I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that you can productize specific business processes into a packaged integration solution.
This is something that regularly perplexes die-hard integration architects and at the opposite end of the spectrum regularly astounds SMEs when they find out there aren’t pre-built integrations between every application.
Who needs it?
SMEs now have access to tools and products at a fraction of the price they were years ago. They can have best of breed solutions to run their business, BUT, who can afford to pay for a custom integration solution to integrate their data? The applications are bleeding edge, but it doesn’t save you time and money if they aren’t in sync.
How to do it?
Our approach to this is ReadyMade, pre-built integration solutions that solve standard integration requirements between common applications.
Some history
We thought that there has to be some common business processes between applications. So we spent some time looking at applications we know well, like salesforce.com. We then looked at what accounting packages people use to connect to Salesforce and discovered that MYOB and Saasu were very popular in the Salesforce community in this part of the world.
So, we then took a look at how customers use MYOB on-premise and how they use Saasu in the cloud and used these observations to determine if there were common functions and processes that could be automated to save time and money.
And of course there are common processes that if integrated would provide the biggest bang for buck.
Don’t get me wrong, it isn’t easy to first work out the common integration processes, identify the right tool, develop the solution, price it right, market it, sell it and then back it up with support.
Well why do it?
Because we like to solve problems in the simplest way possible and we see the potential of SaaS but we also understand the role of existing applications to a company. Let’s not fix something that isn’t broken.
The end result
Our ReadyMade solutions allow an SME to run the best of breed applications without the need to re-key data or deal with data inconsistencies and errors.
They don’t solve every integration process, they’re not meant to, that’s what custom integration solutions are for, they simply provide a productized integration for standard business processes between 2 defined applications and they do it at a low-cost.
