In recent years, there has been an undeniable increase in attention on the integration and automation space. As applications keep moving from on-prem to cloud (SaaS) and from cloud to hyper-specialized clouds, the need for integration and automation as the engine behind any digital transformation initiative has become more obvious than ever.
As a B2B SaaS provider, this shift has likely resulted in growing expectations around how your product operates and fits within the rest of your customer’s tech stack. As the demand for integrations persists, it’s probable that your product team is facing never-ending integration requests and a growing backlog.
What do your customers really need?
What do your customers really need to stand up integrations and automations between your product and the systems they live in? Is it a portfolio of APIs? A uniform API layer? Simple connectivity to JIRA or Salesforce?
What your customers need from integrations driven by your product is the ability to become:
- As efficient as possible, by minimizing/removing manual, no-value repetitive tasks to move data to/from your product
- As agile as possible, by allowing their processes, which your product is a crucial part of, to adapt to market changes and customer demands
Through this, your integration strategy must become:
- As innovative as possible, by being able to introduce and leverage cutting edge technology and offer new services to customers
- As competitive as possible, by offering connectivity and depth of integrations
- As profitable as possible, through new products and revenue streams
With that in mind, one could argue that creating a set of APIs might not directly relate to the outcomes the business desires. However, API-centric architectural approaches such as API-led connectivity try to position APIs as the silver bullet for every organizational need.
A more holistic approach to leveraging APIs for Enterprise Automation is needed to deliver on the true business outcomes you and your customers need.
Differentiating your product through automation
Leveraging your connections to other applications, you can provide users of your product with workflow automations that centralize their key business processes within your product.
This simple extension of the capabilities you’ve unlocked can fundamentally alter how clients and prospects view, use, and depend on your product. Moreover, it can give your product a competitive advantage.
By merely thinking about your customers’ integration requests through the lens of a jobs-to-be-done framework, you can unlock a solid list of workflow automations to build. Being the solution that streamlines critical workflows introduces new and unique benefits to using your product.
Clients can now use your product to centralize process automations and save time, prevent costly mistakes, delight key stakeholders, convert leads at a higher rate, and much more.
The need for enterprise automation
At Workato we believe we can get the best of both worlds and deliver on business outcomes by leveraging technical integration capabilities as the stepping stones that enable Enterprise Automation.
At Workato, more than iPaaS, Automation, or APIs, we have always had “Experience” at the center of our product. Every single touchpoint, from the way we build recipes, to our touchless operations capabilities, we are always thinking about how to commoditize the burden of integration while delivering on the value of automation.
Workato, the leader in Enterprise Orchestration, offers an Embedded Platform that accelerates product innovation and adoption by offering integrations at the speed and depth your customers demand.
Want to learn more?
Schedule a demo with one of our automation experts to better understand how the Workato Embedded Platform can benefit your product.
