After yesterday’s post on the Marketing Orchestration Platform, a friend rightly pointed out that the orchestration platform is applicable to all the major functions. Sales? Check. Customer success? Check. Product? Check. And the list goes on. The explosion of SaaS apps has made for a number of siloed systems, some department specific and some that span departments.

Several years ago I worked on an idea to bridge the gap on the data side between disparate cloud apps and learned a number of good lessons. My two main takeaways were a) being a “dumb” pipe doesn’t engender enough value and b) tier one app integrations, which have the most value, are eventually built internally by most vendors. Now, an X Orchestration Platform adds much more value than integrating data, and that’s why it’s interesting.

Look for the number of SaaS tools to grow and the opportunity for X Orchestration Platforms to grow as well.

What else? What are some more thoughts on the idea that all major function areas now use a variety of tools presenting an opportunity for an app to act as an overlay for them?