Computerworld — It was almost too much of a good thing. When Hines Interests Ltd. launched its real estate investment trust business, Hines Real Estate Securities Inc., as a complement to its real estate development business, it built the IT infrastructure around a bevy of SaaS products. But the need to exchange data between various hosted applications -- transaction processing, CRM, literature-fulfillment, and expense and vendor payment systems -- created a tangled web of integrations linking SaaS to SaaS and SaaS to on-premises applications.

It's the SaaS twist: Add too many applications, and you might to find yourself back in the bad old days, when the various applications in the corporate infrastructure wouldn't talk to one another. "When you're heavily reliant on SaaS, you're putting yourself in the position of siloed data once again," says Benny Lasiter, business systems architect at Hines Real Estate Securities.

Tips for successful integration projects

1. Develop an overall integration strategy that includes SaaS.

2. Take time to fully understand business process requirements before starting integration work.

3. Hire an information architect with a deep understanding of the business process requirements as well as the technology issues.

At least Lasiter had a plan. In many organizations, SaaS offerings sneak in through the departments within individual business units, often without the knowledge of IT. Rogue projects have become "the profile of SaaS" in the enterprise, says Ron Papas, senior vice president and general manager of Informatica Corp.'s on-demand group.

Later, as those applications multiply and grow, problems arise. "You do it once, twice, and five times later, you have these disparate solutions coming into the IT infrastructure. There's no strategy, no consistency, and there's a problem," says Benoit Lheureux, an analyst at Gartner Inc. "Most companies don't even know that they should have a SaaS integration strategy, let alone align that with their internal B2B integration strategy. That is a huge problem."

But you need not go it alone. As IT executives are working through their SaaS tangles, they're developing fresh integration strategies and getting help from new tools and integration specialists.

Three ways integrations can get tangled up

Things can go wrong even after SaaS applications are integrated with the rest of your infrastructure. Pervasive Software says these are three of the most common challenges:

1. New features that raise the bar: The SaaS vendor adds new features that you would like to use. Example: The vendor offers more granular reporting, but the process flows you've built need to change to take advantage of that.

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