With the high growth in enterprise app usage seen over the last few years, enterprise systems teams have become increasingly important in positioning their companies for success. In fact, integration is now the biggest IT challenge globally with nearly 17% of IT budget spent on such needs and the integration market doubling over a 5-year period from 2015 to 2020. Moreover, the true cost of ineffective integration and a lack of automation capabilities is much higher. When executives make decisions with incomplete data, companies respond slower to changes in the external environment, and businesses fail to innovate in serving their customers. To avoid this, companies are investing in modern iPaaS (integration platform as a service) platforms that allow them to achieve the kind of enterprise integration needed, at a fraction of the cost.
Understanding Enterprise Application Integration
So, what is enterprise application integration and how does it fit in? Enterprise application integration refers to the approach and tools used to connect all your applications; to enable data to flow between them with the right governance in place; and to empower your employees and lines of business to build workflow automations to easily solve some of their biggest challenges. Using an integration and automation platform like iPaaS quickly enables this kind of integration and has numerous benefits including:
1. Predictable Pricing with Unlimited Usage
Enterprise systems professionals need to be able to grow their organizations and automation use cases without requiring a corresponding increase in their IT budget. iPaaS provides this low price point and the ability to connect any number of applications without a corresponding increase in cost per application. Once an integration workflow has been launched, your cost does not scale as its usage and the organization grows. You will not need increasingly large teams of developers to maintain these integrations.
2. Supports App Usage Growth and Churn
As an organization’s app usage grows, enterprise teams need to be able to quickly deploy and launch new integrations and workflows. At the same time, we are also seeing a consistent churn in the applications used by companies with some companies churning through 30% of their applications in a year as their needs evolve. Enterprise teams need to be able to keep up with the pace of growth as well as sunset various applications. Using older integration tools or writing custom code in-house is not effective in managing this dynamic situation, whereas iPaaS is built for this quick and flexible use of integrations.
Integration is the biggest IT challenge globally with nearly 17% of the IT budget dedicated to it, and the integration market doubling over a 5-year period from 2015 to 2020.
3. No Coding Skills Required
As iPaaS does not require coding or engineering skills, lines of business and various departments can build their own workflows while enterprise systems teams can be confident that the right guardrails, governance and security requirements are in place. As lines of business grow, they can independently and quickly deploy and manage their integrations without needing more support from enterprise IT. Thus, business professionals in various lines of business can become self-serving for their integration and automation needs without requiring additional headcount or an increase in IT budgets.
4. Helps Manage Employee Churn
A big problem for enterprise teams occurs when a key employee leaves the company. In such situations, a brand-new employee has to take over their integration and automation work. This can become problematic when the organization uses older integration tools or in-house custom code, and the departing employee has not created the right kind of documentation needed by their successor. This often results in the need for considerable overlap, training and a delay in getting back on track with the organization’s integration roadmap. As iPaaS is built for ease-of-use and team collaboration, it’s easy for new employees to quickly pick up and accelerate the organization’s automation strategy.
5. Make Better Business Decisions
In a world where business executives increasingly rely on data to make key decisions in a timely manner, it’s important for all your applications to be in sync. iPaaS works seamlessly in the background moving data between applications with the right governance in place, so that you can empower your company to make better and quicker decisions. In contrast, legacy tools often result in slower decisions or decisions with incomplete data, as teams scramble to pull together information upon request.
6. Insure Against Compliance and Security Risk
With businesses coming under increasing regulatory and compliance scrutiny, an iPaaS platform built with the best compliance and governance features in place can best position your organization to respond to such changes. Additionally, the state-of-the-art enterprise security features of iPaaS can provide your organization with just the kind of bulwark it needs against costly breaches and other risks.
7. Reduce Integration Technical Debt
Integration technical debt results when enterprise teams do not use the most optimal and long-term approach to building robust integrations and workflows for their organizations. Without iPaaS, this kind of debt can be very costly and quickly piles up as organizations fail to meet their goals, needing to add more headcount to address this debt. It is a problem for all organizations and can be alleviated by the full-featured, quick-to-build and deploy nature of iPaaS. Using a modern integration and automation platform, enterprise teams can become agile and flexible partners to their business teams and avoid the cost of technical debt.
By using iPaaS, companies can achieve a low total cost of ownership and have a powerful tool in place that can help achieve enterprise application integration goals. Want to learn more about how to evaluate iPaaS vendor? Check out the iPaaS buyer’s guide.
Enterprise Integration Playbook:
We’re going to reveal the critical elements of any good integration and automation platform. Then we’re going to drill one level deeper and explain the types of scenarios your IT, HR, sales, marketing, and customer success teams can and should be running. We’ll show you some of our best situations and show you exactly how to execute them to get immediate results. The best part is, iPaaS tools often feature easy-to-use click and drag functionality, meaning you don’t need a dedicated employee building integrations and workflows.
