If you know what this prospect’s IT environment looks like, try to represent it here. For example, change the icons of the SaaS apps, cloud platforms, social apps to include the things you know they’re using. We want to make sure they recognize themselves in this picture.
Talk track
This is what most businesses look like today. They still have a number of on-premise systems and databases that reside comfortably behind the firewall. These systems have been built up over time, often decades, and they’re unlikely to go away anytime soon. You have too much invested in them and they’re performing mission-critical work for your business.
However, in addition to these systems, you also rely on a host of other systems and services that reside outside you business, in the cloud.
You’re connecting with partner systems like [Mitchell estimating, DMV] and engaging with customers in new places like [aggregators].
You may have some cloud platforms like AWS or NetSuite
You’re using SaaS applications, probably more of them than you even know about and the number is growing rapidly
Engaging with customers through social media is no longer a nice to have. More than likely your marketing team is actively using facebook and twitter to engage with customers and build awareness
And you’re supporting mobile devices and well as a growing number of devices (ex: telematic device to support pay-as-you go insurance)
The problem is that you need to get all of these systems connected. And many companies still take a point-to-point approach to integration. You have to build all of the connections between your back-end systems [CLICK]
Talk track
And you have to build all of the connections between those back-end systems and all of the SaaS apps you’re using [CLICK]
Talk track
And repeat the process for everything else you need to connect to – partners, devices, social apps, and cloud platforms.
And this is what you end up – integration spaghetti.
Note on presenting this if customer already has ESB
You might think you've solved this b/c you have IBM or Oracle but here's what you haven't solved – connecting SaaS. Legacy ESBs were not designed to connect to SaaS applications – they’re only designed to address the behind the firewall problem.
Talk track:
It’s not pretty, and it’s not easy. Think about it. For every one of these connections you have to learn the interfaces of the two endpoints you’re connecting, which can be hard because the chances of those being well-documented in pretty slim. Then you have to build all the transformations and code the business logic for the processes you’re integrating. You’ll need to build a security layer so your data isn’t exposed in-flight. You’ll have to write some code to manage exceptions and handle errors. And you’ll have to test and debug it all. [CLICK]
And the situation grows even uglier when you roll this into production because now you have to manage and maintain it.
You have no visibility into what’s happening so when something goes wrong it’s difficult to identify and fix.
It’s difficult to performance tune this.
Every time one of these application APIs changes, all of the integrations to that app break and you have go and manually update each one.
And ultimately, it slows you down and makes it really difficult to adapt to change. Adding or changing an endpoint means creating all of these connections over again.
