SAN FRANCISCO, CA -- (Marketwire) -- 02/19/13 -- MuleSoft, provider of the world's most widely used integration platform, today announced the results of its second annual SaaS Integration Survey, which found that integration continues to have an outsized impact on the success of SaaS and cloud providers. The survey findings revealed that integration is playing a significant role in increasing sales and reducing churn -- 90% of respondents consider integration to be important in winning new customers.

For the second year in a row, MuleSoft and THINKstrategies collaborated on a market survey of SaaS and cloud vendors to quantify how the emerging need to integrate and connect to cloud and on-premise apps impact vendor success in the rapidly growing SaaS marketplace.

"Last year's survey revealed that the 'Cloud Rush' effect, attracting a proliferation of players to enter the SaaS/Cloud market, had made integration critical to the success of the leading providers," said Jeffrey M. Kaplan, managing director, THINKstrategies, Inc. and the founder of the Cloud Computing Showplace. "This year's survey results clearly show that not having an integration solution is no longer an option for SaaS and Cloud vendors seeking success in today's increasingly competitive marketplace."

End-user customer expectations have shifted dramatically, requiring technology vendors to take on many burdens formerly held by end users. The opportunity and competitive advantage belongs to companies that can provide a better customer experience through integration. This survey supports this shift, showing integration plays a critical part in the customer acquisition and retention strategies. The SaaS Integration Survey explores how integration has become a critical requirement for success amongst SaaS and cloud vendors.

Survey Highlights

• 90 percent of respondents consider integration to be important or extremely important in winning new customers
  
  
• 63 percent of respondents said data loading and integration are the most time-consuming aspects of customer implementation
  
  
• 40 percent of SaaS and cloud vendors are developing point-to-point, custom integrations in house in order to connect to other applications and systems
  
  
• 44 percent of respondents have experienced the inability to integrate with customers' existing systems and applications as a hurdle in sales conversations
  
  

MuleSoft is helping SaaS and Cloud vendors respond to these challenges by providing the CloudHub integration platform as a service (iPaaS), which connects across cloud-based applications and also connects SaaS to on-premise applications. MuleSoft's Anypoint™ technology for on-demand API connectivity eliminates the need for custom point-to-point code. With CloudHub, SaaS vendors and systems integrators (SIs) can focus on scaling their core business instead of spending time and money on custom integration, resulting in shorter sales cycles, faster implementations, lower support costs, higher customer satisfaction and renewals.

"The results of this report support what MuleSoft has known for quite some time now -- that integration is absolutely essential for all organizations' business strategy within the New Enterprise," said Chris Purpura, vice president of business development and general manager of the CloudHub platform at MuleSoft. "With the rise of mobile and SaaS, more organizations are realizing the necessity of connecting the explosion of endpoints. The positive result of this is the ability to gain new customers and competitive advantage through integration."

Results show that SaaS application connectivity has the power to impact a company's top line revenue. The worldwide survey was conducted in the fourth quarter in 2012 and included over 200 SaaS and cloud provider respondents.

For more on the SaaS Integration Survey:
Read the full report: http://bit.ly/XCsGOB
View the infographic: http://bit.ly/VVzhjK

About MuleSoft
MuleSoft provides the most widely used integration platform for connecting SaaS and enterprise applications in the cloud and on-premise. With the rise of cloud and mobile, enterprises face a choice: get overwhelmed by the resulting explosion of end points or seize the opportunity to gain competitive advantage. Founded on the idea that connecting applications should not be hard, MuleSoft lets organizations harness the power of their applications through integration. MuleSoft's Anypoint™ technology eliminates costly, time-intensive point-to-point integration, enabling business agility. Delivered as a packaged integration experience, CloudHub™ and Mule ESB™ are built on proven open source technology for the fastest, most reliable integration without vendor lock-in. Supporting billions of transactions per day, MuleSoft is used in production by thousands of enterprises, including Walmart, MasterCard, Nokia, Nestlé and Honeywell, and powers integrations with leading SaaS vendors such as Salesforce.com, NetSuite, Workday, Intuit and Zuora.

For more information: www.MuleSoft.com
Follow us on Twitter: @MuleSoft

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