Benefits of Using an Embedded iPaaS for Integrations

The definition of embedded iPaaS is a platform that enables a SaaS company to build integrations connecting its product to the other apps its customers use and deliver those integrations as product features. 

Simply put, an embedded iPaaS enables your team to build integrations for your customers. That's good because your SaaS app needs integrations, and that need only grows as the number of your customers increases. 

Let's examine how an embedded iPaaS benefits your team and customers.

 Embedded iPaaS Helps You Win More Deals

Traditionally, many SaaS teams have treated integrations as services, building them one at a time, exactly customized for the customer, and usually well after onboarding the customer with the main product. This approach wastes time and complicates maintenance, and these integrations are generally not ready for prime time. That is, they have base functionality but often no UI and don't come with utility functions like alerts that make it simpler for everyone to know when there are problems.

Instead, the integrations are primarily black boxes. When they work, the customers are happy. But when these integrations have issues, the customers must rely entirely on your support and Dev-Ops teams to fix problems for integrations they can't even access themselves. 

An embedded iPaaS helps your team move integrations from behind-the-scenes to front-and-center. With an integration marketplace (part of the embedded iPaaS), you can list and describe your integrations like any other product feature. You can also set things up so your customers can activate many integrations themselves.

In addition to making your integrations visible (like the rest of your product features), an embedded iPaaS allows you to build an integration once but then deploy it to as many customers as needed. Gone are the days of building slightly different integrations for each customer, with all the extra overhead that entails.

Customers also have insight into their integrations far beyond merely activating them. They can configure them, check the status, view the logs, and even set up and receive alert notifications for any status changes. In short, an embedded iPaaS helps your team turn your integrations into first-class features of your product.

Increase Your Team's Efficiency with Embedded iPaaS

An embedded iPaaS reduces friction and frustration by increasing your team's efficiency in building, deploying, and managing integrations.

For building, integrations with an embedded iPaaS are much faster because the infrastructure is already in place. Security, redundancy, auth, monitoring, and more are included with the platform, so your team doesn't need to build that functionality. Beyond the infrastructure, an embedded iPaaS comes with API connectors and other built-in code to perform standard functions (math, field mapping, loops, and many more). These components save even more time for your teams.

For deployment, an embedded iPaaS lets you set up the integration with a different configuration for each customer. This ensures that you can deploy a single integration to as many customers as needed while giving each of them a configuration that ensures they send and receive precisely the data they need. And the embedded iPaaS fits into your CI/CD pipeline, so the release process can closely match what your teams are already using.

For management, when you need to change the code for integration, you can do that in a single place but then re-deploy that integration for dozens or hundreds of customers at once. When customers have issues with their integrations, an embedded iPaaS enables your support team and your customers to have visibility into integration configs, logs, and alerts. In many cases, customers can perform first-level troubleshooting for their integration issues.

With all these efficiency gains, your team can spend less time building, deploying, and managing a single integration and instead spend that time working on all your product features (including other integrations). Instead of dealing with the common issue of "I've got to do this integration, but that'll postpone X feature of the product," you will be able to ensure that your integrations and other product features continue to increase your product's value.

Embedded iPaaS Facilitates Excellent Customer Experience  

Historically, integrations have been a significant source of risk and delay in customer onboarding, with new customers' integration needs often becoming stuck in a dev backlog. When they eventually become high priority, there's usually poor communication between customers, services teams, and dev teams about requirements.

An embedded iPaaS enables you to quickly deliver new customer integrations as part of onboarding. Customer-facing teams can rapidly test, deploy, and iterate to ensure these new integrations work as customers expect.

Many SaaS teams lack the tools to support their customers' integrations. As a result, customers are often the first to know when an integration fails. As support staff struggle to determine what went wrong, they must frequently rely on devs and DevOps to access logs or other info.

An embedded iPaaS provides customer-facing teams with a complete integration management environment that covers everything from configuration and activation to logging, monitoring, and alerting tools. This allows them to provide integration support and efficiently examine and resolve integration problems when they occur instead of days later. 

For your more advanced customers (often those with larger organizations having extensive dev resources), an embedded iPaaS allows you to provide them with an embedded workflow designer and templates. Your customers can then build their own one-off integrations between your product and whatever custom systems they have in place. Your customers have the integration they need, and your team isn't tied down building one-off integrations for a single customer – which you can't repurpose for your other customers).

Don’t Try Scaling Without Embedded iPaaS

It is possible to provide B2B integrations using the traditional approach by building everything in-house. But that's no longer feasible for most SaaS companies, given the sheer number of integrations their customers expect. And while other tools can help, only an embedded iPaaS is purpose-built to connect your product to the other apps your customers use.

If you need integrations for your customers and would like to create benefits for everyone – including sales, onboarding, support, engineering, and your customers – then an embedded iPaaS is the right tool for the job.