Gartner 2022 - The Growth Opportunities of Cloud Integration Services

Business innovation obstacles an iPaaS helps overcome

The popular information IT research and consulting firm Gartner presents a ‘Hype Cycle', as a tool to identify overlapping stages in any technology’s life cycle. The fifth stage of this Hype Cycle is called ‘Plateaus of Productivity’ and it is reached when a new technology is widely implemented, accepted, and understood.

When it comes to Cloud Integration Services, Gartner predicts that the Plateau of Productivity will fully hit within the next two years. This involves businesses integrating their business systems with cloud applications, software solutions, or data sources, to digitize their business processes. However, to create these integrations, modern businesses are now looking past traditional custom-code methods and are utilizing low-code integration platforms, also known as iPaaS (integration Platform as a Service).

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“The increasing business appetite for technology self-service results in the rapid growth and increasing maturity of low-code platform technologies.”

Gartner, August 2022

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Discover two common obstacles to business innovation that the Alumio iPaaS helps overcome by supporting businesses with their cloud integration services.

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Balancing budget and process automation need

Nowadays, modern digital enterprises focus not only on improving customer acquisition and customer satisfaction but also on cost reductions. Amplified by the Corona crisis, more and more organizations find their department budgets cut. Moreover, up-and-coming hybrid workforce models are pushing businesses to facilitate the required technologies. Then there are business process automation technologies that organizations wish to use to increase overall productivity.

“The realities of a disrupted workplace, business model transformations, operating model changes and IT delivery model changes, all force fundamental shifts in the activities and responsibilities of the given role of a CIO.” (Gartner, August 30 2022)

The reality is that digital transformation and business process automation have become the new norm, and the business benefits they entail speak for themselves. However, many organizations and departments face shortened budgets, which is an obstacle modern digital enterprises need to overcome in order to add or integrate emerging technologies. As predicted by Gartner, the rise of automation and digital transformation tools is not stagnating, but rather rising.

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Increased technological demands meet IT talent shortage

As more and more organizations find themselves on their journey to digital transformation, they discover the need to integrate cloud applications or SaaS solutions. This commonly requires integrating legacy applications and old-school ERPs to modern, cloud-based, customer-facing applications. However, the traditional way to integrate these applications and software solutions involves creating point-to-point custom code connections. Creating or managing these custom-coded connections requires highly specialized IT personnel. Thus, many digital enterprises find themselves in a need to bolster their IT capacity to reach their digital transformation goals. At the same time, a shortage of IT talents comes to light, making IT capacity management increasingly important.

“Twenty-eight percent of respondents cited IT talent shortage as a major challenge, inhibiting adoption among major technology domains such as platform services, security, digital workplace and IT automation.” (Gartner, March 2022)

Combining the obstacles of rising needs for new technology integrations with the decreased availability of IT personnel and cut budgets, modern digital enterprises are facing serious obstacles with no end in sight. This once again leads us to the iPaaS. As a self-service, cloud-based integration technology, the iPaaS allows organizations to connect SaaS enterprise systems with newer applications swiftly, while also empowering quick business process automation.

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The iPaaS - a perfect fit for swiftly integrating multiple applications

As a low-code solution, the Alumio iPaaS connects two or more systems, software, or data sources rapidly. Thanks to its user-friendliness, the Alumio iPaaS can be operated by non-developers such as data experts and business users, and thus allows organizations to use their domestic IT resources optimally.

While other new IT initiatives take between 6 and 12 months to set up, the Alumio iPaaS is implemented in 1 to 6 weeks, depending on the complexity of the integration. Not only does that mean that integration projects can be implemented quicker than before, but it also means that little IT workforce is required to develop and govern these integrations. Thus, using the Alumio iPaaS helps businesses reduce hiring costs and optimize how they use existing IT resources.

“Organizations choose iPaaS to support rapid integration and automation of SaaS applications with other SaaS and on-premise applications and data sources. More recently organizations are increasingly replacing classic integration platforms, that are now considered too expensive and complex for modern integration delivery practices.”(Gartner, August 2022)

In addition, the Alumio iPaaS serves as a future-proof IT landscape, that accommodates both current and future integration needs. Unlike traditional integration solutions that involve custom-coding integrations, the Alumio iPaaS unlocks data silos and ensures unentangled, up 'n' running application connectivity. The platform also offers a wide selection of connector packages that are essentially templates of popular software integrations. Using these, businesses can configure working integrations even more rapidly and effortlessly.

This makes the iPaaS the perfect integration solution for modern, future-oriented enterprises. It offers the technological capabilities required for digital transformation and business process automation, empowers virtually limitless software integrations, requires less technically skilled staff to operate it, and by expediting integrations it helps businesses achieve faster time to market.

“By 2024, 40% of CIOs will fail to effectively evolve IT’s capability to deliver modern digital infrastructures, provide ecosystem tech governance, and support architecture-driven business outcomes. “ (Forbes)

Don’t allow for your business to become part of this statistic, book a demo of the Alumio iPaaS and experience first-hand how it helps make your software integrations simple.