The Small Business Web LogoAs many of you know we have spent the better part of our summer integrating FormSpring with other popular web applications. These integrations empower organizations to use data they collect via FormSpring web forms with other web applications that can help them run their business.

Why does this help our customers? Now they won’t have to manually import data collected from their web forms into their Email Service Provider. They can now seamlessly pass information into their billing system and import customer leads directly into their CRM system. They can take in a customer inquiry or request directly from their blog and easily integrate payment providers with their online forms.  At last, freedom from the tyranny of disconnected systems that refuse to work with other applications.

SaaS applications, when integrated, are reshaping the way organizations operate, giving us powerful applications that work together without us developing, hosting or managing anything. Most organizations – small businesses, educational institutions, churches, governments and non-profits – want to focus on their customers and not on spending time and money learning how to program or cobble together disparate apps.

But until lately, most applications have not been made to work together and sharing data from one app to the next has required specialized programming or exporting from one app and importing into another. That is changing now.

It used to be that SaaS apps were judged on the richness of their features. That’s still important. But we think excellence in SaaS applications will be decided in the future by how integrated an app is with the rest of the world.  How easy is it for someone to not only use your app but actually use the data generated by your app.

In fact there is a community of like-minded web software providers called The Small Business Web that are dedicated to improving how businesses use online software by integrating applications through the use of API’s. FormSpring is proud to be part of  The Small Business Web and is dedicated to helping grow this philosophy.

So yeah, we get excited about this stuff. We hope you do too. To demonstrate the power of multiple web apps coming together to solve a problem, take a look at Third Party Integrations page.  We would love to hear your comments below on the future of integrations and SaaS applications.

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This entry was posted on Thursday, September 17th, 2009 at 5:12 pm and is filed under FormSpring News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.