Welcome to our session on
what is Integration Platform-as-a-Service
otherwise known as iPaaS.
And what makes this as-a-service unique
is really the integration platform piece of it.
So today we're going to talk about
the why, the how and the what of it.
But before we get into that,
you may be wondering why iPaaS is even relevant to you.
So let's start with a simple analogy.
Like many of you, I have a phone
with potentially hundreds of different apps on it,
and I probably only use 5 to 10 on any given day.
You can translate this experience to your organization.
Maybe there's only 5 to 10 different apps or systems
that you're using on a day-to-day.
But if you think about the entire
organization as a whole, there's
potentially thousands of different
applications that need to be managed
across your entire organization.
This can get really overwhelming to
be able to effectively manage and monitor.
That's where iPaaS comes into the
picture and leads us into the why.
If you consider the different types
of systems that you might have
within your company, they tend to
look something like this.
B2B,
SaaS applications,.
devices,
data,
and on-premise systems.
Now, traditionally, you would see a lot of businesses
wanting to be able to leverage the data
across many of these different types of systems.
So they'd build these integration
points between each of these.
But going back and forth, you can
see how this can quickly get
overwhelming, having to manage and
monitor all of the different types
of connections that are happening
within the organization.
And there's certainly no reusability coming into play.
That's where iPaaS comes in.
It sits right at the top of all of
this and serves as a management
layer for being able to interact
and integrate with all of these
different types of systems more
effectively and more efficiently
for you and your business.
So let's see how we can put this
into play with a simple example.
Over to the how.
Here we have Taylor.
Taylor is a very successful sales
agent selling laptops to her
customers, and she's already secured
a new customer opportunity.
Traditionally, all of her customer
information is stored in the CRM.
And what Taylor needs to do is to
be able to take all of that data and
put it into her coding system so
that she can send the quote to this customer.
Now, if you look at traditional
methods for this, Taylor
would have to go into her CRM,
copy down the fields and then
re-input them into the quoting
system an easy way for
manual errors to pop up with mis
typing or typos and things like that.
Or maybe it's just a little bit more
sophisticated and she's able
to download a spreadsheet from her
CRM and then re-upload that into the coding system.
But you might see more issues where fields are
being mis-mapped between the different systems.
And this is also just an extra
tedious step within the process.
Again, this is where iPaaS can make
the whole entire process more
efficient by sitting right between
these two applications
and building an integration between
both of them, rather than requiring
Taylor to serve as the middleman.
This means as soon as she starts
typing the customer's name within
the quoting system, it can populate
all of the corresponding data for her automatically.
But the best part about iPaaS is
this isn't the end of where you're
able to integrate and bring
different data and systems together.
She can also add in things like her payment platform.
So that the customer can immediately
respond to the quote by providing payment.
Or maybe she also wants to integrate
with her procurement system so
that the order can be sent out for delivery right away.
This can all be managed through her
iPaaS and building these different
integrations between the whole process.
This is a larger example within the
company, but there might be use
cases that she wants to bring to her team specifically.
A great example of this is if she
has a new mission
to be able to notify her team
whenever a lead is received.
So she could go into Salesforce,
and set up an integration with her
iPaaS that sends a message in Slack
to her team every time
a new lead is received.
This is part of the build piece of
it. Taylor is able to build this
integration between these two different systems.
How is she able to do that?
Leveraging connection points.
Often you'll see with common SaaS
applications like Salesforce and
Slack, there are out of the box
connectors that make these
connections even faster for her to be able to use.
But an added piece of this might be
she only wants to notify her team
when it's qualified leads.
So she needs to make sure that the
data that's being received within
here is only alerting when
it's a qualified lead.
That's where the transform piece
comes in, where she's able to
transform the data that's flowing
between these systems so that
whenever she gets a notification to
her team, it's only of the most
qualified caliber of potential customers.
The last bit really starts to look
at her manage where she'd be able
to oversee this entire
process and ensure that it's
operating without any errors
or as efficient, as efficiently as possible.
That was our how.
So let's get in just a little bit
deeper to the what of it?
Here, we were just taking an example
where Taylor was able to build
this different integration flows.
Now, with the build piece, you'll
generally see tooling like no-code authoring
with high code options available as well.
But that really facilitates building
these types of integration flow
patterns more easily by any type of user.
The next piece is really around connect.
This is where we're able to get into
things like the connectors we talked
about which serve as pre-built
out of the box connection
points with common SaaS applications
so you only have to provide
your credentials to get started.
This also includes things like
templates, which might be the full
pattern prebuilt for the user.
In the industry these are commonly called "pips".
The next piece is really around transform.
Here's where we saw we were able to
transform specific types of data.
But it also applies to A.I.
transformations, which can provide
help with mapping fields
or transforming different types
of formulas and providing
those for you more effectively.
The last bit is around manage,
and here this can apply to a lot
of things as well, but you typically
see it applying in terms of
observability and
monitoring, to
make sure that you're able to
troubleshoot and debug all of your
processes across the business and
maintain all of your integration point.
Excellent.
Well, hopefully through these
examples you are able to see
why Integration Platform-as-a-Service is so pivotal to any
business looking to transform digitally.
Thank you so much for your time.
Thank you.
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