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Consulting firm ThinkStrategies, and MuleSoft, a cloud integration provider, have announced the top five findings from a recent study focused on the impact of integration on SaaS (News - Alert) and cloud vendors in the cloud computing market.

According to the survey’s findings, “integration is the most common hurdle in the sales process for SaaS/Cloud providers.” The study found that almost 90 percent of respondents considered integration to be “important” or “extremely important” in winning new customers.

SaaS/Cloud vendors also identified integration as the most time-consuming element of customer implementation process: “Nearly two-thirds of SaaS/Cloud vendors acknowledge that integration needs to be a critical part of their product, rather than leaving it to the end-user.”

“Strong subscriber and revenue growth rates” are carving out a strong position for VoIP in the U.S. telecommunications map, according to officials of Nationwide Telecom, who add that since the entry of Comcast (News - Alert) and other cable companies, “VoIP services are given good preference over other modes of telecom.”

In fact, the IP softswitch appears set to play a large part in the surge of hosted VoIP as well; a market Nationwide appears well-poised to serve.

Jeffrey M. Kaplan, Managing Director of THINKstrategies and Founder of the Cloud Computing Showplace, noted that the success of the first wave of SaaS/Cloud vendors “has sparked a 'Cloud Rush' affect which is attracting a proliferation of players to enter the market.” He observed that these range from fledgling start-ups to “the biggest vendors in the hardware, software and services industry.”

The research report identified five key findings on the impact of integration on SaaS/Cloud vendor success:

Integration is a key to winning new customers. Over eighty-eight percent of SaaS/Cloud vendor respondents view integration as either important or extremely important in winning new customers.

Integration need is widespread. A majority of SaaS/Cloud vendors (52.8 percent) say that more than half of their customers require integration.

Integration is the top barrier to new SaaS/Cloud sales. Almost eighty-eight percent (87.7 percent) of SaaS/Cloud companies identified integration as a common or very common sales hurdle.

Impact of integration on time-to-value. Integration is the most time-consuming element of customer implementation, with 79.3 percent of respondents saying that integration was highly time-consuming or somewhat time-consuming.

Integration is a critical component of SaaS offerings. About 62 percent of the SaaS/Cloud companies believe integration is a critical part of their offerings.