For some business stakeholders, integration solutions like point-to-point, SOA, and others initially seemed to be the most attractive, cost-effective option for the organization’s smaller network of applications and project needs. However, when enterprises have more than two or three interfaces, the cost to maintain point-to-point connections and other legacy solutions starts to increase exponentially. 

Forrester estimates 35 percent of development time is spent in creating application interfaces. The application landscape is expanding with cloud and SaaS products producing increased volumes of data. Imagine the overall infrastructure’s stress, especially with IoT and smart devices getting into the mix and producing petabytes of data. The complexity of data, applications, and devices will continue to grow enormously, posing challenges to the organization while still keeping pace with innovation. The iPaaS integration platform solution can help with the data, devices, and applications both within your enterprise and outside of your enterprise. Here’s how:

Ability to handle complex, hybrid integrations

Today’s generation of architects is devising solutions that live in a cloud or hybrid environment as your usage of cloud and SaaS applications increases. iPaaS can handle this rising complexity of hybrid integrations, helping you connect legacy data sources to the cloud.

Hybrid iPaaS platforms offer instantaneous provisioning of cores to handle the data and transactions while modernizing your IT to the cloud. They provide the ability to scale up and down your capacity, adjusting as business demands fluctuate. iPaaS also provides you with automatic upgrades without incurring any downtime. This not only reduces the costs of maintaining hardware but also provides you with the speed and scale to develop and deploy your applications whenever you wish to.

Support of unified experiences and informed decisions

If you have systems that are operating on different platforms, interoperability becomes a nightmare. You cannot service your customers efficiently if you are juggling disjointed data and records. Fifty-seven percent of companies report losing upwards of $500,000 annually due to poor integrations and challenges with disparate technologies. iPaaS comes to the rescue by providing unified solutions for meeting customer expectations and creating frictionless experiences

To make more informed decisions, enterprises need data at their fingertips and in real-time. As the world moves more towards microservices, you may need to componentize your services and use them as the building blocks for the next generation of business offerings. iPaaS can provide you the foundation and scale to create such granular and lightweight REST/JSON APIs, which can then be quickly composed to archive a larger business capability. This enables organizations to self-service their needs and makes IT nimble enough to respond to your business needs quickly. Many enterprises are finding this operative model as a gamechanger for multiplying their IT capabilities.

Scalability and speed

Oftentimes, what at first looks like a small project requiring only a couple of systems to be integrated often leads to entirely new requirements and a huge demand for more integration endpoints. This is a repeating pain point we hear from our clients trying to connect multiple platforms at multiple points. For example, your customer data may reside in Salesforce, which needs to flow to the ERP system for order placement. But then that same order may need to flow to your accounting system for invoicing purposes. Later on, your organization may want to build analytics and real-time dashboards for your executives, which may require you to extract the data from Salesforce, ERP, and other accounting systems. As you can see, what started with basic integration between Salesforce and ERP quickly turned into additional integration endpoints with accounting systems and reports/dashboard generation systems like Tableau

In the above example, if an organization wants to be agile and quickly build out this project, previously discussed integration solutions would quickly fail. What is needed is an integration platform that enables them to reuse integration assets developed from prior projects, which are already proven to work with quality. Today’s integration platforms allow just that. These solutions are evolving into citizen integrator developments with low-code or no-code options built in through intuitive UI. This allows the composability of the APIs and helps deliver the projects at scale and speed through self-service. 

An integration platform solution, or iPaaS, is the long-awaited answer to many enterprises’ ongoing data and integration challenges. With its ability to handle complex and hybrid integrations, its support of unified experiences and informed decisions, and its inherent scalability and speed, iPaaS gives companies the flexibility and freedom to grow and the structure and stability to sustain the new currency of business: i.e., data.

Next week, we’ll take a look at more of the benefits and effects that follow after adopting iPaaS in your organization.