Why iPaaS

Integration Platform as a service (iPaaS) is a cloud platform service aimed at integrations and governance of any combination between cloud-based applications (SaaS) and on-Premises applications.  It is an integration model high recommended by Gartner.  In the past two year, it has rapidly expended its services and became a strategic integration tool.

iPaaS delivers capabilities that are typically found in Enterprise service buses (ESB), data integration tools, B2B gateways, managed file transfer products and API management platforms.  Its capabilities help business in integrations

• Involving any combinations between SaaS and on-premises applications.
• On both the data and application level. Application integration occurs before a business transaction is completed and is triggered by API calls; while Data integration happens after a business transaction is completed and data is saved into database.
• On real-time base and schedule based

Recently, iPaaS also starts providing services in

• ETL service. The data integration can be used to provide ETL-alike service to gather data for data warehouse.  SnapLogic, an iPaaS vendor, claiming to be strong on this.
• Data Quality Control. Some iPaaS vendors like Dell Boomi has built its own Data Quality service and also support 3-party data quality service.
• Master Data Management. Both Talend and Boomi have been offering the MDM service in the iPaaS.
• Web API Management Service. Dell Boomi has been providing this service since 2014, this service is also on other vendors’ road map.

Compare to traditional integration tools, iPaaS is more cloud friendly and secure.  The integration between two cloud applications (SaaS) takes place in the cloud directly and no longer requires data to travel to local integration tool then back onto the cloud.  With this approach, businesses avoid the risk to expose their local network to internet and benefit from the higher network speed and more effective security measures offered by vendors.  For the integration involving on-premises applications, iPaaS reduces the security risk by positioning its local agent as a proxy in the DMZ and allows communication over port #443 only.  Further security measures include limiting the external IPs to communication to the agent and/or establish VPN connection between cloud applications (SaaS) vendors and the local network.

Agile is an advantage of iPaaS.  Once a business subscribed an iPaaS, integrations can be created, modified, deposed as needed.  Business does not need to worry about whether the application is supported, security for the new integration, nor if any new cost could be applied.  For example, if Joe subscribes 5 connectors from Boomi, Joe then can use these connectors for any five types applications.  One day, if Joe replaces his Dynamic CRM with Salesforce, then all Joe needs to do is change the CRM integration to use the Salesforce connector, which is ready and available for him.  He does not need to contact Boomi (iPaaS vendor) for such change and there is no cost change, nor contract amendment.

Minimum changes are required on iPaaS in the upgrades of integrated applications.  Traditionally, upgrades on any integrated applications require significant amount of work on integration tools, especially on testing integration and more than often upgrading the integration tools too.  To the worse, it might trigger a chain of upgrades.  With iPaaS, connectors (AKA: adapters) are independent objects and are well tested by vendors.  To iPaaS, upgrading on integrated applications are simplified to the extend of editing related integration to use a different connector or editing the related connector to pass a new application version number.  There will be no extensive testing nor impact on other integrations.

While providing competitive capabilities, iPaaS significantly reduces the integration cost.

iPaaS eliminates the cost for developing and maintaining multiple integration tools.  As a unified integration platform, iPaaS supports integrations for all applications.  This is done by providing connectors for various applications.  Vendors generally have a big pool of connectors, for example, Boomi provides connectors for over 900 applications and SnapLogic supports over 800 applications.  In case native connectors are not available, iPaaS can connect to the application using database connectors or applications’ web service.  To the extreme case, there is always the last option of developing a connector for the application.  SnapLogic recently launched “SnapStore”.  It is a marketplace for developers to host and sale connectors, and other integration component, e.g. data-flow, data transformation.

Per its cloud service nature, iPaaS does not require heavy upfront investment and can be deployed within 2-6 weeks, depends on the project scope.  In our most deployment, the upfront investment is less than $20,000 and took less than 3 weeks to deploy.  Refer to chart below for vendor related costs in deployment.

• developer training,
• consulting fee for setting up an agent in cloud (and on-premises if hybrid integration is needed) and support developers to create critical integrations
• first year subscription fee, and
• certain hours of post deployment support

Small upfront investment plus the subscription model means businesses are flexible to switch to a different vendor if the service does not meet expectation.

With iPaaS, businesses can save on integration maintenance and assign technical resource to more value-adding projects.  iPaaS simplifies integrations to the extent that in the past years iPaaS was maintained by non-technical users outside of IT (currently referred as Citizen-integrators), such as marketing department.   Nowadays, iPaaS is generally maintained by iPaaS administrator, usually a staff in service desk or business department.  Most vendors provide free training for iPaaS administrators.  Administrators’ responsibilities include monitoring the alerts and failure error message, restart the failed integration or escalate the error and monitor the health of the integration agent.

Currently iPaaS leading vendors are Informatica, Dell Boomi and Mulesoft.  (refer to Gartner’s 2015 Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Integration Platform as a Service).  ScribeOnline is a fast growing vendor, its transaction based pricing policy is a strong advantage to SME clients.  Other big companies are also in the field now, including SAP (Hana Cloud Integration), IBM (WebSphere Cast Iron Live) and Microsoft (Azure BizTalk Services).