How Enterprise IT Teams Can Leverage a Modern Integration and Automation (iPaaS) Platform

December 14, 2022

The past decade has seen unprecedented growth in the role, importance and challenges faced by enterprise IT teams. The growth in SaaS app usage by companies is about 30% on average with IT and security departments growing their app usage at a whopping 75% or more over the past couple of years.

As a result, enterprise systems teams that are responsible for entire areas of systems and app usage need to be able to evolve with this high growth and respond fast to strategic threats and opportunities.

Teams that adopt a modern integration and automation platform like iPaaS (integration platform as a service) are well-positioned for success in this environment.

Eliminate Data and Application Silos

The meteoric growth in the adoption of best-in-class SaaS applications has helped companies pick the best solution to solve specific needs across different lines of business. At the same time, companies also use many on-premise systems to solve key business problems.

A big problem caused by growth in the usage of disparate systems is that enterprise systems teams need to find a way to manage integrations and build workflows across apps that are not designed to effectively communicate with each other. This often results in the formation of data silos that hinder both work and strategic decision-making.

A modern integration and automation solution, iPaaS, makes it easy to connect all these systems so that they can seamlessly talk to each other, and that data can flow across applications with the right governance checks in place.

Speed of Deploying Integrations

A modern iPaaS platform can help enterprise teams connect to new systems in a matter of minutes, test integrations and deploy workflows into production faster than by using older integration tools or by using custom-built integrations.

In today’s highly competitive and fast-paced business world, enterprise teams can effectively respond to the business needs of faster integration deployment. Moreover, as modern iPaaS tools use simple, easy-to-use interfaces, it is a lot easier to maintain, upgrade and collaborate on your workflow automations.

At Western University of Health Sciences, they started using iPaaS to automate simple tasks – things like automatic VPN access for approved users, keeping assets up to date and reconciling data between Active Directory and Banner.

“A lot of these tasks aren’t tasks that are necessarily hard for anyone to do manually, it’s more that they are repetitive and time-consuming.”David Mitchell, enterprise application administrator, said. And that’s been one of the biggest draws for iPaaS.

“You know, we don’t have a DeLorean to get time back,” Mitchell said referencing the popular time travel trilogy Back to the Future. “But, we do have iPaaS.”

Low Total Cost of Ownership

The best modern iPaaS platform is on that’s purpose-built for a low total cost of ownership. Enterprise teams can take advantage of predictable pricing that does not increase as you connect new applications and systems to your workflows.

In addition, this platform avoids the cost of employee turnover as it is very easy for a new employee to pick up and manage your workflows. This is a stark contrast to the case of custom-built integrations where code is highly individualized and often lacking in clear documentation.

Enterprise systems teams can also benefit from the robust API management, governance and security features provided by iPaaS. In a world where security breaches can be very costly, and where the loss of customer trust can be devastating, enterprise systems teams find iPaaS to be reliable insurance at a low price point.

At Metropolitan State University, Ben Deneen, Director of Enterprise Information and Application Services, and his team are using TeamDynamix iPaaS to bring together several different systems across different campuses.

“We were using a different iPaaS tool before and it took a lot of time to spin up and it became really expensive for what we were hoping to do with it,” Deneen said. “It was fine for connecting macro systems, but we couldn’t scale it the way we wanted.”

With TeamDynamix iPaaS, Deneen is not having the same issues. In fact, they’ve been able to move quickly with the new iPaaS tool and use it to integrate all of their systems from their old ERP to Workday, Active Directory and more.

“We’re able to easily spin up these connections and make it turnkey so anyone can use it,” Deneen said.

And with so many campuses across the state of Minnesota, it’s been invaluable to be able to have a common integration platform and workflow engine with governance and tracking. “Every time something runs, I want all that information, I want the error logs, I want that all documented so that we can run as efficiently and effectively,” Deneen said. “It’s given us a lot of good standardization across our locations and across all the disparate systems we have in place – it brings it all together.”

High Scalability

One of the key issues faced by enterprise systems teams is that they need to help their organizations along the high-growth path they are on without seeing a corresponding increase in costs. A modern iPaaS platform can help with both challenges. Enterprise teams use iPaaS to build and launch new workflows and integrations that can help their companies achieve their biggest strategic goals. In addition to this, iPaaS platforms do not require coding, so lines of business can build and manage their own workflows without needing help from IT and new full-time employees to code and manage the process.

A Complete Integration and Automation Solution

High-performing enterprise IT teams need a single place where they can manage the full range of integrations and workflow deployments. The TeamDynamix iPaaS platform is built with ease of use in mind and with a full range of features including modern API management; state of the art security and governance; out-of-the-box connectors; best-in-class quality and troubleshooting features; and more that can position your team for the high growth and challenges of the next decade.

Since purchasing iPaaS from TeamDynamix, the main focus for Ken Libutti, CIO, and his team at Palm Beach State University has been data integration and transparency, “We’ve made sure that we can populate the data warehouse using iPaaS to get the data out of our different applications and systems, and use all of that data to populate the dashboards we’ve created for our administrative and executive staff,” he said.

But there’s also been a focus on what the user interface looks like for students and faculty as well.

“We want to present a single pane of glass to the students so they can really see what their education plan is, what their progress looks like, who their advisor is and what events are relevant to them if they’re in clubs or things like that,” Libutti said. “So, we have several interfaces that we’re working on and trying to understand how we can pull those together using iPaaS and our data warehouse.”

For Libutti and his team, they’re just scratching the surface of what they feel they can do with iPaaS.

“We want all the data to come into the data warehouse because we know TeamDynamix iPaaS can keep all those APIs in sync, which keeps the data in sync, and it ensures we are doing the transformations that need to be done to the data,” Libutti said. “Having that single source of truth – knowing the data is in sync and valid – is our main focus and why we were so interested in investing in iPaaS.”

This post was originally published in August 2021 and has been updated with new information.

IT Service Management Vendor Rankings

Enterprise Integration Playbook:

TeamDynamix was recognized as an ‘Honorable Mention’ in the 2022 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for IT Service Management (ITSM)

TeamDynamix Partership Program

TeamDynamix Ranked 1st by Info Tech

How Enterprise IT Teams Can Leverage a Modern Integration and Automation (iPaaS) Platform

Eliminate Data and Application Silos

Speed of Deploying Integrations

Low Total Cost of Ownership

High Scalability

A Complete Integration and Automation Solution

You might also like:

The 5 Key Use Cases of iPaaS Explained

3 Non-Negotiable IT Service Management Features

The Benefits of Automating Service Requests in the Public Sector

ITSM – SERVICE MANAGEMENT

CAI – CONVERSATIONAL AI

PPM – PROJECT PORTFOLIO MANAGEMENT

ESM – ENTERPRISE SERVICE MANAGEMENT

IPAAS – ENTERPRISE INTEGRATION

This website uses cookies to ensure you get the best experience on our website. By closing this notice you agree to the use of cookies.