We are seeing more and more companies with SaaS integration needs out there.  What the heck is that you may ask?  Well, consider the scenario where you use an on-demand application like Salesforce.com or Netsuite AND you happen to have a premise-based application that you use for other functions like SAP or Oracle.  You need to connect what is in the cloud with what is behind your firewall or you need to connect to your trading partner’s SaaS or premise-based application.

Meet the next generation of application integration challenges.  Proving again that there really are no new problems in enterprise IT, just shades of the same ones over and over, we now have an "extra-enterprise" application integration challenge that further blurs the line between EAI and B2B.  This is an emerging need as companies seek more and more capabilities from their SaaS applications and have to actually integrate them into existing infrastructure. 

An interesting development in this area…and the reason for my post title has to do with Salesforce.com’s new "Salesforce-to-Salesforce on-demand services" detailed in this article.  An interesting embrace of social networking concepts to allow different users of Salesforce to connect and share information.  Pretty cool. 

This is certainly one way to avoid the complexity of integration by standardizing the same application on both ends.  While technically this is a two-way connection, a complete approach to SaaS integration will have to accommodate the disparate systems that exist out there.