It's said that SaaS applications are nice, but the most vexing issue is achieving meaningful integration with existing in-house financial and ERP systems. Integration is the next great frontier of SaaS -- and the point where SOA can help.
Robert Schneider, writing in SOA Magazine, talks about how Software as a Service (SaaS) and SOA composite applications interact, and how to best leverage this interaction to provide business value.
He talks about how a deep-discount rent-a-car shop, "Pay-N-Pray Motors," deployed a deep-discount SaaS solution from "CheapCRM4U.com."
Things are running smoothly with the new hosted CRM arrangement, Schneider explains. Then, a wrench is thrown into the works. Pay-N-Pray's finance department decides to institute a retroactive three-percent "courtesy fee" for all rentals that occurred in the past two years.
Ouch. Remind me never to rent from this outfit.
While the additional charge goes unnoticed by most customers, a blogger gets dinged with the fee, and all heck breaks loose. Everyone is demanding the additional charge be taken off, pronto. As Schneider describes it, "The besieged customer service representatives (who spend all of their time in the CheapCRM4U.com application) have no easy way of viewing these transactions, and it's even harder to reverse them."
SOA to the rescue for this public relations and logistical nightmare.. Using SOA methodologies, it is able to quickly throw together a cross-system composite application that can be launched from within CheapCRM4U.com.
The composite application presents a unified view of a given customer's contact detail from the CRM package, billing history from the financial software, and service representatives' notes. The customer service reps can continue to work inside the CheapCRM4U.com user interface, but also use the composite application whenever they need to interact with data from the financial application.
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