SaaS Customer Acquisition and On-boarding API

Once you have a deal for a demo, trial or term subscription, you need to make sure that users are on-boarded very quickly. This has three benefits:

1. It can be a “go-live” indicator to mark start of subscription term
2. License usage can be tied directly to the number of users logging in
3. If users are on-boarded in phases, early users can indicate access or usability issues. This feedback can, in turn, simplify on-boarding of users in latter phases.

Here are the key APIs (application programming interface) that your SaaS application must develop and expose for close integration with client’s existing applications.
[Note: Most, if not all, of these API will need to support CRUD operations]

APIs common to most SaaS or Cloud applications

In this case, the SaaS application will need to expose the following User related API or endpoints

• User import API
• Bulk user import API
• User identity API
• User profile API
• User security API

 For business processes, the related set of APIs include:

• Process Life-cycle
• Process Access Control
• Process Data Transfer
• Process Assignment

And for Reporting and Analytics, the APIs include:

• Standard views of data
• Data import into Analytics tools
• Data export to common reporting tools

The first released version (or V1) of any SaaS or Cloud based application, if designed correctly, will definitely include most of these APIs.
Are these API on your SaaS roadmap?