Improving Third Party Service Integration The Cloud, SAAS, BPO - Essay Example

Improving Third Party Service Integration "The Cloud," SAAS, BPO Software-as-a-Service is both an application delivery model and a business model. It allows business owners and other customers to access and use an application without owning it but on a pay-as-you-use basis. This renders the need for installation and running of the software on the client’s machine or infrastructure redundant. Integration of SaaS into the business by third parties is an important process that should be well understood and handled. This research paper aims at developing integration requirements for all BPO and SaaS providers to ensure that their delivery is effective, essential, and efficient. It will, in the end deliver a documentation detailing workflows and future state process that can be utilized throughout the enterprise. It aims at ensuring that standard integration procedures and requirements are proactively incorporated for all third party BPOs and SaaS. Finally, it aims at ensuring effective, secure, and efficient integration of third parties into the business Purchasing, IT, and all other functions operated and directed by IT. Introduction There are several risks that are associated with the integration of third-party BPO and SaaS services into clients businesses. Integration is now becoming a critical concept as far as SaaS is concerned. Currently, SaaS has gained more widespread acceptance and in so doing, it is becoming a key component of the entire corporate software requirement. Therefore, all these key components or parts need to be able to integrate and be aware of each other. SaaS is both an application delivery and a business model thus giving cloud service consumers the ability to access and use various applications on a pay-as-you-use basis without having to install it and run it on their own hardware. SaaS applications are accessed over the internet through a thin client or via a web browser. They are mostly based on subscriptions and all required support, upgrades, or any ongoing maintenance is provided by the vendors as services. In the event that the capabilities of the software application is to be improved, customized or changed, it is provided consistently to all the cloud service consumers utilizing that application. For software vendors, SaaS application model enables adequate protection of their intellectual property rights. They also have control of the operational environment of the software and are sure of a repeatable revenue stream through subscriptions. Cloud computing has various capabilities, promises, and opportunities; however, there are some management complexities and various risk elements that those adopting this cutting-edge technology are faced with. In order to understand and properly achieve improved third-party integration, it is imperative that issues such as Integrating network, storage, and computer services from one or more third-party vendors, beadequately addressed. Managing business continuity and security risks associated with adoption of cloud services from various third-party application vendors. Managing the lifecycle of a particular service in an environment of a distributed multiple provider so as to be able to meet SLAs (Service Level Agreements) with consumers Effectively maintaining audit processes and governance across integrated clouds and datacenters. Switching or adopting new third-party cloud services This research paper looks at how to improve third-party integration as pertains to the SaaS architecture. First, we will establish the need for integrations; what risks are associated with integration. The paper will then analyze some emerging issues as far integration standards and requirements are concerned. This will be ideal in helping us draw out an integration requirements document for both BPO and SaaS. We will then address issues that will emerge in implementing SaaS solutions. This paper will finally address the implication of third-party integration on the overall SaaS architecture. It will also be of great significance to analyze the relationship between cloud consumer and cloud provider and addressing the requirements and standards for the interface between the consumer and the provider. Discussion Organizations and businesses should consider integration simply because through integration, resources such as money, labor, and time are saved; at the same time, data security, accuracy, and integrity are ensured. More often than not, data in any one software system is normally needed and utilized in another or other systems. Manually re-entering of data into another one system is not only expensive and redundant, but it may also compromise data accuracy and integrity. In addition, periodical data dumping into one system from another is very inefficient. Therefore, an ideal thing to do to ensure accurate data that can be trusted is implementing an integration layer that will ensure automatic synchronization of data at any given time. Given that SaaS solutions are considered as very important aspects of a corporates software pact, it is worth considering integration in terms of components as part of a large workflow. An application considered as a component gets its inputs from other different systems, processes them, and finally passes on the output to other one or more systems. When this application interoperability is automated as much as possible, benefits of integration are reaped such as work efficiency, data accuracy, and integrity, etc. In order to comprehend well this concept of integration and be able to offer viable suggestions of how to improve, it will be ideal to consider several examples of systems that can be or need to be integrated. In any corporate or business environment, personnel or employees form a very core part. In one way or the other, they are constantly tracked and monitored through different systems. In most circumstances, companies need multiple systems to get a solid and complete view of employee’s performance and behavior. To achieve this, integration comes into play, and any SaaS solution that in one way or the other utilizes employee data becomes useful for an integration layer for synchronization of this data.In this case, this data includes entities such as address, name, User ID, department, password, location, and authorization information. To manually enter this data and keep it up-to-date is an uphill task, more so in situations where the company or business has very many employees. Integration will thus reap results such as costs and timesavings as well as minimize various risks such as data integrity. Currently, most business have opted to automating their sales process all the way from marketing to closing deals as well as ensuring customer satisfaction through additional services to already existing customers. To achieve this, CRM (Customer Relation Management) systems, which are SaaS solutions have been adopted such as the Saleforec.com. However, integration still arises to ensure that data from one CRM application to another, either SaaS, or on-premise are efficiently handled. In this scenario, data such as financial sales are integrated with a financial package or order data are integrated with an ERP (Enterprise Resource Planner) for consideration. There are very many instances where a financial accounting package may need to be integrated with other SaaS solution such as CRM. For instance, the general ledger contains information regarding various departments, accounts, which all have unique numbers that enable expense and revenue tracking. Thus, there is need for integrating an accounting system with any SaaS application that involves such transactions to enable for easy tracking of all these transactions. Several technologies that involve integration exist and have been put under enterprise application development. To suggest intuitive ways of improving integration, it is imperative that these technologies be investigated, evaluated and conclusions and insights obtained as far as their strengths and weaknesses are concerned. Integration technologies have over the years continued to evolve, grow, and mature so has their standards. For instance, the use of XML (extensible markup language) as a way of data encapsulation so that it can, in an automated way is processed. This has led the use of Web services as a way or mechanism for the interaction of applications over the internet. Web services are now able to exchange XML data through HTTP by using a protocol known as SOAP. Although web services (WS) have become so common a way of integrating application through the internet, there is a huge need of developers who can develop programs that will utilize these services. Integration servers, a set of applications aimed at simplifying the integration process has emerged. Borrowing from and improving on the capabilities of the old Enterprise Application Integration space, interfaces for both target and source systems are exposed enabling visual mapping of data from one application to the other. Necessary and important data transformations have also been defined. Through invoking a call from another system or through scheduling, the servers are able to run these data flows. These applications greatly simplify the integration process; however, to properly maintain and configure them, a substantial amount of technical resource is required. As noted earlier, integration comes with various benefits, advantages, and promises and thus it is an essential goal to achieve. However, the process of achieving integration, especially implementations is marred with various issues that need to be addressed. For a third party SaaS vendor to efficiently and effectively provide a flexible and powerful integration solution(s), it is important that these issues be considered. The first issue we look at is security, which is of concern for almost all business owners who are thinking of adopting SaaS. The reason is that, during integration, more often than not, data from the customer environment is accessed and then transferred or connected to the SaaS environment. The question here is whether data is being pushed or pulled, and is this process safe in ensuring data privacy, integrity, and accuracy. When data from the customer is pulled by the SaaS application, there is unsolicited access into the customer’s environment, which may cause problems for the corporate information security officer. When data is being pushed from the customer to the SaaS application vendor, there is need for an application running in the customer environment which I also a problem. In addition, for the said application to run there must be a server to facilitate that and thus additional funds are needed to foot the bill for hardware purchase, management, monitoring and maintenance. Getting access to internal corporate data becomes a nightmare thus impeding the integration of SaaS. Normally, there are persons responsible for source systems and the data. This means that, to get permission to access such data becomes a corporate bureaucracy nightmare and even if that permission is granted, accessing the data at an appropriate time becomes an additional challenge. For instance, if there is need to synchronize data from a corporate Human Resource system, it is appropriate to invoke a call to the SaaS platform at the entry point of that data, when the data is being, deleted, or modified in the source system. However, this seems to be a costly affair since either the keepers of the system cannot program the ideal API calls or the other passengers do not provide this flexibility. There are many technical resources required to implement integration, which acts as an impediment of integration with a SaaS solution. Traditionally, the focus of IT departments has been to maintain on-premise software purchased off-the-shelf or develop their own solutions. Out of frustrations and failure of the solution offered by the corporate IT groups, corporations and business have opted for SaaS. In this regard, the IT department is usually caught unawares and joins up the implementation at a very late stage making it difficult for effective, technical resource allocation. Therefore, it is essential for the purpose of this common problem that the SaaS providers should avail their own staff to aid in technical implementation by offering it a service. The integration process for both the customer and the third-party vendor becomes easier and interesting once these services are priced, staffed, and sold in a methodological way. The integration of SaaS requires some sort of technical knowhow and work. The people required should be from the vendors’ side, the customer, or a third-party integrator. For the SaaS vendor, his contribution will only be to ensure that the final two options are available. Integration can also be made difficult by the infrastructure components needed to make it work. Servers required to run firewalls or software all need to be installed and configured so that data can be appropriately accessed. This significantly affects the customer’s corporate infrastructure. A SaaS vendor or a third-party integrator should clearly understand and be aware of these impacts for him to be able to offer flexible implementation options. This will make the implementation an easy for both the vendor, third-party integrator, and the customer. When dealing with integration between systems, the concepts of impedance mismatch must be addressed. This refers to inherent difference between relational DB (Database Technology) and OOS (Object oriented Software technologies. Although these two technologies are commonly being used in application development, a challenge of mapping data from one system to the other exists. This is to say that, there are two different mismatches found: different data manipulation and storage approaches, and different data types. Therefore, third-party SaaS vendors and integrators should consider these of mismatch when developing various approaches that SaaS customers will utilize when integrating the SaaS application with other applications. They can achieve this by ensuring that each approach unambiguously enables customers to achieve integration through mapping data stored in the SaaS application and their data. Problems of Impendence mismatch will thus be avoided. Since SaaS solutions have become essential components of the entire corporate process, it is important for SaaS integrators and solution providers to offer integration options that customers will find easy to implement and use. Application vendors may fail to offer solutions that are flexible but rather offer solutions that only address the functionalities that their application provides. In order to allow for improved integration experience, they should consider their applications as simple “black boxes” that are only a part of an overall larger process. In so doing, customers will be able to feed data into the application that is a product of prior steps in the whole process. This data can then be passed on to other systems are able to handle later steps in the process. This is where the concept of workflows becomes applicable. Through workflows, we are able to identify who participates where and in what parts of the business. We are also able to ascertain what happens in each part, and the time at which it is supposed to be done. Several technical standard issues arise pertaining to workflows, including (Workflow reference model), Wf-XML, and Business Process Execution Language (BPEL) for Web Services. Therefore, the SaaS vendor will be forced to determine which standard approaches will serve his customers best. Conclusion As the SaaS model grows and easily becomes accepted, integration of SaaS applications is becoming a critical issue. This integration can involve other SaaS solutions or source systems that are operated within a business environment. This research has just covered some common systems that can be integrated but there are many other systems. There are also various impeding issues that may hinder the implementation of integration although the essay focused only on a few that are critical and if improved would enhance integration experience. Works Cited Ambler, Scott. The Object-Relational Impedance Mismatch.Web. 7 Feb. 2010. Babbock, Charles. Management Strategies for the Cloud revolution: How Cloud Computing is Transforming Business and Why You Can't Afford to Be Left Behind. New York: McGraw Hill Professional, 2010. Print. Progress Software Corporation. White Paper: SaaS Integration.Oak Park: Progress Software Corporation, 2008. Print. Virdell, Margie, Business processes and workflow in the Web services world.Web. 7 Feb. 2012. Read More