
The Modern SaaS Stack and the Unexploited Amount of Data - anacleto
https://medium.com/plainflow/the-modern-saas-stack-and-the-unexploited-amount-of-data-6bf2e982b596
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osullivj
The author makes an excellent point about the integration barriers raised by
running a business on an aggregation of cloud services. Sure, they all provide
REST APIs. But as your suite of services evolve you must constantly re-
implement your client code. And you'll never get the performance you can get
from on premises where you may be able to connect directly to a vendors SQL DB
because you're hosting it yourself, or eavesdrop on a pub sub message bus.

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exolymph
There's a company called Outlier.ai that basically exists to deal with this
problem. I quoted the CEO, Sean Byrnes, in this article about business
intelligence: [https://www.inc.com/sonya-mann/business-intelligence-
cloud.h...](https://www.inc.com/sonya-mann/business-intelligence-cloud.html)

Covers a lot of the same territory from a newsier perspective.

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sologoub
At the higher end of the price spectrum, Adobe has done an amazing job gluing
it all together. I'm familiar with them from the Omniture days, but recently
attended their Summit event and it really opened my eyes on how integrated
their stack has become: \- Analytics

\- Personalization

\- eCommerce and Cart recovery

\- Programmatic Ad Buying (including automatic credit for any bot traffic
detected by WhiteOps above 3% threshold)

\- DMP, that syncs in real-time with your Analytics/segmentation and cart
recovery software.

There is also a slew of video related stuff that was of special interest to
me, but isn't really relevant to this thread.

Best of all, you can setup alerts by email and SMS, and then reply to them
asking for more info that the system auto analyzes for you.

Source: Current Adobe customer and attended Summit 2017.

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rockmeamedee
A popular (in 2017) solution to the tech version of this problem
(proliferation of services and data systems) is put it all in Kafka. I wonder
if that would work for integrating Saas platforms.

You kind of need a bunch of Saas<->Kafka interactions, but if the tech side of
your company uses Kafka for reporting and BI, why not have your Saas platforms
put data there?

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laktek
This is where the bigger opportunity lies for AWS or Google Cloud to move up
the stack. They already power the core of most of the smaller SaaS products.
Hence it's just a matter of identifying the common tooling patterns and add
value on top. These products can integrates well with their existing data
pipeline tools, offering the incentive to business to standardize on a single
cloud platform rather than shopping around for SaaS products.

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mifeng
This post focuses on the problem, but it's also a huge opportunity to build a
product that can integrate from a bunch of different SaaS and provide a BI
layer. I'm sure lots of folks are trying to do this, but I haven't seen it
done well yet. It probably needs to be an enterprise product w/PS, because of
the infinite number of SaaS combinations.

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jaxn
The thing is, without a truly standard stack, the best integration of the
stack comes from gluing it together ourselves.

We use a mix of APIs from the SaaS services we use and Zavier to capture the
data points we need and make the services work well together. The availability
of access filters into our descision, but it seems like at some point it may
make sense to roll our own replacement for some.

Intercom has been great and our customers love it. But it is getting
increasingly difficult to keep deeply integrated with the rest of our stack.

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thricha
hey Jaxn - I'm the PM for the Intercom Messenger. Would love to learn more and
see how we can make it easier for you. You can email me tom@ intercom.io if
you'd like!

