What is an iPaaS?

You’ve likely heard of Software as a Service, or SaaS.

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, together, 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.

Additionally, most software companies have segregated systems themselves, pulling in data from the cloud and on-site systems to complete their own stack. Ascend2 found that 57% of marketers recognize integrating disparate technologies as the biggest barrier to success.

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

Between consumer expectations and internal systems, we need to find a way to create a more frictionless IT experience as a whole. iPaaS - integration platform as a service -is the glue.

iPaaS is the Solution

iPaaS is a platform that connects otherwise disjointed systems to deliver a unified solution to customers. It acts as a conduit for communication between multiple systems — allowing for integration and data sharing.

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.

For example, let's say you are a hairdresser with an ecommerce platform that helps hairstylists book, manage, and send appointment reminders to their clients. After using this ecommerce platform, you realize that stylists also want their clients to be able to leave reviews and make payments through your the website. To meet your customers’ needs, you could either build out and add these features to your ecommerce platform, or you could use iPaaS to connect your platform to existing review and payment software. The latter allows you to save time and money while also expanding your service offering and providing your clients with what they want.

How does iPaaS work?

A company would rely on iPaaS to supply the base infrastructure for creating connections and deploying software applications within any cloud services and on-premise enviornments.

The company will set the parameters for the types of connections that are allowed on the platform. These parameters could be in the form of an application programming interface (API), prebuilt connectors, or some other rule. We utilize a low-code connector apporach in frends.

Once these rules are in place, iPaaS creates a central ecosystem to view, manage, and modify all data, infrastructure, and operations. This, in turn, allows entities to easily modify their product, share information, and provide solutions to their market.

What about eiPaaS then?

Frends is an eiPaaS rather than an iPaaS, where the main differences between eiPaaS and iPaaS boil down to the scenarios where the platform is used.

An eiPaaS solution is typically 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. Rather than single use-case point-to-point solutions traditionally associated with a regular iPaaS solution.

This is achieved by developing, deploying, executing, managing and monitoring integration processes that connect multiple endpoints in various deployment models so that they can work together.

Unlike iPaaS solutions, eiPaaS solutions are 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

Frends enterprise iPaaS also enable Digital Integration Hub approach, which allows legacy modernization, 24/7 APIs from legacy and system-of-records and microservice like scalability to iPaaS based APIs. Digital Integraiton Hub (DIH) and Hyperautomation are features of enterprise level iPaaS.

What is iPaaS based Hyperautomation platform?

Hyperautomation is the combination of Business Process Automation (BPA), Robotic Process Automation (RPA) and Artificial Intelligence (AI).

Frends enterprise iPaaS is an API platform and Business Process Automation (BPA) platform. It includes capabilities to run RPA tools within its process orchestrations and change process execution based on AI-made decisions. For example, a loan request (API) trigger a Frends iPaaS process that queries CRM to check if the person is eligible for a loan. The process continues with an AI-based decision: what size the loan should be if the requested amount is too high risk for the bank. The exact process also activates RPA recordings to integrate ancient legacy systems that have no proper interfaces to connect. This combination of BPA, RPA and AI is called Hyperautomation or Intelligent Process Automation.