The SaaS Mess: How Enterprises Lost Control Of Their Software

Forbes

2 days ago

Pankaj Goel is the technology leader and cofounder of Opkey, an Agentic AI-powered ERP lifecycle optimization and assurance platform.
Five years ago, Gartner released a seminal paper that introduced the concept of a transformative world: composable ERP.
The paper promised enterprise software that would function like LEGO bricks: modular, buildable and easily reconfigurable. They called it 'an adaptive technology strategy' that 'enables…[you] to keep up with the pace of business change.' But the reality of ERP in 2025 has proved quite different. What was meant to be an agile, efficient software ecosystem is instead an unmanageable web of disconnected applications and fragmented data. The status quo today drives enterprise costs higher than they need to be. In a recent conversation I had with a CIO, they put it bluntly: "Composable ERP, without a proper lifecycle management strategy, is like building a race car with mismatched parts. Sure, it might look cool in the garage, but good luck winning any races."
Composable ERP has delivered better solutions for individual processes but also adds new layers of complexity. What was formerly a single-vendor ERP environment is quickly becoming a sprawling SaaS mess of multiple applications. IT teams find themselves tasked with the near-impossible: keeping everything connected and running smoothly.
Consider the steps required to execute a typical 'procure-to-pay' process. First, a requisition might begin in Workday, a spend management platform. Then, a purchase order is processed through Oracle Fusion. Interactions with suppliers are in SAP Ariba, inventory is managed through Blue Yonder, invoicing goes through Stampli and finally, payments flow through Tipalti.
This approach offers the flexibility you need for functional options but comes with a heavy price. IT teams can spend more than a third of their time maintaining custom integrations between applications like these, costing enterprises anywhere from $5,000 to $20,000 per connection. Often dubbed 'SaaS tax,' many companies are paying dearly for their SaaS ecosystem.
What's worse, each of these SaaS vendor updates runs on its own schedule, forcing companies into a never-ending testing cycle and depleting valuable IT team resources.
End-users, your non-IT employees, need a great deal of training to carry out workflows on so many apps, which costs an immense amount to carry out manually. An even greater problem is the cost of fixing integration-related defects. It takes an IT team an average of thirteen days to resolve an integration defect, slowing down other business priorities and taking up valuable resources.
Enterprises don't need to rush to abandon their composable architectures. Enter: ERP Lifecycle Optimization, a complete framework for proactively managing change across fragmented systems. Let's dive into how they help:
Sorting through your SaaS mess requires that you get ahead of issues. To do this, your IT team needs excellent system visibility. More specifically, they need real-time monitoring of configuration updates, API changes and metadata modifications to anticipate disruptions and avoid downtime. A misstep I've often observed—assuming manual alerts and ticketing systems are enough. Here's why they fall short: By the time a problem shows up in a support ticket, it's already customer-facing. I don't know about you, but I want to catch issues before users ever feel them.
In an enterprise, no app is an island. A minor update in one SaaS app can completely derail another, causing a cascade of downstream issues across multiple workflows. With AI-enabled analysis, teams can visualize the impacts of cascading issues instantly. Manual methods of impact analysis are not wise, as teams often realize that they've missed critical cross-module impacts too late. My advice: Invest early in systems that surface and analyze these connections automatically and proactively. The hidden issues are usually the ones that hurt the most.
Providers update the software frequently, which is viewed as one of the advantages of SaaS applications, but it is unsustainable if your testing methods are still manual. Enterprises need automated test frameworks to validate integrations and business processes in real time. Adopting robust test automation can mean 70% faster release cycles, with a 90% reduction in the occurrence of post-release defects. For this, I recommend agentic systems. They not only execute these tests but also decide which tests to run. They adapt testing based on what's changing, so you can rest assured you're covered.
With every update, employees need to be trained on how to adapt to each change, but too many training programs are static PDFs or outdated videos created manually. The most valuable enablement happens in the flow of work—giving users contextual help and guidance as they are navigating their tasks. For this, I recommend AI-driven training delivered through in-platform guidance. Agentic digital trainers can personalize training to specific user behaviors and adapt in real time, resulting in faster adoption, fewer errors, less workflow disruption and drastically fewer support tickets for your IT team to address.
To truly solve problems, IT teams need more than just error logs. AI-powered observability tools bring real-time visibility to your team across the ERP lifecycle. These tools can tell you not only where the fire is burning but also how it started and where it might spread. Agentic-powered observability tools allow your team to shift from putting out fires to preventing them in the first place.
Composable ERP is finally within reach. Enterprises that treat their ERP landscape as a unified whole will be the ones thriving in the Agentic AI era.
This is where ERP Lifecycle Optimization becomes essential. Instead of reacting to problems as they arise, enterprises can take a proactive approach to the core system of their IT ecosystem. ERP Lifecycle Optimization enables enterprises to orchestrate change, enhance existing systems and mitigate risks before they materialize.
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