Fully aware of the challenges, Bluewolf has made its integration solution available to customers for several years. Now, as added insurance, the company has added a monitoring feature that allows technicians at Bluewolf to keep tabs on clients’ integration projects, much like an MSP (managed services provider) does for its clients’ servers, desktops and myriad other devices for prevention and troubleshooting.

“We are proactively looking at all of our clients’ jobs,” Sklar says.

Bluewolf’s Integrator spots errors and potential trouble areas, then alerts customers of the issues and helps them remediate or prevent the problem. When necessary, Bluewolf dispatches technicians to client sites.

With its approach, says Lheureux, Bluewolf makes it possible for the vendors with which it does business to put aside concerns over integration.

Integrator, says Sklar, is a manifestation of Bluewolf’s philosophy of supporting its customers’ business as opposed to simply providing them with technology. “We don’t make tools for IT; we make tools for the business.”

Customers, she says, don’t care about the technology as long as it works. “You want to be successful, you don’t want to worry about the technology,” she says.

But getting the technology to work requires the right tools or expertise, especially when it comes to integration, which is why Bluewolf developed the integration-as-a-service approach.

A lot of companies that have embraced the SAAS model for some applications have legacy software, and they want both types of applications to work together.

For instance, a company using CRM software from Salesforce.com, which is hosted remotely and accessed by the customer through the Web, may also have in its network ERP software from SAP or Oracle. Ideally, the company would have the CRM and ERP software share information, but if the company lacks the expertise to integrate the applications, the sharing of information takes place manually, which is time consuming and error-prone.

With Integrator, Bluewolf empowers the customer to perform the integration, and the people involved don’t even need to be technical experts, Sklar says. “We built a very easy-to-use solution for administrators,” she says. “It’s for somebody who is not IT-focused.”

Integrator uses wizards presented in simple nontechnical terms to guide users through an implementation. The tool integrates with Salesforce.com, Big Machines, Oracle, SAP, Microsoft SQL Server and MySQL, and supports flat files such as .csv and .xtml.

Will Wiegler, marketing manager at Big Machines, a developer of e-commerce software, says the Bluewolf integration tool helps both the customers and his company.

Customers enjoy the added security of knowing Bluewolf is supporting them through the monitoring service during an implementation, he says. Big Machines also benefits because anything that helps the customer also helps the vendor get its technology into the market, Wiegler adds.