Today’s businesses involve hundreds of cloud applications. With so many being used, critical business processes are fragmented across many mobile applications. It’s a waste of time and resources to manually move data from system to system. Growing companies need a way that can eliminate manual processes, reduce dependency on spreadsheets and email, while increasing visibility, speed, and accuracy across their organization.
The Challenge Of #integration Today:
The variety of business applications available today address every conceivable challenge that a company could encounter. Most of these mobile apps are simple to use, easy to set up, offer beautiful interfaces, and require no training. Integration is a key component across enterprises necessary to grow and deal with operational efficiencies. It has been along for a long time. Traditional ways of connecting apps through custom development are labor-intensive, lack flexibility and just can’t keep up. Thus, we need an integration strategy to holistically address the growing complexity of cloud applications through automation. This is where iPaaS comes into play. iPaaS, or integration Platform as a Service, are platforms that standardize how applications are integrated into an organization, making it easier to automate business processes and share data across applications.
iPaaS in Modern IT Environments:
- Business-to-Business (B2B) data exchanges.
- Do complex actions like filtering, transforming and combining data from the system to the system based on your business’s needs.
- Leveraging cloud technologies to streamline complex integration flows, improve efficiencies, manage resources better, and reduce costs.
- Trigger actions based on the data like sending an invoice upon project approval.
- Guaranteed data delivery and data governance.
- Endpoint adaptors and connectors: integration platform as a service typically make it easier to connect with specific applications without needing to code directly via API; this includes specific business applications and communication protocols.
- As complexity increased, buying decisions started moving away from IT, the next generation iPaaS enabled larger volume and a wider range of integrations, thus resulting in a connected enterprise and automating business processes.
The Next Generation of Integration Platform As A Service (iPaaS 2.0):
- Platforms need to be as intuitive as any cloud application.
- Users should be guided clearly through the integration process.
- Integrations can be federated across different parts of the organization.
- It should be easy to deploy, customize, maintain, and scale.
- Best-practices should be productized into pre-built integrations that can be reused.
- Pricing models should fit the needs to accommodate small and large businesses.
Today, iPaaS 2.0 technology is becoming more and more critical part of a company’s tech stack and considered much earlier in the process. With the next-generation of integration platform as a service solution, IT can centralize integrations and automation onto a single platform while significantly reducing the time and resources needed to build and maintain these integrations.
iPaaS ease of use allows integrations to be done by junior developers or even non-developers. From systems analysts to administrators, now anyone can manage ongoing maintenance and troubleshooting, while updates can be handed off to other departments, freeing up IT bandwidth to spend on higher-value activities.
Some Integration Platform As A Service (iPaaS) Platforms:
Dell Boomi:
Recognized as a leader by top analyst firms, Dell Boomi integration platform as a service (iPaaS) is 100 percent native cloud. It’s a shared-everything, multi-tenant platform that supports cloud-to-cloud, SaaS-to-SaaS, cloud-to-on-premises, on-premises-to-on-premises and B2B integration. It provides a solution to connect your data, applications, and people seamlessly. Utilizing the power of cloud technology, it offers a unified platform to handle your workflows from end-to-end. It empowers digital transformation in your organization by taking care of complex technical challenges to leave you focused on driving business growth and success. With a hybrid IT landscape, you can integrate your apps and data sources with ease.
Jitterbit:
Jitterbit is dedicated to accelerating innovation for our customers by combining the power of APIs, integration and artificial intelligence. Using the Jitterbit API integration platform companies can rapidly connect SaaS, on-premise and cloud applications and instantly infuse artificial intelligence into any business process. Our intuitive API creation technology enables companies to reuse business-critical applications and data to bring new offerings to market in days, not months. Best of all, our team of industry experts works side by side with you to accelerate innovation beyond anything you previously thought possible.
Celigo’s Integrator.io:
Celigo offers integration solutions that enable applications to work together as one, in a way that is easy and simple. Over 1500 companies rely on Celigo to synchronize data, automate processes, and streamline operations by integrating their cloud applications. Celigo’s integrator.io iPaaS platform offers a simple and powerful platform through a guided user interface, integration templates, and other tools that empower both business users and IT to easily integrate any cloud applications. Built on integrator.io, Celigo also offers Smart Connectors, a suite of prebuilt fully managed integration applications for popular cloud applications, including NetSuite, Salesforce, Shopify, Amazon, Zendesk, and many others.
MuleSoft Anypoint Platform:
Mulesoft is probably one of the best known of all of these vendors. Mulesoft provides an integration platform (Mule ESB and CloudHub) that allows their customers to connect applications in the cloud and on-premise as well. With the Anypoint Platform, you can design, publish, and manage APIs both on-premises and in- cloud and the platform provides pre-built templates and connectors for the ease of use of the solution. They offer a wide variety of solutions for industries, such as financial services, government, healthcare, higher education, media, telecom, and retail. This hybrid integration platform includes iPaaS, ESB, and a unified solution for API management, design, and publishing.
Is Integration Platform As A Service (iPaaS) The Future?
Glenn Weinstein, an industry expert said “I think we’ll see rapid growth in the popularity of iPaaS. Integration developers want to work on modern platforms that are rapidly evolving. I think you’ll see not only vendors move towards iPaaS, but you’ll see the integration development community pushing that momentum. I also think you’ll see greater adoption by vendors, especially SaaS vendors, in more and more robust Web service [application programming interfaces] APIs. In particular, those that can handle greater batch data scenarios. That makes them iPaaS-friendly and that is going to be increasingly important criteria for your API in the future. That applies for all vendors, not just SaaS vendors”
References:
https://www.celigo.com/what-is-ipaas-integration-platform-as-a-service/
