Why integrations, not dashboards, drive SaaS adoption

Enterprise users today are swimming in software. The average business user interacts with at least six different apps every day: and in many cases, far more. Adding yet another login, dashboard, or tool to that mix can create more friction than value.

Yet many Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) still approach product adoption as if every user will happily embrace a new application dashboard.

In reality, the most successful SaaS products are those that meet customers where they already work. By embedding value into existing systems, workflows, and tools through deep integrations, you increase your chances of lasting well-beyond the trial phase, and reaching a broad audience for your product’s usage.

Why meeting users where they are is a competitive advantage

Today’s enterprise IT environments are complex and fragmented, with users spread across a wide range of roles, departments and tools. 

And each team relies on its own stack. Engineering lives in GitHub and Jira, finance is most active in Excel, Xero or Oracle, while customer success spends most of its time in Salesforce and Slack. And so on across every team in the company.

On top of this, governance and approval processes often sit within centralised platforms like ServiceNow. These platforms act as the “source of truth” for IT operations, controlling who can request, provision and manage services across the business.

For many enterprise users, it’s not about preference. It’s about permission limitation. They literally can’t access certain product interfaces (e.g. the AWS console), either because they lack the necessary permissions or because it bypasses key approval workflows.

Meanwhile, user expectations have evolved. People are used to modern consumer experiences, so they expect information, actions and alerts to appear where they’re already working – not hidden behind another login. 

It doesn’t take a productivity expert to figure out that context switching between multiple apps is frustrating, and fragmented workflows slow people down. 

We’re seeing a growing gap between how many products are still being designed with the assumption that users will come to a dedicated UI, and how users actually want to interact with these products.

Designing for enterprise workflows: what we learned with AWS

At Cloudsoft, we’ve seen this challenge ourselves through our work with AWS. As we touched on earlier, ServiceNow is the IT service management (ITSM) platform of choice for many enterprise companies, handling everything from approvals to procurement and device provisioning. 

For these customers, asking users to log into the AWS console to provision cloud resources simply isn’t viable, limiting cloud adoption:

• Most employees don’t have AWS permissions
• Approvals and governance happen in ServiceNow
• Business users expect to request IT resources through familiar systems.

To address this, Cloudsoft helped build a deep integration between AWS and ServiceNow. Now, users can browse a catalogue of AWS services, request resources, and manage lifecycle events all from within ServiceNow. As well as offering more convenience, this integration also provides full alignment to users’ existing approval workflows.

This has increased the adoption of AWS services across the enterprise, made cloud provisioning accessible to non-technical users, and preserved governance and compliance through existing ITSM processes.

Real-world patterns we’re seeing

The same principles apply far beyond cloud provisioning. Another example to consider is FinOps tools. Finance teams care deeply about cloud cost visibility, but they’re unlikely to often log into a standalone FinOps dashboard. They want reports delivered into their existing reporting tools or workflows.

And engineers want actionable alerts in Slack or Jira, not hidden in another UI. As for executives, they want exportable insights they can use in board decks or decision-making. They definitely don’t want another analytics tool to learn.

AWS itself recognises this shift. Amazon Q Business, its GenAI solution, offers integrations with more than 40 different enterprise tools. This makes its capabilities accessible across the systems users already inhabit.

“We have an API” isn’t enough

Having an API is a great way for power-users to integrate your product into their workflows in bespoke ways. However, it’s not enough to just pass this responsibility to the customer.

Users want something out-of-the-box: they don’t want to do an engineering project as part of a product trial. They want well-tested integrations, for example properly handling permissions, approvals, error handling and bi-directional data syncing.

What does this mean for ISVs?

Many integrations done by ISVs are still treated as a checkbox exercise: something to list on a marketing page or cover in an RFP. But in modern enterprise environments, integrations are central to product success.

In today’s enterprise environment, forcing users into a dedicated dashboard limits reach and adoption. But deep, thoughtful integrations can significantly broaden your product’s impact. 

There’s often a fear that “being invisible” will dilute a product’s value. In fact, the opposite is true. The value of your product isn’t in where users see it – it’s in how seamlessly it enhances their workflows. By delivering value where users already work, you expand your product’s audience and embed it more deeply into the enterprise.

Integrate, or get left behind

As enterprise buyers grow more sophisticated, and their ecosystems more complex, integrations will increasingly determine which SaaS products thrive. If you’re building or scaling a product for this market, ask yourself:

• Where do your users already live?
• How can you meet them there, rather than asking them to come to you?
• What integrations would make your product an indispensable part of their workflow?

At Cloudsoft we’ve seen how powerful this shift can be – and how much opportunity it creates for ISVs who embrace it.