Integration Platform as a Service, or iPaaS, is no longer just a buzzword in the tech industry. It’s a vital tool that enables organizations across industries to streamline their processes, enhance their productivity and stay ahead in the digital transformation race.
In this blog post, we will dive into the five key use cases of iPaaS. We aim to help you understand its potential impact on your business, and why it’s worth considering as an investment for your business or organization.
Defining iPaaS
iPaaS (integration Platform as a Service) is a cloud-based platform that connects different systems, technologies, and applications both on-premises or within the cloud. It enables companies to deploy and maintain integration flows without using middleware and specialized hardware between a company and third-party software or within an organization.
iPaaS allows for more efficient and better-governed enterprise integration and automation (versus homegrown scripts or APIs, for example) by centralizing all integrations into one hub with a library of connectors to common systems such as Workday, Oracle, your ITSM platform, Salesforce, Active Directory, Azure, and hundreds more, as well as any APIs.
With all these systems connected and data points secured in one spot, end-users can leverage the platform to move data, transform data and build out automations and workflows using a visual drag-and-drop flow builder that can be triggered from a field change, form fill or any number of actions.
5 Key iPaaS Use Cases
Modern integration and automation platforms help address the problems of growing integration debt by making it quick and easy to connect any systems you bring on board with the rest of the organization. This means that IT teams can satisfy the demand without the need for coding, development, scriptwriting and building out point-to-point integrations.
iPaaS is built for the kind of quick deployment teams need to avoid creating and accumulating new integration debt because it’s so easy to make new connections leveraging a library of pre-built connectors. Once connected, automation can easily be created using a codeless drag-and-drop interface.
In addition to making it easier to connect systems, iPaaS helps reduce toil within your IT organization. A recent study from InformationWeek found:
- 58% of organizations say their IT team spends more than five hours per week (six-and-a-half work weeks annually) fulfilling repetitive requests from the business.
- 90% of respondents say that manual and repetitive IT tasks contribute to low morale and attrition in their organizations.
- 45% of IT teams spend more than five hours per week writing scripts for workflow and automation.
A quick calculation shows that an IT worker (or team) who spends 10 hours a week on these manual tasks wastes more than one financial quarter every year on things like resetting passwords for people.
Not only is this draining corporate resources, but it can be draining on the morale of IT employees who often join a company seeking to innovate and problem solve – not get bogged down with technical grunt work.
In fact, the survey found that 90 percent of respondents felt these types of repetitive manual IT tasks directly contributed to low morale and attrition within their IT organizations.
So how can organizations use iPaaS? Here are 5 use cases:
- Integrate with Grab-and-go Connectors
Using an iPaaS tool, like the one from TeamDynamix, allows you to access a library of pre-built connectors and quickly build integrations between systems – reducing integration building time by up to 90 percent. Unique to TeamDynamix, if there’s a system connector you need and can’t find, you can request new and custom connectors from TeamDynamix’s Connector Concierge.
- Gain Better Security and Governance with API Management
With iPaaS, connecting different applications becomes a breeze. It provides a unified platform where all applications can interact with each other, enabling seamless data flow and allowing you better security and governance over integrations using APIs. The TeamDynamix iPaaS solution is designed to help you with API management, while also giving you the tools to create integrations and workflows.
- Create Workflows for Automation
One of the biggest benefits of using a no-code iPaaS tool is that you can democratize the building of automations and help people save time. As we touched on before, teams both within IT and other departments have mundane, repetitive tasks they’re responsible for. By building out automations to handle tasks like password resets, name change requests and more you can gain back valuable time and work on higher-priority projects. With TeamDynamix, you can use the visual flow builder to grab data elements and trigger action all while easily managing and testing workflows. Our easy-to-use iPaaS platform allows anyone to watch a flow execute against real data as it’s being built. The flow builder interface presents a visual language that produces syntactically correct user-generated code. For those who are keen to see the backend, you can easily click over and be in the code. Quick, easy, and codeless.
- Leverage Dynamic Forms and Conversational AI
The dynamic forms within TeamDynamix iPaaS allow you to use forms to gather end-user inputs to minimize the time spent going back and forth (within tickets or email) on various questions. You can leverage pre-filled data from back-end systems, and even push the forms out through Microsoft Teams/Slack or other channels, including a conversational AI chatbot. Forms can dynamically adjust as used – allowing for additional picklists or fields based on inputs. Forms can also be embedded on websites and throughout the service catalog to help facilitate end-user interactions and more streamlined data input and automation.
- Integrate, Transform and Harmonize Data
With iPaaS you can easily integrate data across systems, transform it for uniform analysis across multiple systems and even leverage data cleansing in flows and automation paths. As the number of systems and applications running continues to grow, it’s more important than ever to have one “golden record” for data. With iPaaS you can pull data together through connectors – harmonizing and transforming it – so it can flow back and forth between systems and across workflows.
As you can see, iPaaS can provide significant benefits. It’s all about understanding your needs and leveraging the right tools (and vendors) to meet them. Are you ready to unlock the power of iPaaS?
To learn more about how iPaaS and how to find the right vendor for your business check out our iPaaS Buyer’s Guide.