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What is Embeddable iPaaS and Why Should SaaS Consider Using It?

By
Peter Jung
May 6, 2024
8
minute read
Summary
Embeddable iPaaS solutions (A.K.A Native iPaaS) focus on simplifying the process of building user-facing embedded integrations.

Embeddable iPaaS platforms enable SaaS companies to ship and maintain the native integrations their users need significantly faster. Essentially, engineering teams use an embeddable iPaaS to build integrations that feel like native product features for their application.

Today, every SaaS company gets consistent requests for integrations from their prospects or existing users. However, they struggle to ship these integrations quickly enough because of insufficient engineering resources. Companies want to focus their engineers on core differentiating product features, not integrations.

Embeddable iPaaS solutions streamline the process of building these integrations and minimize the resources required by offloading the complexities of interacting with third-party app APIs, such as authentication, token management, rate limits, concurrency, and debugging user issues. Instead, engineers need only to define the integration logic.

However, before we delve into the different features and capabilities of embeddable iPaaS solutions and how your team may benefit from using one, we need to take a step back and cover the overarching iPaaS category.

What is an iPaaS Solution?

You may have heard the term iPaaS solution more frequently in recent years. These solutions generally serve as building blocks and connectors for developers to build internal workflow automations and internal tooling that require connectivity between various APIs, removing the complexities of building and maintaining integrations with messy or incomplete API documentation.

This has been a game changer for fast-growing companies, as they have recognized the need to focus their engineering efforts and resources on differentiating through building unique product features in an increasingly competitive landscape.

As such, it is only logical that companies try to offload engineering resources wherever they can across other workstreams by using iPaaS solutions, which has led to the success of platforms such as Mulesoft, Workato, and even Zapier.

However, the large demand for these iPaaS solutions also highlights a much larger issue - the fragmentation of the SaaS ecosystem and internal technology stacks. This is precisely where embedded iPaaS solutions come in.

Types of iPaaS Solutions

Integration needs range from simple data transfers between systems to complex user-centric app features managing authentication and tokens. Here are some common types:

  1. System-centric Integration Solutions: These B2B enterprise integration solutions keep data consistent across multiple systems by ensuring that changes in one system are reflected in another.
    • Common tools used: ETL (Extract, Transform, Load), ESB (Enterprise Service Bus), Message Queuing, EDI (Electronic Data Interchange)
  2. User-centric Integration Solutions: These tools provide integration for their users, managing app connections, user identities, and access permissions, ensuring secure and seamless access to various services and applications.
    • Common tools used: Integration Platform as a Service (iPaaS), Identity and Access Management (IAM), Single Sign-On (SSO)

What is an Embeddable iPaaS Solution?

Embeddable iPaaS solutions focus on simplifying the process of building user-facing, embedded integrations. Unlike regular iPaaS, where users need to go to the iPaaS platform to use the integration, embeddable iPaaS platforms allow SaaS companies to fully white-label and provide the integration as if it was developed in-house.

With embedded integrations, end-users do not even know there’s another product providing the integration - it comes out of the box for them as soon as they authenticate via SSO for the various integrated apps.

Here are two common examples of embeddable iPaaS:

  • CRM Sync: Enable data from your app to update records in your users’ CRMs (e.g., Salesforce, Hubspot), or for new leads/accounts/opportunities in their CRMs to also show up in your app.
  • Message Sync: Allow your users to receive Gmail, Slack, or Teams messages whenever an event occurs in your app, to the channel of their choosing.

Traditionally, companies have had to build these integrations in-house from the ground up. This requires navigating complex and messy API documentation and generally takes 4-6 weeks of engineering resources per integration. Even after launch, maintaining and patching these integrations becomes a consistent burden that development teams need to allocate valuable resources and time towards.

In addition to that, as your team grows and the resources in charge of building new integrations change, you will inevitably need to deal with inconsistencies in integration, which can be difficult to reconcile.

For a full in-depth guide that covers the benefits and tradeoffs of building embedded/native integrations in-house vs. leveraging an embedded iPaaS, you can check out our Build vs. Buy: Native Integrations Guide here.

What are the Features of Embeddable iPaaS Solutions?

Primarily, all embeddable iPaaS solutions aim to solve the issue of resource allocation and accelerate the deployment of integration roadmaps. This is done by abstracting away the most complex aspects of building these integrations, and while not all platforms come with the same comprehensive set of functionalities, most offer:

  • Fully managed authentication for every integration (including token refresh)
  • Out-of-the-box end-user interface for configuring integrations
  • Error handling and auto-retry
  • A visual integration logic builder that comes with API abstractions for pre-built integrations
  • Configured and standardized in-app event triggers
  • Logging and monitoring tools
  • A support/user management dashboard

By having all these tools out of the box, your team will be able to focus almost entirely on designing the integration logic to enable the use case you want to provide, instead of all the infrastructure and maintenance work that would otherwise require significant engineering investment.

Not only that, leveraging an embeddable iPaaS will allow you to easily scale across multiple iPaaS solutions, as the use cases are often very similar across third-party apps in the same product category (e.g., Gmail/Outlook for email, Slack/Microsoft Teams for chat, and Salesforce/Hubspot for CRM).

This not only increases your team’s ability to ship integrations much faster, but it also ensures that the business logic between your various integrations stays consistent and allows any update to your app’s API to instantly be reflected and compatible with all your integrations.

What to Look for When Picking an Embeddable iPaaS Solution

Beyond the basic capabilities mentioned above, there are clear distinctions between the top embeddable iPaaS solutions in the market and the rest. When picking a solution for your team, consider the following criteria:

  • Does the embeddable iPaaS enable you to provide a seamless end-user experience for your users?
  • Is this tool extensible enough for your developers to use?
  • Does the embeddable iPaaS significantly reduce engineering effort across implementing multiple services?
  • Does the embeddable iPaaS provide full parity to the underlying APIs?
  • Does the embeddable iPaaS enable you to build your own custom integrations?
  • How does the embeddable iPaaS store your users’ data? Is it secure, and do they offer on-premise deployment?
  • How scalable is their infrastructure? Have they demonstrated the ability to handle high request concurrency and volume?

While most embeddable iPaaS solutions share the same stated benefits and value propositions, these details are what truly differentiate providers that will set you and your team up for success from those that cannot.

We have designed Interactor from the ground up to address these practical considerations and ensure the best integration experience for not only your development/product teams, but also your users. As developers ourselves, we recognized the need to build a platform that enables the same level of flexibility as building in-house while eliminating 90% of the unnecessary complexities without compromising on user experience and security.

That's why, alongside the single-API approach to service integrations, Interactor provides an integrations-as-code Javascript framework for authoring all integrations on Interactor.

If you’d like to see how Interactor can help your team scale your integration roadmap so you can acquire and retain more users as a result, book a demo with us today!

In Summary

If your prospects or existing users are asking for native integrations with their other SaaS apps, consider leveraging an Interactor embeddable iPaaS solution. This will allow your team to focus on shipping core, unique product features without backlogging your integration roadmap, which will have a significant impact on both user acquisition and retention. Just make sure to ask the questions outlined earlier when evaluating solutions in the market so that you pick the right platform for your team. If you have any questions or would like to chat about your integration roadmap, feel free to send us a message through our chat on the bottom right of the page and we’ll get back to you as soon as possible!