7 Guiding Principles for Selecting Integration-Friendly Application Partners

DMA is a SaaS success story, having taken an aggressive and smart approach to moving its systems out into the cloud, beginning in 2001. The company credits the strategy with allowing it to better compete with larger firms in its industry, food distribution. DMA CEO Bob Sala has employed these principles in his company’s 10 years of experience with software-as-a-service. Look for each in your SaaS engagements.

Click through to see key factors you should consider when selecting a SaaS vendor.

Fit is first and foremost.

Confidentiality is extremely important, because it provides competitive advantage. You do not want vendors to use or re-purpose your data.

If companies intend to keep growing, technology infrastructure needs to scale.

Ask to see every vendor’s financials if they are a private company; don’t work with inexperienced SaaS vendors.

Systems downtime kills profits and service-level agreements assure that outages will be kept to a minimum.

Insist on exclusivity agreements on custom solutions built by systems integrators; you don’t want the solution to be repackaged and sold to competitors.

Only the highest security certification will do.