Celigo is an integrator platform. An iPaaS, or integration Platform as a Service, is a platform that standardizes how applications are integrated into an organization, making it easier to automate business processes and share data across applications. By leveraging iPaaS technologies, growing companies can eliminate manual processes and reduce dependency on spreadsheets and email, while increasing visibility, speed, and accuracy across their organization.
The variety of business applications available today address every conceivable challenge that a company could encounter. Most of these apps are simple to use, easy to set up, offer beautiful interfaces, and require no training.
The concept of integrating applications has existed for years. But for most companies, it’s an afterthought after new applications are added. From there, integration projects are tackled on an as-needed basis. When they ultimately do move forward, companies often use a patchwork of application integration solutions.
Vendor-Built or Native Integrations
Most software includes out-of-the-box native integrations allowing users to quickly connect with specific applications. For example, practically every marketing automation tool today connects directly to Salesforce. This is very convenient, often covers the most popular use cases, and usually don’t have additional subscription costs.
However, the challenge with native integrations is that they are designed to sell and renew the vendor’s offering and typically only cover the use cases that will check the box in the sales cycle. This means they are typically static, not designed with enough flexibility or customization capabilities to address important edge cases.
Third-Party Point-to-Point (P2P) Connectors
Just like vendor-built integrations, point-to-point connectors may be very convenient and cost-effective upfront. However, they were typically domain-specific, and were not designed with flexibility to accommodate larger business processes. Also, with thousands of cloud apps available today, it’s difficult to develop individual point-to-point connectors for every possible permutation of business applications.
Build it Yourself (DIY) Integrations
Anyone can build their own core integration. By leveraging code and APIs, custom integrations can be very powerful and are often the preferred path taken by many operational teams. However, because they require trained technical resources and are very time consuming, it is hard to build them in a scalable, robust way. For example, integration requires the critical functionality such as error-handling and guaranteed data-delivery, which are not trivial to build from scratch for every integration. Further, as processes change, these application integrations need to be meticulously maintained and updated by stretched technical resources.
One of the increasingly common integration strategies today involves the adoption of an integration Platform as a Service, or iPaaS.
Standardizing Integrations with iPaaS
The term “iPaaS” was coined by advisory firm Gartner in referring to a cloud-based integration platform that makes connecting applications and business processes much easier. Integration Platform as a Service solutions holistically standardize how applications are added to an organization, making it easier to move static or transactional data across applications while providing critical integration functionality out-of-the-box.
Leveraging an integration platform makes sense for growing companies since it standardizes how to monitor, maintain, and update processes across applications, which are added and changed every day. Companies can quickly integrate applications into business processes, and no longer need to reinvent the wheel with building integration functionality. With the right iPaaS, both line-of-business users (“citizen integrators”) and technical users (“integration professionals”) can build, manage, and maintain integrations.