Delivering a seamless and pleasant customer experience is a top priority for any enterprise. Given the limitations of in-house development resources and bandwidth, businesses often turn to third-party solutions for various functionalities.
One critical aspect of ensuring smooth communication and data exchange across diverse applications is through integrations.
This has given rise to Integration Platform as a Service (iPaaS), which plays a pivotal role in simplifying the process of connecting different applications and processes.
Understanding iPaaS
- Integration Platform as a Service, or iPaaS, is a platform that facilitates the connection of diverse applications and ensures the smooth exchange of data.
- It allows developers to link applications, replicate and exchange data, and execute various integration initiatives effortlessly.
- iPaaS enables users to build and deploy workflows in the cloud without the need for installing additional software or hardware.
- This not only simplifies the integration process but also significantly reduces costs and efforts associated with traditional integration methods
Embedded iPaaS: Bridging the Gap
- Embedded iPaaS proves invaluable for Software as a Service (SaaS) businesses, enabling them to provide multiple integrations or connected third-party applications to their customers.
- In a typical scenario, businesses use over a hundred applications, most of which are Software as a Service (SaaS) apps.
- However, for these applications to contribute to business value, they must interact with each other, exchange data, generate insights, and facilitate workflow automation based on data exchange.
- Embedded iPaaS ensures a smooth connection and communication between a product and other applications used by customers.
Features of Embedded iPaaS
Embedded iPaaS comes equipped with several features, including:
- Support for End-User Authentication: Embedded iPaaS includes support for managing authentication for end-users, ensuring secure data exchange.
- Pre-built Stable Connectors: It offers pre-built connectors for common SaaS apps with logic components for no-code integration building, capable of handling high volumes of data.
- Custom Connectors: Users can build custom connectors tailored to their specific business or product requirements.
- Alignment and Syncing Management: Embedded iPaaS provides the ability to manage alignment and syncing between different components, ensuring a cohesive workflow.
- Infrastructure Support: It offers the necessary infrastructure to run integrations seamlessly.
- User-Friendly UX: Embedded iPaaS provides a pleasant and user-friendly user experience for customers using integrations.
Embedded vs. Traditional iPaaS
- While traditional iPaaS is suitable for internal integrations, embedded iPaaS is specifically designed for end-users.
- Traditional iPaaS might require customers to build integrations and subscribe to the platform every time they adopt a new software solution.
- In contrast, embedded iPaaS allows SaaS providers to offer native integrations pre-built into their product, simplifying the user experience and eliminating the need for customers to manage traditional iPaaS.
When and Why to Use Embedded iPaaS
Whether in the startup or scale-up phase, there are indicators that signal the need for embedded iPaaS in a SaaS business:
In the Startup Phase
- Customer Demand: Customers are demanding several integrations.
- Competitive Landscape: Market competitors offer significantly more integrations.
- Native Integration Experience: The desire to offer a native integration experience to users.
- Development Cycle Challenges: The development cycle is getting delayed.
- Resource Allocation: Developers are unable to focus purely on product functionalities.
- Cost Concerns: Integrations are adding significant costs to the development cycle.
- Security Apprehensions: Apprehensions about building, managing, and securing integrations.
In the Scale-Up Phase
- Customer Loss: Losing customers due to a lack of integrations.
- Development Bottlenecks: Unable to deliver new functions due to integration time constraints.
- Support Burden: Integration management and support consume developer time.
- User Experience Management: Unable to manage the customer experience for integrations.
If one or more of these points resonate with the business, it’s time to deploy embedded iPaaS for the SaaS application.
Top 6 Benefits of Embedded iPaaS
- Reduced Engineering Effort
Pre-built connectors and low-code integration designs reduce the time and effort required to build integrations, allowing developers to focus on core product features.
- Ability to Scale/Reduced Infra Load
Embedded iPaaS offloads the infrastructure load, ensuring scalability as the volume of requests increases.
- Accelerate Time to Market
Embedded iPaaS provides building blocks that can be quickly configured to offer the right integrations, reducing time-to-market and enhancing customer acquisition.
- Enhanced Experience with Native Integrations
Native integrations within the product improve the user experience and reduce the likelihood of customers seeking alternative solutions.
- Customer Integration Configuration
Embedded iPaaS allows for a configurable experience, enabling customers to customize integrations according to their specific needs.
- User Seamless Maintenance and Support
Pre-built connectors handle maintenance tasks such as updating API references and debugging, reducing the engineering team’s workload.
Seamlessly Integrate with Embedded iPaaS
Embedded iPaaS emerges as a key enabler for accelerating and scaling the integration journey for SaaS applications.
Developers can leverage its benefits to build native integrations, reduce maintenance efforts, accelerate time to market, free up developer time, utilize pre-built integrations, and reduce the time needed to scale infrastructure.
With embedded iPaaS, SaaS businesses can ensure that integrations don’t hinder the growth of their robust products, enhancing functionalities with seamless native integrations.