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One of the greatest challenges leaders face today is integrating an endless variety of tools and technologies into a business-appropriate technology stack. Your business toolkit must communicate cohesively, connect employees and departments, enable seamless data flows, and augment productivity, efficiency, revenue generation, and growth. The answer to this challenge could lie in an iPaaS rather than a complete tech stack overhaul.
In this article, we’ll look at what an iPaaS is and what it does, the benefits, and how to go about adding this tool to your tech toolkit to potentially improve the utility of every other SaaS or application.
An Integration Platform as a Service (iPaaS) is an evolution of software provision and integration that solves the problem of disparate, disconnected systems and data flows, and they are expected to become increasingly popular in 2024.
The average company now uses an average of 254 SaaS apps and larger enterprises average 364 apps in their tech stack. Add to this legacy or on-premise applications, IoT devices, and mobile applications and any organisation's digital and data touch points are now immense in number.
The average company has over 2,000 silos of information, places, or applications where data resides that is inaccessible to other parts of the business. Companies lack a unified view of markets and performance, and 47% say data silos are preventing them from gaining powerful data insights.
Hubspot says:
“Over time, we’ve learned that things aren’t so linear, and consumers rarely use just one software to satisfy all of their needs. Instead, they find a plugin here, some software there, and maybe even a widget until they have a smorgasbord of options that, together, create the perfect solution.
The popular CRM recommends an iPaaS as an integral solution for a frictionless technology experience connecting disjointed systems, acting as a conduit for communication and allowing data sharing. It has a full guide to all things iPaaS.
Gartner defines iPaaS as
“a suite of cloud services enabling development, execution, and governance of integration flows connecting any combination of on-premises and cloud-based processes, services, applications and data within individuals or across multiple organisations.”
Research from Gartner once described iPaaS as one of the fastest-growing enterprise software market segments, and such platforms have evolved with advanced integration, intelligence, and customisation.
Today’s iPaaS have multiple automation features to enable integration, improve workflows, and prevent human error, extensive libraries of SaaS and app connectors and APIs, and powerful monitoring tools to check the status of integrated apps. They are also designed to be inherently secure.
Popular iPaaS providers include Adeptia, Boomi, Celigo, DBSync, IBM, Flowgear, Microsoft, Oracle, Salesforce Workato, and Zapier.
An iPaaS has immediate internal benefits for efficiency, productivity, performance management, robust data insights delivery, and growth.
An iPaaS connects a multitude of applications but also the departments and employees that use them, facilitating data sharing between platforms and users.
Data sharing happens in real time with automated integrations without the need for manual uploads and transfers. A quick and accessible solution provides for centralised oversight of workflows and data flows to maximise efficiency and output.
Integrating, sharing, and thus enabling effective collation and analysis of data delivers insights that are truly powerful and indicative of the bigger picture. This is in contrast to data from multiple sources that have to be manually combined and interpreted if this happens at all.
The efficiency gained in workflows, processes, and more robust data can negate the need for a business to consider further major software investments to solve efficiency and productivity flaws. Rather than redesigning a tech stack completely, an iPaaS can unify and improve whilst also facilitating the addition of other tools, this time seamlessly.
An iPaaS can highlight weaknesses in applications and integrations, making it easier for firms to see and address potential threats and risks. iPaaS solutions have their own fraud detection and alert systems, and again this is all visible in a single platform. Where changes are required, they are more easily managed in a single interface.
In addition, the removal of data silos makes it far easier to comply with regulations such as General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) which requires businesses to provide customers with the ability to access personal data records.
Any form of digital transformation should be powered by data itself before it is deployed to optimise data flows, efficiency, and productivity. Considering an iPaaS should also be part of a wider digital strategy that’s continuously and constantly reviewed to keep pace with technological change. Before commencing a digital review, it helps immensely to take a holistic view of a company’s internal and external ecosystem.
Some of the metrics to capitulate for an iPaaS investment include cost savings from using multiple connection and integration tools, legacy integration or API cost reduction, and reduced maintenance costs. You can also consider the value of robust data, improved innovation and agility, reduced downtime, and improved quality of service for users, as well as the opportunity to leverage new software opportunities and replace legacy systems or apps an iPaaS highlights as underused or inefficient.
Appropriate steps to incorporate an iPaaS will be to:
It’s the perfect time of year for a Tech Stack Spring Clean, but a digital review might well highlight how many pieces of software and applications your business uses each day and how disparate and disconnected they are. An iPaaS solution could be a fast remedial solution to reconnecting workflows, departments, employees, and even customers that facilitates the easy adoption of new tools and the replacement of outdated ones over time.
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