How iPaaS Helps Integrate Systems
By Alex Oprica | October 7, 2021
User experience (UX) is not only about the visitors to your website…it also includes your staff and employees, or the employee experience (EX). Today, Astriata’s Director of Development, Alex Oprica, takes a closer look at one tool you can use to smooth out some internal UX wrinkles.
A Tool for Getting Connected: iPaaS
iPaaS, or Integration-Platform-as-a-Service, is a self-service, cloud-based solution that standardizes how applications are integrated. Anyone (even non-technical users) can use iPaaS out of the box to quickly build the integration flows for sharing data within an organization, or with multiple companies.
This solution is particularly good for small businesses, because the interfaces require less coding, present integrations visually, and include prebuilt connectors. And, because iPaaS is a cloud-based solution, a business or association can rely on it to supply the infrastructure.
What are the benefits of iPaaS?
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Faster time to value:
Operations and development teams can help themselves to iPaaS—they simply subscribe and start integrating. -
Reduced integration costs:
iPaaS solutions are typically much less expensive and time consuming than custom integrations, message-oriented middleware, and enterprise integration projects such as enterprise service bus (ESB) and enterprise application integration (EAI). The reduced cost and faster implementation make integration a possibility for more mid-sized and smaller businesses as well. -
Single toolset:
iPaaS provides a single toolset and a consistent process for data integration between all the apps in your enterprise, whether they’re on-premises or in the cloud.
Words to the Wise: Best Practices
So now that you know what it is and why it can help, it’s important to do a little homework before you jump in. Having a sound data integration plan before you begin syncing your data between multiple apps can make a big difference in the outcome. For your plan to be successful, you need to:
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Define the goals you want to achieve with data integration.
For example, you may want to integrate internal business data to have a holistic view of your business and build better analytics reports. Or you might want to integrate customer data from different applications to have a 360-degree view of your customers. -
Decide what kind of data you want to integrate.
Once your data integration goals are set, you will have a much clearer idea of what kind of data you need to integrate. iPaaS platforms set algorithms to sync the same type of “object” between apps. These objects can be names, emails, deals details, service tickets, etc. However, not every iPaaS can integrate all the objects of your apps. Determining which kind of data you need to integrate is key to deciding which iPaaS to use. -
Find out where this data lives.
In which applications are you storing this information? These are the tools you’ll want to integrate with iPaaS. For example, if you want to sync customer data, find out which applications are collecting it across your business. -
Figure out how the data should flow.
Decide how the data needs to flow between your tools. You might need one-way, trigger-action data pushes, or you might need a real-time, two-way synchronization.
So where’s a good place to start?
One of the most straightforward iPaaS integrations is connecting your email marketing software and your CRM. The marketing department will enrich their email lists with data from the CRM, which means they will have more opportunities for segmentation and personalization. And if it’s a two-way sync, your sales department will get qualified leads back to the CRM, which leaves them with solid leads and all the current data in one place.
Ready to see how an iPaaS solution can help your systems connect and smooth out your EX to improve your UX? Give us a call and we can give you some ideas of how this might benefit your internal processes and website.