A recent market study between IDG and TeamDynamix found that a staggering 89 percent of respondents from businesses of all sizes and industries are dealing with a data integration backlog regardless of whether they handle integrations in-house or with the help of a third party. That’s huge. What’s to blame for this? Many organizations say they simply don’t have the resources to keep up with demand. This is why iPaaS (integration platform as a service) is rapidly growing in popularity. In fact, Gartner predicts the global iPaaS market will soon reach $2.7 billion.
With an integration and automation tool like iPaaS businesses of all sizes can easily resolve their enterprise integration backlog struggles. Using iPaaS has many benefits, the most important being that it revolutionizes how companies manage data integrity and enterprise-wide automation. Rather than building integrations from one application to another (a time-consuming task) and using the workflow engine inherent in each individual application, companies can join all applications to one data integration and automation platform. This provides better security, visibility and workability.
The Benefits of Using iPaaS for Application Enterprise Integration and Automated Workflow Building
By using iPaaS to standardize enterprise integration in a single platform with automated workflow building capabilities, you can count on the following benefits:
- Better security and control over data, as well as better data security.
- Cut down or eliminate your integrations backlog as iPaaS is easy to use for both developers and non-developers.
- Quickly add new integrations without impacting existing workflows.
- Better visibility into line of business integration activity.
- You can easily add automation to your integrations.
- Save time and resources, reduce the burden on IT teams.
Finding the Right iPaaS Vendor for Your Company
When it comes to finding the right enterprise integration and automation tool for your business, you’ll want to find a company that offers iPaaS with predictable pricing and unlimited usage. Oftentimes, cost can be a big prohibitor when researching new technology – especially when budgets and resources are already limited. When you’re evaluating iPaaS vendors for pricing, here are some questions you should ask:
- Does this vendor provide a simple and understandable price for my workflows regardless of how many connections I am using? Am I able to transparently understand their pricing approach?
- Will this price remain the same on a per flow basis even if my business needs change and I need to connect more applications or systems to my workflow or add new business logic?
Other things to look out for in an iPaaS vendor include:
- Ease of use.
- Speed of deployment.
- Modern and scalable architecture.
- Security, compliance and governance.
If you want more tips, including questions you should ask potential vendors, check out our iPaaS Buyer’s Guide.
The right iPaaS tool can be a game-changer for any business, allowing you to achieve a high level of success sustainably – a true differentiator in today’s competitive business world.
How Companies Are Using Automation and Integration to Solve Key Challenges
At Pima County, one of the goals of bringing on TeamDynamix for ITSM and iPaaS (integration platform as a service) is to reduce toil.
“People feel so much more empowered and have so much more worth when they are doing things that are intellectually rigorous and challenging versus when they are just repeating the same mechanical actions over and over and over with very little thought,” Mark Hayes, information technology leader at Pima County, said.
“Our ITSM is our entry point to our entire IT organization, and we want our employees to graduate out of this area into other roles within our organization – network technicians, client services, desktop technicians, developers and project managers,” he continued. “If all they’re doing is handling tickets and doing the same mundane, manual tasks over and over that’s not particularly great training. So investing in tools that allow our employees to engage in meaningful work is something that’s important to us as an overall IT organization.”
With TeamDynamix now in place, Pima County is looking to automate and integrate as much of the manual ITSM processes into workflows as they can.
“The drudgery of working through mundane, repetitive tasks doesn’t exist just in IT,” Hayes said. “I think the more we can reduce toil within the departments that we support, the more people are going to buy in and understand the value of what we’re trying to achieve. There’s nothing like success to breed more success, and once other departments see the benefits they’re going to want these tools too.”
One of the key advantages of TeamDynamix iPaaS is its no-code nature, which empowers technical employees across the organization to set up their own integrations and automations. This democratization of technology reduces the dependency on IT teams, who often face a backlog of requests from various departments.
By enabling non-IT employees to create and manage their own integrations and automations, iPaaS frees up IT staff to focus on higher-level tasks, such as strategic planning and cybersecurity. This not only improves overall efficiency but also fosters a culture of innovation and collaboration within the organization.
“With iPaaS, we’re looking at automating tasks to take some of the things we do manually out of the hands of IT staff, so they can be more efficient,” Barry Bowden, IT Service Desk manager at NaphCare, said.
NaphCare is an Alabama-based company providing healthcare services and software to correctional facilities. They use TeamDynamix for both iPaaS and IT Service Management (ITSM).
Bowden said iPaaS will save him significant time. Currently, setting up and provisioning IT accounts for NaphCare employees is a multi-step process.
NaphCare uses a software program called Adaxes to automate the provisioning of accounts within Active Directory, but IT staff still have to coordinate with both HR staff and the managers of various departments to confirm what IT privileges employees should have—such as whether they should get a free or paid Zoom account. Bowden’s staff includes one full-time employee whose sole responsibility is to perform this work.
With iPaaS in place, NaphCare has created automated workflows for contacting HR and department heads to collect the necessary information. Using iPaaS, Bowden plans to connect TeamDynamix with Adaxes and build a customized workflow to create new user accounts from this information.
Automating this process will enable it to be completed in under five minutes, he says, with very little human intervention needed—freeing up the IT employee responsible for this task to do more strategic work, “That employee can be reallocated to other areas to work on more complex projects,” Bowden said.
There are also plans to automate software provisioning for programs like Microsoft Office.
“It will take me a week, right now, to go in and install Microsoft Office on all the accounts that request it. With automation in place, I won’t need to touch those requests unless there’s a problem. People will be able to go to our portal, put in the request and automatically get the software,” Bowden said. “That’s a full week of time I can get back to work on other things. That will be a huge benefit for us.”
Gainesville Regional Utilities has used TeamDynamix’s integration and automation capabilities to solve a key IT support challenge that affected thousands of retirees.
The software that handles payroll for GRU employees is Workday, which is supported by Gainesville’s IT department along with the other applications used by the city. Retired GRU employees receive their pensions through Workday as well.
However, prior to TeamDynamix, if retirees weren’t getting their pension checks or had trouble with their Workday account, they couldn’t submit a service request using GRU’s online service portal. Because retirees are no longer city employees, they don’t have an Active Directory account, and they need an Active Directory account to submit tickets to IT support staff online.
GRU Business Systems Analyst Tristina Grywalski worked with the TeamDynamix implementation and process consulting teams to develop a simple solution to this problem using the platform’s flexible configuration options.
As a result of their efforts, GRU retirees no longer have to call IT support staff during normal business hours, wasting valuable time for retirees and support staff alike. Instead, they can use the online service portal just like current employees with an Active Directory account can, resulting in faster and better service.
In just the first two months of this capability alone, more than 150 retired GRU employees from all across the country had submitted service requests online. “The service team is very grateful for this solution,” Grywalski said, noting that it has allowed them to be more efficient in resolving people’s problems.
Want to learn more about iPaaS and the positive impact it can have on an organization? Check out the latest market study: InformationWeek: State of IT – Resource Drain.