System Integration via SaaS

I'm in San Francisco for Salesforce.com's Dreamforce Convention and took a quick tour around the Exhibit Hall on Sunday evening. Some interesting apps:

• SpringCM: A SaaS-based content management system, including workflow. It integrates with Salesforce so that content management tasks don't become process black holes. For example, let's say a contract is in Legal. In Salesforce, that's all you see: In Legal. When you add SpringCM to the equation, the contract and other content is attached to that bid within the Salesforce UI, and you can see the process status within the Legal Department via SpringCM. In short, a relatively sophisticated content management system. The bad news is that the market will overlook the option of SpringCM for SaaS-based content management because they've never heard of the company--Cisco, Google, and Microsoft will be grabbing all the headlines.
• Endeca: Endeca, a company selling enterprise search software, can use Salesforce.com as a data source, as well as other systems. This allows Endeca users to drill down into the data held in their disparate systems via faceted search. For example, the Sales VP could drill down into sales within the Central Region (data held by Salesforce.com) and then look at the affiliated contracts (data held by a content management system) within the Endeca interface. The gotcha here is that your metadata needs to be in pretty good shape for the multisystem consolidation via the UI to work. If one system calls a client "IBM" and the other calls it "International Business Machines," the system won't necessarily know they're one and the same unless you create a synonym table.
• Business Objects: Business Objects, the business intelligence (BI) vendor, can extend the standard Salesforce.com reports via Crystal Reports. In addition, the company just started a service that consolidates information from data providers such as D&B, so you can run sales reports and then see how you stack up against the competition and the economy at large within the reporting interface. This is a change from buying the information from D&B directly and then having to consolidate the benchmarking data with the Salesforce.com data via spreadsheet.
• Omniture: This web analytics vendor can both get information from and pass information to Salesforce.com, thereby making it easy to map campaign initiatives against sales in either the Salesforce UI or the Omniture UI.

When talking about the advantages of SaaS solutions, people often cite (1) the pay-as-you-go model and (2) avoiding the need to install software due to brower-based access. However, another advantage is the one visible above:  being able to buy pre-built complementary applications offering functionality that used to demand hiring a systems integrator. While all of these applications require some integration work, it's days or weeks rather than months or years--not a bad deal.