No man is an island
But what about integrations, you say? And indeed, most enterprise systems need to integrate into a landscape of other systems and solutions.
Today’s cloud solutions handle these challenges with relative ease however, thanks to modern APIs and common open data standards. Again, the SaaS model offers certain advantages here, if for no other reason than the fact that they tend to be newer than most legacy platforms.
So, just like a building that was constructed in the last ten years will generally already come pre-fitted for HVAC, data communications, and other modern needs, so will a true SaaS solution generally feature a flexible composite or micro-services architecture, support open APIs and data standards, and often have pre-built, configurable connectors to common ancillary systems that many legacy applications lack. Worse yet, the architecture of the legacy system may be a real impediment to integration and require complex, brittle, and expensive workarounds.