation, and Interact Insight, which provides real time reporting and analytics.
The Integration Challenges of SaaS
There are many advantages to deploying Responsys and other SaaS applications over traditional licensed software. Users benefit from lower upfront costs, greater scalability, and fewer maintenance burdens.
Nonetheless, the growing use of SaaS applications generates new challenges in the form of integration problems. When enterprises deploy multiple SaaS applications, they inadvertently create cloud silos, scattering their data across the web. This can create data discrepancies and ultimately lead to decreased business inefficiency.
Existing customers as well as prospects of Responsys would benefit from planning ahead and considering different SaaS integration strategies. Typical integration scenarios might include the following:
- Integration with other SaaS applications and cloud services, such as LivePerson intergration or RealPage integration
- Integration with existing on-premise systems
- Integration with social media platforms
- Integration with desktop applications
Custom Built Integration Solutions
Although many enterprises agree that SaaS integration is a mission critical challenge, there has been less consensus about the best course of action for solving integration problems. Due to the lack of effective packaged solutions, many companies opt for building their own solutions via custom coding.
By taking a custom approach to SaaS integration, companies can align IT systems with specific business goals without paying high upfront costs for a packaged solution. Building custom connectors, moreover, is relatively quick and simple and especially makes sense for small- to medium-sized businesses with simple architectures.
Custom SaaS integration solutions, however, become increasingly difficult to build and maintain as new systems are added and your architecture grows in size. Typically, custom integrations create dependencies between systems, making it very hard to modify existing connections or add new ones. And as custom integration projects become more complex, more time is required to resolve them.
A custom approach also requires substantial expertise for building and managing integrations. Although some companies have in-house developers on staff, many others hire systems integration consultants. This not only adds up in terms of financial costs, but can create problems of continuity and consistency when working with several different consultants over time.
iON: Simple Integration for SaaS and Cloud
With SaaS integration becoming a major IT concern for enterprises and few effective solutions available, Mule iON is leading the way among next generation integration solutions. Fully based in the cloud, Mule iON is an Integration Platform as a Service (iPaaS) that enables users to quickly integrate SaaS.
- iON is both a platform and a service and includes many features designed to make SaaS integration easy: No Coding: With Mule iON, users can access a growing library of cloud connectors to quickly connect the most popular SaaS applications, including NetSuite, Salesforce.com, and Sugar CRM. Users can also use the Mule iON platform to build custom integration applications (iApps) through drag-and-drop configuration. The best part? No coding is required to implement cloud connectors or build iApps.
- Scalability: Built on an elastic architecture, Mule iON scales seamlessly to meet your changing business needs. This means you can start with a few systems and integrate new ones quickly and easily.
- Secure Integration: Although data is increasingly scattered across several cloud services, the bulk of most enterprise data is still stored in legacy systems and databases residing on-premise. Mule iON’s Secure Data Gateway lets users access this data without undermining firewall security.
- Low Maintenance: Scaling, provisioning, and infrastructure and other typical maintenance concerns are handled by Mule iON. This means users can focus on building new applications instead of getting bogged down by maintenance issues.
- Visibility and Reporting: One of the major limitations of custom built solutions is that they do not provide visibility into integration flows, making it hard to identify bugs and errors and devise proper solutions. Mule iON features a browser-based management portal that gives users deep visibility into runtime performance and actionable intelligence for addressing issues.
