Cape Clear 7 ESB for SaaS
The illusion of uniqueness
Every SaaS vendor offers its customers an 'illusion of uniqueness'. That is, they make it appear that all aspects of the service, its behaviour, and the user interaction with it, are customized for their specific needs. This 'illusion of uniqueness' is an important concept for SaaS vendors because it enables the hosted service to accommodate existing work practices and customer-specific extensions. The abilility to do this reduces customer inertia and gives them the confidence to use the externally hosted service rather than their existing processes and systems.
But while solutions for multi-tenanting are widely adopted for the service implementation - solutions for service integration have tended to lag, this means that customers and prospects who are less technically sophisticated or have less control over the IT systems that they use are prevented from considering the use of hosted services. Cape Clear 7 offers SaaS vendors a solution to this problem - we allow SaaS vendors to present a service facade which allows client data and messages to be integrated, routed, transformed and orchestrated thus eliminating the technical barriers to integration with hosted services and expanding the potential market for these services.
Solutions where a shared data model and namespace may be assumed to exist (as, for example, with co-hosted applications in Salesforce.com's Apex platform) are beggining to become available. However, these approaches have little application for the case where a hosted application is required to integrate smoothly and bi-directionally with a set of on-premise applications and data sources.
Efficiencies naturally arise when one single service implementation is being exercised in a multi-tenanted fashion by very many clients simultaneously. In this case, the job of the ESB is to create and maintain the illusion of uniqueness by managing a complex set of per-client 'mediations'.
Cape Clear 7 is used by a number of SaaS vendors, and their customers, to enable integration between on-demand applications and on-premise customer apps. SaaS integration, on both the provider and the consumer side, is the purest form of 'On-Demand' integration.
