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.

Continuing a theme of "Top 10" posts, here’s a good slide show from Bessemer Venture Partners on "being SaaSy" (via Adventurista).  They recently held a session on SaaS with a pretty impressive list of folks.  Some good nuggets here…

http://static.slideshare.net/swf/ssplayer2.swf?doc=bessemer-s-top-10-rules-for-being-saa-sy-1202744982519196-4

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Hubspan’s 8 B2B resolutions for 2008 continue to get some attention.  We had an article on them just published in Enterprise Systems Journal and Loraine Lawson over at IT Business Edge did a great post on it entitled "SaaS Solutions Can Offer Efficient EDI Alternative."

Shameless plug here for Hubspan, but Mark Hall over at Computerworld did a nice write up on us after we had the chance to speak.  I thought the article title of "self-service middleware" was really good and fits our on-demand software message nicely.   We’ve had a multi-tenant, on-demand approach from the beginning and our self-service efforts are focusing on allowing our customers to do things beyond data mapping to things like change management, e-commerce enablement, and business activity monitoring themselves.  Simple integration is sort of an oxymoron although there are certainly basic data mapping needs (and tools) out there.  Our technology  really shines when there are more advanced needs to synchronize, correlate, and choreograph information flows at the business process level.

Also, our eight B2B New Year’s resolutions have gotten a bit of coverage recently.

In my travels the past weeks, I spent about 36 hours in Las Vegas at the Gartner Integration Summit.  I sat through a great SaaS presentation by Gartner analyst Ben Pring and wanted to share a few of my notes:

• SaaS-based
  revenue growth = 22.1% CAGR thru 2011
• The first
  wave of SaaS adoption was end-users, not IT
• Next wave
  will need an end-user AND IT message
• The era of
  the ship it on a CD, load it on a server enterprise software is over
• ~65% of
  Siebel licenses never in production before Oracle acquisition
• ~55% of
  Peoplesoft/Vantive licenses never in production before Oracle acquisition
• 18% average
  server utilization rate in the enterprise (Yikes!)
• $1:$10
  software to services ratio was good for the supply side(vendors) but not the
  demand side (customers)
• Large
  enterprise software companies (Oracle, SAP) high gross margins are under threat
  from upstart, pure plays (Salesforce.com)
• Gartner believes SaaS is primarily a software
  delivery and management approach that exists in an established market, such as
  CRM or ERP

The last point is perhaps the most interesting when looking at software as a service in the enterprise.  Salesforce didn’t have better features than Siebel, the just made it easier for end-users to access and use it.

I also sat through a great presentation on enterprise mashups by Anthony Bradley.  Here’s some audio of his preso.