Integrations made easy–and scalable
Today’s companies have, on average, being used in different departments across multiple teams.
These might include cloud-based apps, premise databases, flat files, internal tools, and miscellaneous databases. Your team is likely overwhelmed with internal requests to generate reports, upload data, merge records, clean up bad data, and more. According to , most workers toggle between apps 10 times per hour, which equates to as much as 32 days lost in workplace productivity per year–and the issue of app-hopping appears to be worsening.
Why can’t all of these applications just talk to each other?
What is an iPaaS?
If this sounds familiar, an integration platform as a service (iPaaS) can not only help manage these connections, but also give you the scale you need to grow. An iPaaS delivers cloud-based tools that enable teams to manage and integrate various applications and services from across their organization. For example, maybe your product managers want to share Fullstory data with a customer data platform like Snowflake or Segment.io and your marketers are getting information about key segments over into Marketo and your sales team wants that same information for their CRM. An iPaas can help manage through all of these scenarios. They are designed to simplify the integration process, often coming pre-configured with many commonly used business applications and a low setup cost.
Here are five additional reasons iPaaS may be a great fit for your integration needs:
Ease: With pre-built integrations and low- or no-code tools, you can connect a wide variety of data sources and applications in minutes–compared to hand-coded strategies that can take, on average, 34 days. Longer term, having all connections in one place streamlines the process of managing integrations and querying them when you’re looking for something specific.
Lower Cost: Because an iPaaS is typically billed as a monthly or annual subscription, your iPaaS represents a predictable, manageable expense. You only pay for the service level you need without incurring a large up-front investment. It also allows your team to avoid building an integration solution in-house, which would be expensive and complex to set up and manage.
Flexibility: As long as the integration platform offers a bridge for your applications, adding new apps to your tech stack doesn’t involve significant risk. An iPaaS can eliminate the labor, costs, hardware, and time commitment required to develop traditional integrations. This flexibility empowers end users by letting them use the technologies they want to use to do their jobs.
Transparency: Connecting systems and applications of value across the organization ensures a 360 degree view is made available to everyone who needs it, when they need it.
Alignment: With data readily available across systems and apps, employees in different departments can easily find and work off of the same set of information. By providing accurate, matching data across your applications, lines of business can collaborate more effectively and deliver better bottom-line results for the business.
Why not just use APIs?
What’s that? You’ve already integrated your systems with APIs?
While APIs are a great option for many companies, an iPaaS solution can still work alongside APIs to provide real value. Not all APIs are the same–they will be different depending on who creates them, when they’re created, and the scenario for which they were written. Too, you often have to shoulder the burden of maintaining them which, just like infrastructure and hardware, can be costly and time-consuming–especially at scale (remember that stat about 137 applications?).
Using an iPaaS makes the data consistent and readable, regardless of the system, application or API on the receiving end. Eliminating inconsistency yields one (big) additional benefit: speed. In their report, “How Pervasive Integration Enables your API Initiatives (and Vice Versa),” technology analyst Gartner finds that “Anecdotal evidence from Gartner clients’ experience suggests that by using an integration platform, time to value for integration logic can be reduced by up to 75% versus custom coding.”
That time to value is important when you’re looking to share information about your digital experience. When customer satisfaction and conversion are on the line there isn’t a moment to waste!
Fullstory and iPaas: Common use cases
Here are some ways we’re seeing customers put them to work:
If a user has more than 10 Rage Clicks (™) in one day, clients can leverage an iPaaS connector to automatically send the information to their marketing automation application and add the user to a product education drip campaign.
When a new note is created with the phrase “#bug,” the iPaaS connector can immediately share the update with Pivotal Tracker and create a new story on the backlog.
Successful keystone events (such as signup complete, order checkout complete) can alert a #wins channel in a messaging app like Slack to let everyone know the good news.
Whether you’re looking to free up hundreds of thousands of dollars from your budget, need a more efficient way to bridge data silos, or just need to speed up the onboarding (and offboarding) of applications–you may want to explore the money and time saving benefits of iPaaS technology a little further.
How to get started
In addition to our native integrations, Fullstory has pre-configured connectors available with three of the most popular iPaaS solutions, Tray.io, Workato, and Zapier to streamline automation and keep the process easy.
