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SETTING THE ENTERPRISE FREE

Home : Innovation : Featured Articles : Setting The Enterprise Free : The Truth About Customization

The Truth About Customization

Innovapost, a Canada-based IT services company with 800 employees, builds SaaS-based applications for its customers. For example, more than two years ago Innovapost developed a customer call-center system based on Salesforce.com’s cloud computing platform for a large customer, which it uses to serve its consumer customers. And with that work, Innovapost dispelled one of the leading assumptions about SaaS applications: that they’re generic, one-size-fits-all products that can’t be customized.

Customization capabilities do vary among SaaS products. But with Salesforce’s Force.com programming tools, Innovapost developed a customized system that provided a common customer experience across multiple points of interaction--the Web, an interactive voice recognition system, and phone conversations with agent--and provides up to 400 agents one integrated, common view of the history of a customer’s contact through any of those channels.

“I expected there would be limitations in how much we could customize the Salesforce product, but was surprised to find the only limit is your imagination,” says David Rea, senior VP of client services. Innovapost is now considering using the programming tools to quickly create some new types of SaaS apps that would replace legacy on-premises apps, and would run them in Salesforce.com’s data center. “Because of the nature of SaaS and the pricing model, this will be highly cost effective,” Rea says.

Innovapost chose Salesforce.com for the call-center system because it anticipated lower costs than an on-premises product. Two years later, the “cost profile is exactly what we expected; probably a little better,” Rea says. Since the system was located off premises, Rea anticipated that would create more complexity in the data communications paths between Salesforce’s data center and his own, and drive up support costs. “While it was a little more troublesome to get the data communications performance correct at the start, it has not proven to be expensive to support this connection at all,” Rea says.

Customer data privacy is a critical priority for Innovapost and its customers, so Rea’s team spent considerable time checking out Salesforce.com for data security and back-up. His advice to others: “You need to ask the hard questions, go look at the data centers, and get right into the details.”

Like Chiquita, Innovapost didn’t find systems integration any easier with SaaS. The multiple interfaces of a three-channel customer service application had to be integrated with an on-premises SAP pricing and ordering system. Integrating a cloud app with an on-premises system “wasn’t any worse, it just wasn’t any better” than integrating two on-premises systems, says Rea. “Anyone getting into this should have no illusions about that.”

Innovapost used SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol) as a starting point for the integrations, but it took considerable fine tuning by his own team and by his SaaS services partner, Appirio, to work with Salesforce.com and get the systems integrated and working at the required performance levels. “Both companies knew all the little tricks involved,” Rea says.

The SaaS industry recognizes that integrations are important, and continues to improve its contributions for that work (see “Getting SaaS And Onsite Apps To Co-Exist”). Appirio founder Narinder Singh believes integration for cloud computing will improve, particularly as more companies do SaaS-to-SaaS integrations. “Workday, Saleforce.com, and Google have fantastic APIs (application programmable interfaces),” he says. “It’s always the other side that’s harder to integrate. Where I think that can change is by having more of the center of gravity in the cloud.” Indeed, Chiquita, Life Time Fitness, Innovapost, and others are forging ahead, expanding their SaaS deployments, and in some cases moving more types of applications into the cloud. Those decisions have nothing to do with hype, and everything to do with positive experiences. For the SaaS skeptics, or simply the cautious, that’s the best evidence of real value in SaaS.

Mary Hayes Weier is an award-winning journalist, writer, and editor with more than 20 years' experience covering business and technology. In recent years Mary's reporting and research has focused on the software industry, software-as-a-service, and cloud computing. You can write to her at mary.hayes@workday.com.