If you can think through and deliver on high quality integration it can save the amount of manual effort within your organization immensely.
Take for instance for iNTERFACEWARE. We found that by using Iguana to integrate these systems to get 360 degree picture of our customers:
Marketing automation system
Licensing system
Support system
Put all these data points together and one has automated about 85-90% of the function of what an accounts manager would do. We can use that data to signal if we detect that a customer account is in need of attention much the same way that Target can detect if a woman is pregnant before her own family knows by looking at her buying patterns.
This has massive value - since one can scale up the number of customer accounts without needing to scale up the number of account managers.
How did we do it? Well it really helped that we had simple systems in all the categories.