This morning FreshBooks, the SaaS invoicing application that boasts hundreds of thousands of customers worldwide, will launch it’s integration with salesforce.com/ Normally another integration from FreshBooks,  company that prides itself on integrating with almost every SaaS player in the marketplace, wouldn’t raise any eyebrows – but this is interesting given that it’s an integration with salesforce, an unashamedly enterprise product, with freshBooks, more at home with Mom and Pop business.

A third party offering created by pervasive Software, the DataSynch OnDemand application is available from the AppExchange and offers salesforce users the ability to:

• Insert Salesforce Accounts into FreshBooks as Clients and vice versa
• Use Salesforce to generate Estimates and Invoices in FreshBooks and vice versa

This integration highlights a particular effect that cloud computing, and particular SaaS applications are having in the market. Formerly a large enterprise would only invest in up-market software from top shelf providers – it is for this reason that the larger vendors were able for years to discount the ascendency of the internet, secure in the thought that enterprise would only ever consider software from a “trusted” provider.

With the advent however of SaaS, of open APIs and of discrete point solution applications a scenario that was formerly unimaginable eventuates, that of a large enterprise integrating it’s core applications with small point applications, from nimble and relatively obscure startups.

It’s all part of the democratization of software and it’s the reason that the large vendors – from IBM to Microsoft, from Oracle to SAP are moving quickly to respond to the threat.