Integrations can have a detrimental effect on your business in a number of ways, including missed or delayed sales due to missing integrations, reduced time to market, derailed product roadmaps, subpar user experiences, and increased support workload.
As a result, an increasing number of SaaS teams are using embedded integration platforms to speed up the delivery of native integrations and improve the client integration experience.
But what do embedded integration platforms actually do? Why do they exist? Will they actually aid in the expansion of your SaaS? And how do you decide which one is best for your team?
Table of Contents
Embedded iPaaS
Embedded integration platforms as a service (iPaaS), also known as embedded iPaaS, are solutions that assist SaaS providers in creating and managing native integrations that link their current products to the other products that their clients use. A low-code integration designer, pre-built connectors to popular apps, embeddable integration user experiences (UX) for consumers, integration support tools, and the infrastructure to build and run the integrations are just a few of the features available on these potent platforms.
By decreasing effort, abstracting complexity, offering pre-made management tools and infrastructure, and letting non-developers handle much of the integration job, these solutions can enable SaaS teams to build better integrations faster than they could with conventional techniques.
They can also offer a better consumer experience than conventional techniques. End users benefit from increased dependability and stability, self-serve support tools, and the opportunity to investigate and self-activate integrations.
What is the need for Embedded iPaaS?
Software integrations are now more of a requirement than a luxury. On average, 137 apps are used by mid-market companies. To provide users with the data access, insights, and workflow automation they require to conduct business today, these apps must communicate with one another. If a B2B SaaS company wants to offer a competitive product and retain its customers, integrations must be taken into consideration. Additionally, many SaaS businesses may find that having simple native interfaces gives them the competitive advantage they require.
However, because traditional integration approaches are cumbersome, expensive, and ineffective, the majority of SaaS organizations fail to realize these advantages. Developers must become familiar with a variety of APIs, authentication techniques, and data formats in order to create integrations from scratch. This time-consuming method might be successful one or two times, but it cannot scale to accommodate numerous integrations or even a small number of integrations with intricate business requirements.
The traditional dev-heavy approach to developing integrations frequently causes or makes business problems worse. Companies frequently have a backlog of integrations because integrations take so long to create and implement, which hinders the sales and onboarding processes. Because of incomplete integrations, deals are lost. Furthermore, the considerable engineering effort delays time to market and the release of new features by diverting development teams from their primary tasks. Building integration features like logging, which are unrelated to their business domain, takes up a lot of this time, and there is also the struggle with issues like security and scalability. Additionally, developers are largely responsible for the initial creation as well as continuous maintenance and support in the traditional approach to integrations. Moreover, the typical method of integration doesn’t offer a pleasant user experience. Because integrations are frequently provided as services, they lack the finished feel of native app components.
What advantages does Embedded iPaaS offer?
Integrations can be constructed more quickly with embedded iPaaS. It enables you to turn them from a major competitive advantage to an organizational burden. Businesses that use embedded iPaaS solutions experience significant business gains. Here are five ways they aid in SaaS growth.
- More sales are closed quickly
A prospect would typically look for another vendor if your program doesn’t interact with their current systems. Missing integrations frequently cause offers to be lost, or at the very least, they make the sales process more difficult and prolong the time it takes to complete.
You may quickly create a comprehensive library of the connections your prospects require with the help of an embedded iPaaS, enabling you to accept more of their integration requests. Instead of waiting months to implement new integrations, you can do so in a matter of days or hours—possibly even in time for a demo.
Moreover, by including an integration marketplace in your product, you can more readily highlight the integrations you offer and show prospects that you can support their present and future tech ecosystems.
- Boost customer loyalty and minimize churn
The reduction of client turnover is a top priority for SaaS businesses, which generally have annual churn rates of 32 to 50%.
The good news is that SaaS organizations that use an incorporated iPaaS for integrations see an increase in the typical number of integrations among their clients. This is due to the fact that integrations involve a great deal less work, allowing you to construct more of them. Additionally, it’s simple to find accessible integrations via your marketplace rather than having to contact your support team via phone or email.
As integration adoption rises, your app shifts from being a simple replacement to becoming a tightly connected component of each customer’s complete tech stack. Your app not only performs its basic tasks but also powers customer workflows and becomes a hub for business operations across its whole tech stack.
In other words, more widespread usage of integration makes it more difficult for users to switch to another program.
- Reduce developer workload to focus on the main product
SaaS relies heavily on speed. Unfortunately, creating integrations from scratch consumes a large portion of your development capability, which slows the rate of innovation and speed to market. The effort needed for integrations is significantly reduced with embedded iPaaS, freeing up your developers to spend on improving your core value proposition.
It takes far less time to create connections utilizing a low-code integration designer and ready-made app connectors than it does to write custom code. The amount of code you need to write is greatly reduced by these technologies, which abstract complexities like authentication and APIs.
Like many teams, yours can even delegate the creation of integrations to non-engineers, including your developers, only when something specifically tailored is required.
You can create productized integrations that can be customized for every customer with the aid of embedded iPaaS solutions. This helps prevent the development of one-off integrations and the associated tech debt and support concerns.
Conclusion
With the help of embedded iPaaS solutions, productized integrations that can be customized for each customer can be created. This lessens the risk of creating one-off integrations and resulting in tech debt and support issues. Connect with SaaSworthy, to know everything about it.
