iPaaS

You've probably heard of Software as a Service, or SaaS. What about Integration-Platform-as-a-Service (iPaaS) or Enterprise-Integration-Platform-as-a-Service (eiPaas) or even Digital Integration Hub (DIH)? Now - all this is available in low-code integration platform.

Frends is the B2B integration platform that enables API integration, API development, API management all with low-code integration approach. Frends enterprise iPaaS also support all the defacto industry standards like OpenAPI, oAuth2.0 out of the box.

If you are looking for iPaas solutions or iPaas vendors - you've found the most developer friendly and powerful iPaas in the markets. Frends is proud to be recognized for iPaaS in the 2023 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™

Why iPaaS?

You've likely heard of Software as a Service, or SaaS. Or maybe you have bumped into an Enteprise Application Integration (EAI) platform?

A SaaS company sells software to a user as a subscription. Along with that subscription, the software company provides technical support, customer service, and upgrade options to maximize their customers' ability to use their software.

Organizations rarely use just one software to satisfy all of their needs. Instead, they find a plugin here, some software there, and maybe even a widget until they have a smorgasbord of options that create the necessary IT-landscape needed to support and grow their business.

From a business standpoint, it can be costly to add more tools to your existing software. An ever-increasing demand makes it harder for software/system vendors to accommodate every customer need.

What happens when you have different systems operating on separate platforms that play an integral role in your business? You become subject to data loss, disjointed information, and misalignment. You need iPaaS to solve this challenge.

Between consumer expectations and internal systems, we need to find a way to create a more frictionless IT experience as a whole. iPaaS is the glue platform for your system hybrid cloud and on-premises landscape. Frends iPaaS enables distributed hybrid installations - you can run APIs or execute processes in on-premises or cloud-environment and yet control them centrally via single user-interface.

What is an iPaas?

Integration-platform-as-a-Service (iPaaS) is a modern cloud development platform for integrations. iPaaS gives organizations unlimited potential, and as we deepen our cloud dependency, iPaaS becomes integral to nearly every business model.

Most companies run on various systems, especially between their sales, marketing, and service departments. iPaaS is a solution that improves communication between different silos by integrating software and systems to better share data within and without the organization.

iPaaS also allows a company to expand its offering without the need to build out more services or further develop existing systems and services. Instead, it can integrate with another software that already provides that service and offer a unified, more robust solution to customers.

Enterprise iPaaS include API cloud development, process automation and orchestration capabilities. For example, frends BPMN2.0 low-code workflow language is way ahead of any other orchestration tool or RPA platform. The same low-code language is used to develop API, workflow or a process orchestration for long-running process automation. Same low-code visual language is used for monitoring. Each instance of a process includes all visual way to monitor and audit trail your processes and APIs. No more black-boxes or wasted time for finding the problem instead of fixing it. Frends is a low-code cloud and on-premises integration platform for all your integration and automation needs.

A modern iPaaS combines API, API management, low-code integration, robotic process automation, business process automation and artificial intelligence to a comprehensive hyperautomation platform.

All modern iPaas platforms are deployed in multitenant cloud platforms. Frends can also exist on your own on-premises as hybrid. Also - Frends provides virtually endless scalability via containerization.

Frends as an enterprise level iPaaS

Frends is built to be used for cloud service integration (CSI), application-to-application integration (A2A), business-to-business integration (B2B) scenarios and, increasingly, for mobile application integration (MAI) and IoT integration scenarios. In addition, its process automation and workflow managemenent capabilities make frends iPaaS a real enterprise level solution for your needs.

process design low-code ipaas

With Frends enteprise iPaaS you can develop, deploy, execute, manage, and monitor integration processes that connect multiple endpoints in various deployment models - on premise, cloud, and hybrid - so that they can work together.

Frends enterprise iPaaS is designed to support enterprise-class integration projects requiring:

  • High availability
  • Disaster recovery (HA/DR)
  • Security and data protection concerns
  • Service-level agreements (SLAs)
  • Technical support from the provider

platform monitoring audit-trail

A modern, state-of-the-art service cloud integration and development platform - also known as modern iPaaS - can do the following:

  • Managed File Transfers (MFT)
  • Extract, Transform & Load (ETL)
  • Data Mapping
  • Low-code integrations visually
  • Complex Scheduling
  • Development and hosting of APIs
  • Ability to scale APIs and processes in containters
  • Micro-services and miniservices (uncoupled and loosely coupled)
  • API Management
  • API integration and API data integration
  • Act as or use Enterprise Service Bus (ESB)
  • Development and hosting of Open Interfaces (OpenAPI)
  • Business Process Automation (workflows)
  • Controlling software robotics as part of an overall process when needed (BPA over RPA)
  • Intelligent Process Automation aka Hyperautomation
  • Acting as a Digital Integration Hub (DIH) to enable digitalization with old legacy systems

Frends as a Digital Integration Hub (DIH)

A Digital Integration Hub (DIH) is a backbone for your digitalization. DIH brings all the business functions and data that exist in your systems, available for use in every digitalization case you have.

Digital Integration Hub (DIH) connects to the legacy line-of-business systems with its numerous connectors - either application-specific adapters or technology. It merges and joins that data and publishes it for your digicases as APIs. This kind of miniservice has a huge problem. Legacy systems were never meant to withstand the pace and quantum of requests that this kind of facade api will sustain can be enormous and effectively kill the legacy system via exposing its interfaces too heavily.

The answer is simple - let's put an intermediate superfast data storage in between. The required business data from Legacy systems are pulled and prepared into a superfast and scalable storage. The Digital Integration Hub and API published from it shall use that storage to read and write the business data. When Frends enterprise ipaas (eIpaaS) is used as a Digital Integration Hub, even the APIs can be scaled within containerization if the workload gets extremely heavy.

Digital Integration Hub (DIH) requires the features explained in previous chapters: it must have the features to connect to all systems; host publish and scale APIs, scale limitlessly and be capable of use superfast intermediate data storage. All these features are built-in in Frends iPaas.

Frends enterprise ipaas is a low-code digital integration hub. Read more from here.

API Development: SOA Platform or Microsercices Platform?

SOA, or Service Oriented Architecture, is an quite old development pattern, where business functions are implemented with e.g. iPaaS. iPaaS in that use is often called by its old name, SOA platform. Currently those business functions are implemented as independetly scalable services without tight connections to legacy systems. SOA evolved to microservices. You can call Frends a SOA Platform, Microservices Platform, API Platform, Digital Integration Hub or Hyperautomation platform. Frends is an pervasive integration platform that fit to all of these approaches.

Frends is developed for API development and developers' need in mind. So as an integration API developer, you enjoy the easy BPMN2.0 language, option to put C# code snippet inside the visual processes, automated versioning, automated testing, click'n'play deployment and many other developer-friendly features. Our online documentation also include full API tutorials as well other integration related how-to -articles.

Frends support over 200 ready-made connectors to line-of-business systems like SAP and others. Additionally, it supports all the defacto standards like OpenAPI and OAuth and many more. Frends can also create processes from OpenAPI / Swagger files.

Integration-as-a-Service (IaaS)

iPaaS itself is a service that includes SLA as product level; also the related services like SLA solution support, solution development and can be bundled to a single service. This way the Customer may outsource all the integration headache to frends eipaas supplier.

-> Deploy anywhere with iPaaS -> Hyperautomate everything -> Monitor anything

What makes frends eiPaaS unique?

Frends enterprise ipaas (eiPaas) has features and a combination of functionalities that no other ipaas or integration platform include. Frends uses a standard notation (BPMN2.0) for low-code integration and orchestration. Whether the process is an API call that takes 50ms to run or a long-running order-to-invoice process, frends use the same standard visual notation for both. Frends eipaas uniquely joins low-code process automation to RPA and AI to enable automated processes to make decisions that humans were previously required to make. When combined with API-capabilities of frends - the result is a pervasive platform for all of your API, RPA, integration and API-management requirements. Frends can be used in a heavy-duty API-hosting as its hybrid architecture supports containerization. Commonly, slow back-end cannot handle the load that scaling integration platform can push through. An in-memory data storage between the fast frends APIs and slow back-end solve this challenge, and your legacy systems can act as the backbone for digitalization. Creating facade APIs with caching is something that Gartner calls Digital Integration Hub.

Frends is an iPaas in Azure, but with its distributed deployment architecture, execution can be done in any cloud or on-premises environment and still developed and monitored via single user interface: Frends iPaaS Control Panel.

HiQ is is the major Frends iPaas Vendor in Nordics.

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