One of the biggest challenges with accessing real-time software as a service (SaaS) data for things like data mashups for business intelligence.

2. One of the biggest challenges with accessing real-time software as a
service (SaaS) data for things like data mashups for business
intelligence (BI) and reporting requirements is that you have all of
these SaaS applications out there in the Cloud. Each one of them has
its own method of authentication if you want to retrieve data. The
unique methods, application programming interfaces (APIs) and
underlying query languages make it very difficult for BI companies or
application developers to easily understand, connect to and retrieve
the data from these platforms. We joke around here that you need a
master’s degree in each of the APIs of companies like Salesforce,
NetSuite and Zuora to be able to effectively get at the underlying data.

3. The unique authentication methods are a real challenge for our industry
because they make it very difficult for BI tools to talk to these
applications. They make it very difficult for other SaaS applications to
utilize data from other SaaS apps. An example might be, if you are a
Zendesk user and you are looking at your customer support issues,
would it not be terrific if when you opened up the screen to look at a
customer’s support issues, you could also see the top three
opportunities that the sales reps were working? That’s data that comes
out of Salesforce. Would it not be fantastic if, when you opened that
screen, all that information was right there and available? In order for
us to do that and to make it very effective, the data needs to be
accessible in real time, and that is why real-time information is so
important on a data mashup side.

4. Of course, in reporting and BI, there are a lot of things about which you
would like to know the status as they are happening. If we had a way
for the BI tools and for the application developers to access the
underlying data from all of these SaaS applications in real time from
where they reside, we would be solving a very important issue for the
Cloud industry.
The way we solve the problem of access to the underlying data in all of
these different SaaS applications for the industry is that we need to
reintroduce a standard way to talk to all the underlying data in all of
these applications.

5. We need to introduce a language that everybody understands that
makes it very easy for an application developer or for any of these
BI and data tools to be able to access that underlying data. Those
standards exist today in the industry but the SaaS world has not
adopted them. Instead, we have adopted ways to connect the data
that involves understanding the different authentication methods,
APIs and query languages of each application.