Signs You Have Integration Appliance Reliance

I spent the day yesterday at the Cloudforce event in Boston and had some great discussions with Salesforce customers and prospects about integration as a service. What was quickly apparent from some of my discussions is that many people still aren’t aware of the fact that you can subscribe to a true software-as-a-service (SaaS) integration solution that can be managed by non-technical users without installing an on-premise appliance behind the firewall. Here are a few signs that you might have integration appliance reliance:

• You bought into the Salesforce vision of “No Software” and you ended up with “All Hardware” for data and application integration.
• Non-technical, line of business managers are your SaaS application administrators, but you rely 100% on the IT organization to manage integration with other systems.
• New data integration releases aren’t upgraded automatically and seamlessly because your solution is not delivered as a true multitenant service.
• You’re considering putting integration projects on hold because you didn’t set aside enough budget and IT resources to manage and maintain on-premise integration hardware and software when you implemented Salesforce.

Clearly there are a lot of Salesforce customers that need to start thinking outside the box when it comes to application and data integration in the cloud…