SaaS Integration: Taleo

Taleo: On-Demand Talent Management Software

Taleo is a provider of talent management software that gives enterprises the necessary “talent intelligence” for making smart HR decisions. With over 5,000 customers ranging from small businesses to global enterprises, Taleo has become a leader in the talent management software space.

Taleo offers a comprehensive set of solutions to support core HR functions, including recruitment and sourcing, new employee onboarding, performance management and assessment, employee training and development, and compensation management. Taleo also provides goal management solutions that enable company stakeholders to track the execution of organizational objectives as well as analytic tools to measure and optimize efficiency and effectiveness across different talent management functions.

These talent management functions are delivered entirely on demand through the Software as a Service (SaaS) model. Companies can choose from three different editions of Taleo’s product offerings depending on the size of their organization: Business Edition, for companies with up to 5,000 employees; Enterprise Edition, for companies with 5,000 to 13,000 employees; and Large Enterprise Edition, for companies with more than 13,000 employees. Although each edition varies slightly to suit the different needs of small and large organizations, all Taleo customers benefit from the elasticity, flexibility and cost benefits of deploying SaaS.

SaaS Integration Challenges

Although SaaS providers like Taleo offer a number of advantages over traditional enterprise application providers, SaaS users are encountering a new set of integration challenges. As companies deploy more and more SaaS applications, enterprise data becomes fragmented into different cloud silos. In order to eliminate these silos and connect data and processes across the cloud and enterprise, SaaS users need to implement an integration strategy.

Companies can increase the business value of Taleo products by considering the following integration use cases:

• Integration with other SaaS applications, such as NetSuite integration and Concur integration
• Integration with on-premise legacy systems and databases such as SAP and Oracle
• Integration with social networking sites like LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter

Custom Integrations

Although it is clear that integration has become a mission-critical priority among SaaS users, what is less clear is how to implement it. A holdover of the early days of SaaS when integration was treated as an afterthought, some companies rely on in-house developers or hire systems integration consultants to build custom connectors.

With this approach, companies can quickly connect two SaaS applications and customize integrations to suit particular business needs. Such an approach, however, also has the following disadvantages:

• Time and Cost: Custom integrations are quick and efficient for smaller businesses with only 2 or 3 systems to connect, but the complexity of integration projects increases exponentially as new systems are added. The difficulty of building such integrations requires significant time investments from developers. Moreover, if your company lacks in-house integration expertise, hiring consultants can lead to skyrocketing budgets.
• Flexibility: A custom integration approach typically creates a tight dependency between applications, resulting in a rigid architecture that can be difficult to change. Within a pair of integrated systems, changes and upgrades in one application often require modifications to the other. In order to maintain agility in the face of fast-changing business needs, companies require flexible integration solutions.
• Maintenance and Upgrades: In addition to developing the integration code, companies that use a custom approach are also responsible for ongoing maintenance and upgrades. Performance monitoring, bug fixing, and testing further require time and resources while large scale custom integrations are especially difficult to manage.

iON: Integration for the Cloud Era

Mule iON is a packaged integration solution designed to eliminate both cloud silos and the burdens associated with building and maintaining custom integration code. Mule iON is leading a new category of cloud services called Integration Platform as a Service (iPaaS) that delivers integration on demand.

iON simplifies cloud integration and features a robust set of capabilities, including:

• Cloud Connectors: Users can quickly integrate popular SaaS applications such as Salesforce.com, Sugar CRM, Magento, and more with Mule iON’s rich library of cloud connectors. Cloud connectors are simple to configure and deploy, enabling non-technical users to quickly implement integrations to meet changing business needs.
• Development Toolkit: Developers can also leverage Mule iON platform to build custom integrations for specific use cases--without writing a single line of code. Using Mule Studio, an Eclipse-based flow designer, developers can create integration applications (iApps) through drag-and-drop configuration, speeding up the development cycle and resulting in faster go-live times.
• Secure Data Gateway: Besides SaaS-to-SaaS integration, Mule iON also supports integration between the cloud and enterprise. Using the Secure Data Gateway, Mule iON users can access data residing in legacy applications and systems behind the firewall without compromising security.
• Essential Cloud Features: Mule iON is a fully cloud-based platform with all the core features that users of SaaS and other cloud services have come to expect. These include an elastic and flexible architecture for enhanced scalability, multi-tenancy for security and data isolation, flexible pricing, and self-service provisioning.
• Management Portal: To support the management and maintenance of integrations, Mule iON includes a management portal that gives users visibility into runtime performance and integration flows. With the management portal, users can identify bugs and errors and develop a course of action for addressing problems that may arise. Best of all, the management portal is browser-based, so there is no need to download, configure, or install additional software.