Organizations are embracing SaaS faster than ever before. In 2023, organizations used an average of 371 SaaS apps (up 32% between 2021 and 2023).
Your customers are prioritizing SaaS app integrations in their buying criteria and offering these integrations can be a huge opportunity for your business. Through integrations, you can make your product stickier, increase retention, ensure valuable product differentiation and even boost revenue.
But how do you get started?
You may have tried working with an outside team to build one-off integrations, referring customers to an ISV or tech partner, or even building integrations in-house. But as the number and complexity of integration requests grows, your product team may be facing lengthy backlogs, resource constraints and/or budget limitations.
If you’re considering purchasing an embedded iPaas solution, you’ve likely decided the approaches above aren’t working. In this article, we’ll cover why you should leverage an embedded iPaas to meet your customers’ integration needs, and the 5 things you should look for when making your decision.
Why leverage an embedded integration platform?
By leveraging a modern embedded integrations platform, you can take full advantage of market trends and ensure your product’s success for years to come.
A modern embedded iPaaS allows you to address the connectivity and depth of integration you want to offer and manage the functionality you’ll need as your customer base and use cases grow. On top of that, the platform can offer automation solutions that fit seamlessly into your application and can be packaged and sold to your customers.
To find an embedded integrations solution that can grow with your business, you need a solution with the following:
1. Pre-built connectors to the apps and databases your clients have
Pre-built connectivity to hundreds of SaaS apps and databases can fast-track your product roadmap by expanding the breadth and depth for what can be integrated and automated. All the while, it saves your product and engineering teams a meaningful amount of time, which they can reallocate to higher-value work.
Using pre-built connectors, your team can also move quickly in providing an in-product marketplace where your clients can easily browse and get inspired by the full range of integrations available.
2. A low-code UI that’s easy for all lines of business to understand and use
Whether you enlist a team like professional services to build custom integrations or have a product owner package a pre-built integration configuration, you want the experience to be intuitive and empowering. A low-code UI makes it possible for non-technical resources to efficiently maintain and build upon your solution. In addition to saving your engineering resources’ time, you’ll be able to scale quickly as your customer base, use cases and integration strategy grows.
An embedded integration solution should be accessible for users of any background.
3. Flexible configuration for a seamless customer experience
An embedded integrations solution should offer flexibility in how you configure and deploy integrations and automations for your customers. This includes having the flexibility to embed the solution into your product so that customers can write their own automations. And it can also mean providing in-line experiences where customers can enjoy the benefits that come with using automations without having to think about the work that’s involved in setting up and managing them.
4. Enterprise-grade security that meets the most rigorous data protection standards
Handling this additional responsibility effectively at scale involves finding an embedded provider that’s equally committed to protecting your data. This includes finding one that’s compliant with GDPR, has passed the SOC-2 Type II security audit, has data centers across the globe—allowing you to comply with the data residency requirements in different regions—, etc.
5. Chatbots that let employees access your product from their business communication platform
Employees spend a significant amount of time in a business communications platform like Slack or Microsoft Team throughout their day-to-day work. Case in point: According to Slack’s internal data, their average user has the app open for longer than 9 hours per day, on average.
Given that this is where customers spend the bulk of their time, an embedded integration solution should offer customizable chatbots that communicate between your clients’ business communications platforms and your product.
Using this type of chatbot, you can offer a productized extension of your platform that allows users to access specific data or actions from your product without leaving their business communications platform.
Workato’s Embedded Platform
Workato, the leader in enterprise automation, offers an Embedded Platform that accelerates product innovation and adoption by offering integrations at the speed and depth your customers demand.
The Workato Embedded Platform, which is used by brands like Autodesk, Unanet, CyCognito, and Tango Card, allows you to:
- Take embedded integrations to market 3x faster with access to 400+ pre-built connectors to SaaS applications and databases and hundreds of thousands of automation templates—which we refer to as “recipes”
- Enable less technical resources to implement integrations and automations in minutes via our low-code UI (freeing up engineering resources to focus on your core product)
- Seamlessly embed our platform directly into your product with the configuration options that meet your needs
- Leverage our patented Workbot to build chatbots that can be incorporated into your product’s workflow automations—or that simply allow clients to access data and actions from your product without leaving their business comms platform
