SaaS requires no introduction or explanation. What primitively was a daunting task to store data on systems, a challenge to call a technical person to install the needed software in systems, and a nightmare to go through a year of training and a year of implementation was washed out by the invention of SaaS.
Today, you can manage all aspects of your business, including sales, finance, and marketing, while relaxing on the beach or enjoying a vacation. Thanks to SaaS, we are now attending Google Meet meetings being in some corner of the world and talking to somebody in the other corner, message and getting information instantaneously on all official matters via Slack and MS Teams, viewing our shop’s sales on Shopify, checking our finance on Zoho Books and Intuit. The use cases go on and on.
These SaaS products, with their powerful run-on-the-cloud model, create that value.
The SaaS was born in 2000’s, it grew and started to walk in 2010’s and in 2020’s it has started to run like an athlete. There are an average of 110 SaaS applications used by a single business today.
SaaS companies have to display their product’s worth every time, or else they will be ditched. In such a competitive market, SaaS companies must thrive.
Below are the key characteristics a great SaaS product should have:
User centric:
The SaaS product must have an intuitive and easy-to-use user interface and user experience. It should avoid friction in onboarding and navigating through features to achieve a business use case.
Offers customization:
The SaaS product must have the option for customization according to the business needs. The SaaS product should not lock the users with rigid functions. It should enable the users to customize the product and tailor it to fit their needs.
Product lifts security:
The SaaS product should be secure to use because it handles business data, and it cannot leak any business data. It should be compliant with the security standards needed across regions and business verticals.
Scalability:
Scalability comes when the SaaS product has the ability to integrate with other SaaS products. In other words, a great SaaS product should have integrations. Integrations are the key to a SaaS product’s success.
Let us see how integrations are the key to a successful SaaS product and what the SaaS products should do to have the capacity to deliver integrations.
Increased product stickiness:
Users very well know that no individual product can satisfy all their needs. Hence, they opt for different SaaS products for their different requirements. For example, a business can use Freshdesk for their support ticketing team, use Zoho Books for their finance, use Slack for their communications, BambooHR for their HR team.
However, for the business to complete its tasks quickly, these various SaaS products must always communicate with each other.
Here comes the need for integration. Once the integration is in place, the business can link Freshdesk and Slack, alerting the Slack agents to the newly created ticket in Freshdesk. The integration between Zoho Books and Slack could alert the finance team in Slack about the payment of a new invoice in Zoho Books. This type of use case goes on.
To connect the applications and set up the workflows as mentioned above, they need an integration tool that connects apps and automates workflows.
Increased scalability:
Users, at one point, will have everything that they can get out of your product. They will start exploring the options if your product can convince them to get the other product’s work inside your product. As they explore these options, they will begin to demand that the SaaS provide them with integrations with their existing software.
Omni-channel experience:
Users, today, want to look at their data with a 360-degree view of it. SaaS companies with decent revenue streams are looking to expand their products into multiproduct suites in a particular category to provide an omnichannel experience for their users. Companies like Zoho and Freshworks are doing this successfully. Zoho has over 55 applications, and their Zoho One product has a complete suite of 55 applications tied with each other. Freshworks boasts five interconnected products.
However, for a SaaS company that is just getting started or in the middle of its journey, this is not feasible. This is due to the significant emphasis on enhancing the quality, features, and user experience of their product. They cannot focus on building multiple products. And so there arises a need for integration.
Need for iPaaS?
iPaaS (Integration Platform as a Service) helps businesses in connecting applications and automating workflows. Recent trends have shown that the interest of businesses in adopting an iPaaS product just to connect their SaaS applications and automate workflows has decreased.
Reasons:
1. Separate license fee.
2. Separate vendor. (That means, individual effort to contact support in case of issues.)
3. Multiple disparate tools for diverse needs already.
Hence, businesses now need their SaaS vendors to provide them with native integrations. And that raises the need for Embedded iPaaS in SaaS companies.
Why Embedded iPaaS for SaaS?
Embedded iPaaS (Embedded Integration Platform as a Service), as the name abbreviates, is embedding the integrations inside a SaaS application.
SaaS companies will have to brainstorm the build vs. buy approach and should finalize which approach is beneficial, effective, and strategic for their business.
The SaaS company should raise three questions and provide three logical, factual answers to those three questions by themselves.
- Can we build native integrations using our resources?
- Can we build native integrations incurring so and so cost within so and so time?
- Can we build native integrations without diluting the focus on our core product?
Let us have an in-depth discussion on the three questions.
Can we build native integrations using our resources?
Generally, the SaaS company's product managers should provide information on this question. As product managers, they know how many development resources are working on what set of features and whether it will be possible to allocate certain resources dedicatedly to developing native integrations for their SaaS.
Can we build native integrations incurring so and so cost within so and so time?
In their role as a SaaS product manager, they should adopt the mindset of a CEO. They are also involved in budget allocation for building products/features every quarter. Therefore, they are aware of the budget for each quarter and can determine whether the cost of developing native integrations will be feasible to implement. Time is a valuable resource. Every extra hour they spend building integrations is a cost they are incurring, as they are not investing their time in their core product development. On average, it takes eight months to one year to develop a SaaS integration ecosystem or SaaS integration marketplace.
Can we build native integrations without diluting the focus on our core product?
Lastly, the observation of the focus on their core product plays a crucial role. As a Product manager of a SaaS, they must analyze if they can deploy the engineering team to build integrations. Because it is a costly decision since their focus on their product dilutes when the resources must invest time on shaping up the product, bringing new product features and fixing the current issues faced by customers. If there is a slip, then it may be a downfall for the product.
If the answers to these questions are fairly bringing ‘No’ as a conclusion, the product managers must go with the ‘Buy’ approach.
What to look for in the Embedded iPaaS for your SaaS?
When you, a Product Manager of a SaaS, have decided to go with the ‘Buy’ approach, then you must think of the points you have to look for in the embedded iPaaS before making the purchase decision.
Actually, the answer lies in the questions raised and brainstormed by you.
As a Product manager of a SaaS, you were:
- Worried about the availability of the engineering resources.
- Concerned about the budget and time for the resources to develop native integrations.
- Disturbed about your core product focus dilution you would be experiencing if you spent on native integrations development.
Now, in an embedded iPaaS that you want to buy for your SaaS, you have to look for the offerings the embedded iPaaS provides for your SaaS.
- Does it remove the dependency on your engineering team to build integrations?
- Does it offer you the native integrations at the cost of what you would have had to put in to build in-house?
- Does it enable you to focus on your product development?
- Does it give the native experience to your end users?
If you get ‘Yes’ to all these above questions, look no further. That is the best embedded iPaaS platform you can get.
A Look into Klamp Embed: The best embedded iPaaS for your SaaS
Klamp Embed is the best embedded iPaaS for your SaaS offering all the feature sets a SaaS can expect.
It is thoughtfully designed for the product and sales teams, which means a product manager or a sales manager can create integrations and launch native integrations—all in clicks, not in code.
Unlike any other embedded iPaaS product that requires the development team’s involvement in providing the integrations, Klamp Embed stands out as the top embedded iPaaS product for you since it removes all the time and effort of the engineering team and empowers the product and sales teams in creating and launching native integrations.
Top three reasons to buy Klamp Embedded iPaaS:
1. No IT dependency in building native integrations.
2. Launch native integrations in three steps
3. Complete native experience via white-labelling
4. An easy embedding option
No IT dependency in building native integrations
Klamp Embedded iPaaS makes it fast and easy for the SaaS product managers or sales managers to create integrations via its intuitive no-code automation builder.
Launch native integrations in three steps
Klamp Embedded iPaaS enables the SaaS product managers or Sales managers to launch native integrations to their SaaS in three steps:
- Create integration at no code
- Export integration as a template
- Publish integration to the SaaS
They can create SaaS integrations with no code, export it as a template to the integrations manager, add ‘How-to’ instructions (which may be useful for the SaaS users while they read and install the integrations from their SaaS integrations marketplace), and hit ‘Publish.
Boom! The native integration is launched inside their SaaS for the SaaS users to install and consume.
Complete Native experience via White-labelling
Klamp Embedded iPaaS offers a complete native integration experience for SaaS users by tailoring the UI according to the SaaS’s UI guidelines. We tailor every text, font, color, and background theme to match the native UI of the SaaS. When navigating through the integrations page of the SaaS, users won't notice any differences.
Easy embedding option
Klamp Embedded iPaaS packages the integration functionality and the entire embedded integrations UI in an iFrame tag or a custom URL (which can then be mapped to the respective SaaS portal). The SaaS company can decide which approach they are going to go ahead with.
- If they opt for the iFrame tag, they can configure it inside their product, where they want the integrations page to appear, and it is done. The SaaS users will start viewing the integrations, ready to consume, from an ‘Integrations’ module of the SaaS.
- If they opt for the custom URL approach, Klamp will host the embedded integrations with UI styled according to the SaaS UI guidelines, and the SaaS can do DNS mapping to route that to their portal. The SaaS users can click ‘Integrations’ from the SaaS, and they will see this page open in a new tab. They can then start using the integrations.
Hence, as a SaaS product manager, with the decision to go with the ‘Buy’ approach, and with all the feature sets provided, Klamp embed stands as the top embedded iPaaS platform for your SaaS.