The exploration and practice of EventBridge in the field of SaaS enterprise integration

Author: Ken Meng

When reducing costs and increasing efficiency are themes in all walks of life, SaaS applications are well known and adopted by more companies as a way to reach and serve business scenarios faster. With the gradual maturity of the domestic SaaS business environment, engineers and managers of various departments in traditional enterprises can quickly decide to purchase SaaS products that improve efficiency, and then quickly put them into production and use. However, with the increasing number of SaaS in the industry, how to solve the data islands of various SaaS systems and how to connect SaaS application data with existing system data has become a bottleneck for enterprises to use SaaS. Therefore, the industry has also widely proposed the concept of B2B integration enterprise integration.

This article will combine the actual business scenarios to describe the insights in the SaaS industry and the exploration practice of SaaS integration.

What is SaaS

SaaS overview

SaaS (Software-as-a-Service, software as a service) originated from the new software service model created by Salesforce (founded in 1999). Compared with traditional software, the data of SaaS software used by users is stored in the cloud (there are many domestic SaaS industries that are deployed separately in customer IDCs due to their data sensitivity). Moreover, the services provided by SaaS companies to customers are usually rented on demand, such as paying the annual usage fee for 5 years, and then renewing the fee in the second year. , Continue to provide customers with greater value motivation.

SaaS Typical Classification

SaaS classification is cumbersome and generally has two classification dimensions. One dimension is based on usage scenarios, and the other dimension is based on business value.

SaaS is generally classified into two basic categories: general SaaS and industry SaaS.

Generic SaaS, as the name suggests, is generic and cross-industry, such as DingTalk instant messaging or HR products of a company. Due to the wider usage scenarios, there will be more customer groups.

Industry SaaS is a product used in a certain industry, such as catering enterprise SaaS, e-commerce SaaS, etc.

Of course, there is a second dimension that is tool SaaS and business SaaS.

Tool SaaS, provides a tool for improving management efficiency for client enterprises; commercial SaaS, in addition to providing a part of the "tool" value, can also provide value-added value for client enterprises, such as increasing revenue and obtaining funds.

Although commercial SaaS products are more risky, it is easier to quickly realize customer value and self-value under the domestic characteristic business environment, management level and talent structure.

The development history of SaaS in China

For the SaaS field, the popularity of cloud services has boosted everyone's confidence in the stability of SaaS services and data security. At the same time, the fading demographic dividend makes the cost advantage of SaaS prominent. The current epidemic environment has also accelerated market education, business owners have changed their thinking, and the demand for cost reduction and efficiency has increased significantly. As the penetration rate of the entire industry accelerates, SaaS scenarios and industries become deeper and deeper, and the SaaS market can experience rapid growth in the future. Many companies will use SaaS services in new business scenarios to solve problems that survive, rather than reinventing the wheel.

What is B2B?

B2B, or Business-to-Business (B2B) integration, refers to automating business processes and communications between two or more organizations. By automating key business processes, it realizes the connection between applications and organizations, and effectively promotes application providers and organizations. Data connection and cooperation between customers.

It can be asserted that with the gradual penetration of the SaaS industry, the demands for enterprise integration will gradually increase. The demands for data synchronization, user synchronization, and interface synchronization will gradually increase, including the connection between self-built services and SaaS services, and the connection between SaaS services and SaaS services.

Scenario Analysis of SaaS Integration Field

With the gradual enrichment of industrial SaaS, in the production practice of enterprises, the data integration and interoperability of applications and applications has become very important. Including API integration, data integration, process integration and other scenarios.

API integration

The business processes of SaaS applications are connected in series through API. At this stage, most of the SaaS integration and docking are realized through standard API protocols. The source end uses the WebHook mechanism to push to the specified HTTP endpoint, and the target end uses a method similar to API interface calls to actively call and execute actions.

The implementation structure is as follows:

The common solutions in the industry are almost all synchronous solutions, decoupling and mapping calls through API + intermediate gateway. The main problem of this scheme is that it is difficult to trace calls; secondly, if there is a problem of inconsistent upstream and downstream interface restrictions, a large number of downstream calls will fail.

data integration

The data integration scenario is mainly the connection between the enterprise's self-built system and the SaaS system. When the industry SaaS used by enterprises gradually increases, the problem of data consistency will become imminent.

Most enterprises usually face the scenario of importing/synchronizing data from the cloud to SaaS applications, and the industry's data integration solutions for SaaS applications are not as standard and general as Debezium in the CDC scenario.

The pain points of enterprises in the field of SaaS integration

High access cost

For enterprises that use a large number of SaaS applications, SaaS integration is a must-do infrastructure. However, this part of the infrastructure usually consumes a lot of manpower. Due to the flourishing of SaaS in various industries, it is usually difficult to use a set of architectures to meet all integration scenarios. It means that under normal circumstances, every enterprise using SaaS will face difficulties in integrating the SaaS system with its own system.

A lot of heterogeneous data

Heterogeneous data is another typical feature in the integration field. Heterogeneous data usually includes structured data, unstructured data, and semi-structured data. For example, a relational database built by an enterprise is typical structured data, but it is usually semi-structured data such as Json to be integrated by other SaaS systems. Of course, this part of the content can be done through custom code, but this idea must not be a message hub idea;

How to efficiently and uniformly process heterogeneous data is actually an urgent problem to be solved in the current SaaS integration, and it is also the biggest conflict point.

Distribution/routing difficulties

When many integration requirements emerge at the same time, how to reasonably distribute the integrated data will become another difficult problem in the integration field. The data content and even data types required by each subdivision scenario and even each integrated link are different. If routing/distribution can't be done, enterprise unified integration won't be possible.

Difficulty integrating tracking

When all synchronous links are used, the integrated state tracking here will become metaphysics, unless the link is connected to Tracing, but this part will generate a high cost of transformation, and the complexity of multi-source Tracing is compared with that of single link. will increase geometrically.

Difficulty migrating old systems

The migration of the old system is mainly the data integration part. If the old and new systems are connected and a unified application network is built, it is a difficult point for enterprises to build SaaS construction. Enterprises urgently need a way to connect "new" and "old" applications, break the time and space boundaries of enterprise application development, collaborate with the enterprise's original core data assets and innovative applications, and build an enterprise IT architecture that can evolve smoothly.

EventBridge One-stop Enterprise SaaS Integration Solution

In response to the various pain points of SaaS system integration in the industry, EventBridge has launched a one-stop enterprise SaaS integration solution. By converging the pain points of SaaS integration, EventBridge has launched API integration solutions and data integration solutions to connect applications and applications, cloud and applications.

Low-code integration platform

Provides a fully managed integration platform service that enables application integration in minutes with simple configuration in the console. Customers do not need to care about the underlying resources and implementation details to get through the cloud-to-cloud, SaaS-to-SaaS integration and connection, and easily complete heterogeneous data access.

financial-grade stability

Meet the requirements of enterprise-level integration projects of different customers, provide high availability, disaster recovery, security, service level agreement (SLA) and all-round technical support.

Full range of integration capabilities

It supports various integration scenarios and bridges the information silos between enterprise applications, IoT, devices and partners on and off the cloud. Support event rules, event routing and other routing methods to achieve cross-cloud and cross-region interoperability and information sharing. At the same time, the powerful link tracking capability can help enterprises to quickly troubleshoot.

open platform

Embrace the CloudEvents community and provide a standardized event integration solution. Provide rich developer tools, have a large number of ecological partners and developers, rich out-of-the-box connectors and application components can help accelerate enterprise business innovation.

Typical application scenarios of EventBridge in the SaaS field

SaaS application synchronization

Application synchronization is the act of migrating a specific set of events from one system to another at a specific point in time. The event synchronization mode allows developers to create integrated services for automatic data migration; business personnel and developers can automatically transfer data within a specific range to downstream applications by configuring integrated applications; creating reusable services can save a lot of development and operation teams time.

E.g:
Migrate sales opportunity data from an old CRM (customer relationship management) system to a new CRM instance;
Migrate sales order data from one CRM organization to another;
Synchronize product master data from ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) to CRM system.

event broadcast

Event broadcasting is the act of moving events from a single source system to multiple target systems on a continuous, near-real-time, or real-time basis. Essentially, it's a one-to-many one-way synchronization. Typically, "one-way sync" means a 1:1 relationship. However, the broadcast mode can also be a 1:n (where n is greater than 1) relationship.

E.g:
When a sales opportunity is marked as successfully closed in CRM, a sales order should be created in ERP.

SaaS application notifications

Event notification means that when a certain type of event occurs in a SaaS application, users can be notified through DingTalk, SMS and other notification methods. Users can obtain key event information in time.

E.g:
When a sales opportunity is marked as an important opportunity in CRM, other colleagues will be notified in time for follow-up and attention.

Migration from self-built systems to the cloud

EventBridge supports cloud database, cloud message queue, cloud product event docking SaaS system, improves the demands of enterprise users to build a network of applications, breaks the time and space boundaries of enterprise application development, and cooperates with the original core assets of enterprises and SaaS systems to build Evolvable Enterprise IT Architecture.

E.g:
When a new SaaS application is introduced, the core assets (such as personnel information, etc.) of the database/big data platform can be synchronized to the SaaS application through EventBridge.

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