Bungee Labs has announced the release of CRM integration reference applications enabling companies to use the Bungee Connect development and hosting platform-as-a-service (PaaS) to build highly interactive web applications that integrate software-as-a-service (SaaS) CRM silos with 3rd party data sources. Companies of all sizes can now quickly extend on-demand CRMs, including NetSuite, Oracle CRM On Demand and Saleforce.com, to interact with data from multiple data sources such as databases (MySQL, PostgreSQL), ERP systems, Microsoft Exchange, scheduling and inventory management applications, and e-commerce APIs, including Amazon, eBay and PayPal.

“The growing frustration with the cost and complexity of on-premise solutions is leading many companies of all sizes to implement SaaS applications to meet their business objectives. However, the lack of integrated interactivity between multiple SaaS solutions continues to be a sticking point,” said Jeffrey M. Kaplan, managing director of THINKstrategies and founder of the SaaS Showplace. “Through its Platform-as-a-Service model, Bungee Connect enables developers to address this issue and quickly combine various SaaS implementations together to better meet the needs of the end-user while ensuring secure access to essential corporate information.”

According to a current survey of CRM customers conducted by the Aberdeen Group, 51 percent of respondents to date plan to integrate a CRM system with a Web 2.0 application (20 percent currently do so). Companies use Bungee Connect to build desktop-like web applications that leverage multiple web services and databases, and then instantly deploy them on Bungee’s high-performance multi-tenant grid infrastructure. By providing development, testing, deployment and hosting on a unified on-demand platform, Bungee Connect enables a new class of interactive rich web applications while eliminating significant complexity, time and cost across the entire application lifecycle.

Healthnotes, a leading provider of wellness-driven marketing programs for retailers, publishers and manufacturers, used Bungee Connect to move its inventory manager to a web-based application and tie it directly with the “opportunity” data that was embedded within its Salesforce.com CRM. With Bungee Connect, Healthnotes was able to design, complete and embed a custom inventory management application within Salesforce.com in under eight hours. As a result, Healthnotes generated more accurate customer, opportunity and inventory data while significantly improving productivity and customer service.

User interaction with Bungee-powered applications can be delivered inside the CRM solution (e.g. tabs within Salesforce.com) or as stand-alone web applications. Because Bungee-powered applications execute on the Bungee Grid™ infrastructure, not within a downloaded and installed client, the amount of business and personal data pushed to the browser is greatly reduced, improving both application security and user interactivity