HSVs push technical limits

With enterprises looking for low-cost, low-risk solutions in a tight budget environment, HSVs (hosted software vendors) have started to gain more traction in areas ranging from CRM to human resources (see "Rise from the ashes," Jan. 20, page 35). And though they are strapped for cash and staff, just like nearly every other company, HSVs are continuing to push the technology limits of delivering software as a hosted service.

Two years ago the main challenge they faced was demonstrating security, reliability, and availability. Today, several other items have crept into this menu. Integration tops the list for most vendors, who see it as the biggest impediment to hosted software adoption. As enterprises consider outsourcing more mission-critical applications, they need to make sure their vendors can integrate with key systems behind the firewall.

On your mark, get set, integrate

"As long as there are applications behind the firewall, how you tie into them is definitely going to be an issue," says Dave Moellenhoff, CTO of Salesforce.com in San Francisco . "A lot of IT departments still have this concept of ‘If I have the application running in-house, I can integrate, worst case, by just going into the database and brute force yanking the data out.' That integration of last resort is not really available in a Web-native application."

John Alberg, co-founder and vice president of engineering at Norcross, Ga.-based Employease, agrees: “I have almost as many developers who work on [integration product] Employease Connect as on our employee self-service system,” he says.

The company now offers 300 prebuilt connectors to inside-the-firewall systems such as payroll, as well as to third-party vendors such as insurance companies and eligibility systems. "One of the bigger challenges is finding a way to do that in a reusable way, so each one doesn’t have to be separately maintained," Alberg says.

Built using Java Beans and a plug-in interface to the Employease network, these connections create maps between the Employease database and the customer or third-party system’s target format. “They live in their own little sandbox and don’t interfere with the production code,” Alberg says.

Like many other HSVs, Employease, a charter member of the HR XML group, is working on projects to expose a given set of transactions, such as a hiring a new employee, to a Web services interface, so it will trigger a chain of events via XML.