I repeatedly heard this in various forms last week citing integration as both a sales obstacle and market limiter to software as a service adoption.  There are no shortages of tools to do integration with out there and a handful were on display at this event, but it still begs the question for all those SaaS application companies or even technology enabled services out there – do you really want to do the integration heavy lifting yourself?

Simon Peel, SVP of Strategy at Cast Iron, had a really great point during the integration panel discussion which I will paraphrase as "the applications have the value and we (integration solutions) are the enabler of that value."

Every SaaS customer has or will have an integration problem as the software application functionality is increasingly consumed by that customer.  Expectations are high for time to production and value given all the benefits that SaaS is suppose to provide.  You want to have deep (and renewing) relationships as an on-demand software company and getting the integration question right is essential.