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Why Agencies & System Integrators Use an iPaaS

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Published on
May 23, 2022

The Alumio iPaaS, a cloud-native, low-code integration platform, is revolutionizing software integration by offering a faster, cost-effective, and future-proof solution. This blog explores how iPaaS solutions like Alumio can benefit agencies and system integrators by empowering less technically skilled individuals to create and manage integrations, preventing budget overruns, and delivering a cost-effective and scalable integration solution. Keep on reading to uncover the full story!

What is the Alumio iPaaS?

The Alumio iPaaS (integration Platform as a Service) is a cloud-native, low-code integration platform. It helps create quick, cost-effective and future-proof software integrations for customers via a user-friendly interface, without any custom code. To speed up the process of creating these integrations even further, Alumio provides flexible mappers and transformers, as well pre-built integration connector packages. Owing to this and many more factors, the Alumio iPaaS provides a faster turnaround time on creating integrations, compared to traditional methods such as ESB tools, integration plugins, or custom coding integrations.

Using an integration platform as a central tool for software connectivity enables you to rapidly add, interchange, or reuse software or system integrations. Furthermore it makes all your connections visible and understandable on one user-friendly interface, simplifying how you manage all your data and connected sytems in one place. This makes it easy for system integrators, agencies, or develoeprs to quite literally be on the same page with project managers and C-level, when planning tweaks, improvements, or budget allocations on their system integrations. All of this, makes the iPaaS an ideal integration solution to lower TCO (Total Cost of Ownership), improve TTM (Time to Market), and increase ROI on system integrations, increase margins, and build future-proof IT ecosystems for your customers.

How can an iPaaS help agencies and system integrators?

  1. Create integration with less technically skilled professionals
  2. Prevent budget overruns
  3. Save money on developing your solution
  4. Increase customer success by creating future-proof IT landscapes
  5. Become more scalable 
  6. Pursue new business opportunities 
  7. Win more deals with integration projects
  8. Increase ROI and reduce TCO 

1. Create integrations with less technically skilled professionals


An iPaaS (integration Platform as a Service) presents self-service integration tools and a user-friendly interface to connect two or multiple software, systems or data points, without coding expertise. In other words, where once integrations could only be created or managed by senior developers and IT specialists with coding expertise, now junior developers, data experts, project managers, or anyone with a love for excel can create, manage and monitor software integrations all by themselves. This frees up senior developers to solve complex problems or to create custom integrations using advanced features that the iPaaS offers:

  1. Access a visible iPaaS toolbox
    Get a complete overview of all your integrations, data, errors, and integration tools on a user-friendly dashboard. Any professional that is an excel expert and understands data can use the iPaaS to create complex integrations.
  2. Get centralized control
    Manage and organize all the integrations of all your customers via one integration tool. Add new integrations with seamless data sharing and without the loss of data integrity. 
  3. Automate monitoring & logging
    Get instantly notified of integration problems or API conflicts that you can immediately troubleshoot via the dashboard.

2. Prevent budget overruns


An iPaaS helps highlight and eliminate roadblocks to improve customer satisfaction across all software integrations. It also makes integration data flows visible for users and project managers to review and optimize together.

“Too often, we see integrations delivered as custom-built solutions, delayed in time and with a vast overrun in budget. These solutions offer no logging or monitoring features, resulting in integration problems that demand considerable operational costs."
  1. Visible integrations bring neutral understanding
    Since an iPaaS makes all integrations visible on a user-friendly dashboard, it enables customers and project managers to see the data flow and plan improvements to integrations on the same page. It also presents an overview of built logic versus agreed-upon logic at the start of the project. An extra budget can be easily requested by clearly identifying integration improvements or extra data logic that needs to be created. 
  2. Reduce error costs with automatic logging features
    The iPaaS’ detailed monitoring and logging system saves manual maintenance costs. By automatically detecting and presenting a clear overview of integration errors and API conflicts, the iPaaS helps identify and troubleshoot these on its user-friendly dashboard. For example, if an integration is not working due to insufficient data quality or lacking APIs, the iPaaS logs these conflicts. The project manager can use this information to contextually request an extra budget for fixing these integration errors. The cost is offset by the time it would take to manually detect problems in the absence of such automated monitoring and logging.
  3. Optimize your resources
    Where once only Senior Developers could develop or manage integrations with coding expertise, now junior developers or professionals with a less technical background – like Excel experts - can create integrations via the iPaaS’ user-friendly interface. This allows you to quickly develop your integrations and resources simultaneously while optimizing your IT team’s technically skilled professionals to solve more complex problems. The fact that working with juniors minimizes your cost per hour just happens to be a pleasant side effect.
  4. Junior developers can do support on iPaaS
    Leave support to facilitation roles. The easy-to-use interface of the iPaaS, coupled with its monitoring & logging system, helps automate error detection. Junior developers or trained business users can troubleshoot these errors from the iPaaS dashboard with minimal tech support. 
  5. Re-use your logic and integrations by using integration templates
    Some iPaaS solutions like the Alumio iPaaS allow you to create and market your own integration templates. In other words, if you make an integration using such an iPaaS (Alumio, in this case), you can save the configurations as an ‘integration template’. You can re-use this pre-configured logic or template to create a similar integration for another customer or project. An integration template will allow you to load all the configured settings of the integrations in the iPaaS’ user interface when setting up another similar integration. You can adjust this saved working integration to suit your new business needs, saving you the need to create integrations from scratch. 

The Alumio iPaaS offers a growing selection of tried and tested, preconfigured integrations templates, allowing you to create quicker and more cost-effective integrations from the Alumio Marketplace.  

3. Save money on developing your solution

Do you currently have your own custom code framework or solution, which is used for integrations? And if so, do you have a clear picture of how many hours of development are spent on building and maintaining in-house solutions? 

“If you’re already automating your business with tools like: BitBucket, JIRA, Hubspot or other Project management tools, why write custom code to create system integrations when you can use an iPaaS?” 

Instead of investing significant money and time in developing your integration solution, simply get an iPaaS (integration Platform as a Service) to create, manage, monitor, and secure your integrations for you. Apart from being a cost-effective and future-proof solution, an iPaaS offers additional business benefits: 

  1. Save money on hidden costs with transparent finances
    Saving you the cost of spending exponential hours to develop internal system integration solutions, an iPaaS works as a ready-to-use cloud-based, integration platform that allows you to create your integrations at fixed prices. This means you avoid the hidden costs of maintaining, updating, and troubleshooting your integration solution and the unpredictable, costly hours spent by senior developers on all these processes.   
  2. A better tool for integrations, including automated updates
    Using an iPaaS results in the opportunity to sell more hours, win more deals, and make customers happier because integrations are created quicker and more cost-effectively. While maintaining your integration solution may just be one aspect of your business in development, an iPaaS is a tool that’s constantly being improved and optimized to be the most scalable, sustainable, and future-proof solution available in the market. In other words, you won’t have to bother with upgrade or updates to meet evolving industry standards but simply avail them at a flat rate, as part of one integration solution.

4. Increase customer success by creating future-proof IT landscapes


Consult your customers to acquire a future-proof solution for their integrations instead of just creating point-to-point integration with custom code. Advise them to centralize and streamline all integrations with an iPaaS to unlock data silos, instantly detect IT failures, and connect rapidly to new software or systems. Adjust, change or add integrations to meet business requirements swiftly.

Become a Strategic Integration Partner for companies by running all their integrations and getting them ready for:

  1. New business models
    Enable API-driven business ideas, ready for AI and ML, and earn money with data.

  2. Lower error costs
    Reduce the business impact of all poorly performing integrations by delivering proven data flows and receive notifications and logging to help detect and resolve errors quickly.

  3. Connect fast
    Help customers to digitalize and automate their business processes to achieve a quicker time to market. 

  4. Continuity by centralization
    Advise customers on how to use an iPaaS to organize a future-proof IT landscape where data silos are unlocked, integrations are streamlined and there are reactivation procedures for IT failure or system crash occurs.

  5. Be compliant
    To comply with key privacy legislations, companies need to be able to present customer data upon request. However, this data could be stored in so many different systems (CRM, ERP, POS, Ticketing, Shipping, etc.) and it’s challenging to retrieve holistically. An iPaaS gives you complete control over your data across all systems, allowing you to comply with crucial privacy legislation like GDPR.

  6. Gain data insights
    Work smarter by acquiring data insights from all systems to BI. Get a 360° view of your customer.
  7. Automate business processes
    Automate repetitive business processes like Invoicing, Hiring & Onboarding, Inventory Management, Payroll, Customer Support, Email Marketing, etc.

5. Become more scalable 

Digitalization is evolving rapidly and being able to integrate with newer software and solutions is the only way to ensure digital growth. However, here’s how an iPaaS helps you create quick, cost-effective and scalable integrations: 

  1. Seamlessly connect more software
    Unlike creating point-to-point integrations with custom code, an iPaaS allows you to seamlessly add new software connections and scale your IT landscape, via a user-friendly interface, quickly and cost-effectively. By organizing and streamlining all your newly added software integrations on one dashboard, an iPaaS enables seamless data sharing across connections. 

  2. Upscale with juniors and minimal IT support
    By allowing you to develop and orchestrate your integrations with junior developers or data experts, an iPaaS enables even smaller companies to grow their integration without needing to hire expensive resources sustainably. Also, while managing custom code integrations becomes increasingly difficult with each new software that you add, an iPaaS significantly simplifies this by providing monitoring and logging that helps automate the maintenance and security of your integrations. This helps you avoid having to proportionally grow your team as you rapidly expand your IT landscape.
  3. Centralize your integrations and data
    By centralizing and normalizing data shared across all connected systems on one cloud-based platform, an iPaaS allows you to expand your digital growth with system integrations in a scalable and sustainable way.

6. Pursue new business opportunities 

  1. Become an integration partner
    Help companies swiftly integrate ERP, E-commerce, PIM, CRM, Marketing, HR systems and more, to improve and automate their business processes.

  2. Become a strategic partner
    Enable companies to rapidly integrate with new digital software via a dedicated cloud-based platform. Present the iPaaS as a central integration solution and critical strategic pillar to help organize future-proof IT landscapes.

  3. Digitize customers
    Connect trading partners, suppliers and B2B transaction data by mapping data across many file types such as EDI, JSON, X12, CSV, XML, and cXML via EDI to other file types.
  4. Integrate key ERPs
    Integrate SAP, Microsoft, Oracle, Sage, and other critical enterprise resource planning solutions, with eCommerce, PIM, CRM, or any other cloud applications, for digital growth.

Looking to calculate your returns on software integrations? Discover the financial benefits for agencies and system integrators to use an iPaaS.

7. Win more deals with integration projects

  1. Present the iPaaS as a next-gen service
    Win deals with customers that need complex integrations! By partnering with an iPaaS solution, agencies and SIs can use their case studies, integration capabilities, default components to integrate with complex ERPs, and pre-configured integrations templates with popular software.

  2. Proposition self-service Integration to give your customers control
    Offer an integration platform that even customers can use to create, monitor, or manage integrations themselves. Promise to deliver them complete control of their data and one central platform to organize their IT landscape in a future-proof way.

  3. Deliver your customers with better data insights
    An iPaaS helps present a 360-degree view of your customer data across all your connections, and prepare your data to be seamlessly shared with emerging technologies like AI and ML.

  4. Choose from select integration templates
    Build quicker and cost-effective integrations by choosing from a selection of integration templates. These are pre-configured and saved integrations created by certain iPaaS providers (like Alumio) that allow agencies and SIs to simply adapt the template to develop similar integrations faster, ensuring faster time to market.

  5. Promise the need for minimal IT
    Since an iPaaS’ automated monitoring and logging system automatically detects integration errors and significantly simplifies troubleshooting, companies can save considerably on maintenance and fixes.

  6. Deliver the integrations compliant with privacy regulations
    The logging and rule management system of an iPaaS makes it possible for your customers to comply with privacy regulations like GDPR. This is a massive boon for more significant customers with huger customer databases whose data privacy they are responsible for.  

The Alumio iPaaS helps agencies and system integrators win more deals with its cases & credibility in creating integrations for various customers worldwide and by providing an ‘Integration Marketplace’ to help companies discover software or systems they would like to integrate with.


8. Increase ROI and reduce TCO 


To summarize, the key reasons why most Agencies and System Integrators are opting to pitch the iPaaS as a next-gen solution and strategic pillar to their customers is because it helps increase ROI (Return on Investment) and reduce total cost of ownership (TCO) by:

  • Lowering the cost of operations
    Enabling less technically skilled professionals to create, monitor, and manage integrations via a user-friendly interface.
  • Preventing budget overruns
    By presenting a visual overview of integrations that developers and project managers can understand together, to plan tweaks and improvements.
  • Reducing error cost
    By automating error detection and integration maintenance via monitoring and logging.  
  • Delivering a ready-to-use integration platform
    Saving agencies or customers the costs and hassles of developing and maintaining their own internal integration solutions.
  • Deploying integrations in a scalable way 
    Integrate with multiple new software or systems from one central platform, unifying and sharing data across connections.
  • Adding new business opportunities
    Offering customers the iPaaS as a gateway to future-proof integrations with software essential for digital growth.

To learn more about how an iPaaS can positively affect your financial returns, delve into the economic benefits for agencies and system integrators to use an iPaaS

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