SaaS Application Integration Challenges

Cloud services are all the time growing method to provide new services to businesses to gain benefit by subscribing the service instead of investing to it. Many on-premise solutions are replaced with new software as a service model where application is running in a supplier datacenter having scalability and elasticity and without any need for customer’s own resources. An application can be used with any device connected to the internet. Challenges are appearing when integration from a cloud application is needed to several on-premise or other systems. Each system is having own processes, practises and integration layers. The purpose of the thesis was to identify pitfalls in the Company X and provide best practises and checklists for project management to support future SaaS application integration implementation projects. Two large projects were used as a reference. Issues from these projects were investigated, categorized and prioritized. Used research method was action research where team proposed new solutions to the issue items, and those were partially executed and tested in the following iteration rounds. Study was concentrating in the case company’s findings that were related to processes and practicalities, technical issues were left out from the scope. In addition, processes or practises which were working correctly without any issues were left out. Study find out several items to be developed in the processes, IT design, data management, roles and responsibilities as well as project and vendor management. During iteration rounds best practises and checklist based on analyzed findings were collected, and these were presented as a final outcome. All confidential material has been removed from final thesis