Embracing product-led growth can yield numerous business advantages.
Your average deal size will balloon, your retention rate will soar, client referrals will multiply, and your market reputation will leap to new heights.
So, how can you effectively achieve product-led growth? While there are numerous solutions available, investing in a modern embedded iPaaS should be a top priority.
Before diving into the features and benefits of an embedded iPaaS, let’s clarify what an iPaaS and an embedded iPaaS are.
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What is an iPaaS?
An iPaaS, or an integration platform as a service, is a cloud-based platform that enables you to connect SaaS applications and on-prem systems; once connected, you can develop and deploy data flows that work across these applications.
What is an embedded iPaaS?
An embedded iPaaS is simply an iPaaS that can be added directly to your product.
The nuance here is how you decide to deploy it.
You have a few options to choose from: an in-line experience or an embedded automation customization.
In-line experience
This approach involves building the integrations and automations into your product—allowing users to avoid designing, implementing, and maintaining them.
For example, the screenshot below shows the UI of a fictional HRIS. If the user clicks “Sync document to payroll,” the document gets added to your client’s payroll system automatically thanks to a data sync set up in your embedded iPaaS.
Embedded automation customization
This approach offers users more control, allowing them to implement integrations and workflow automations without leaving your platform. For instance, a fictional ERP system might enable users to set up a one-way sync between your system and Salesforce.
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Pros and cons of an embedded iPaaS
When should you invest in an embedded iPaaS versus building integrations in-house? The decision largely depends on the nature of your integrations and the technical resources available. Here are some pros and cons to consider:
Pros
- Developer Relief: Frees your developers from building and maintaining integrations, allowing them to focus on core product features
- Quick Market Entry: Enables faster go-to-market for integrations, helping you win new business and retain clients
- Enhanced Product Value: Turns your product into a hub for workflow automations, significantly increasing its value
Cons
- Unnecessary if Few Integrations Required: May be unnecessary if you have a limited number of integrations, as building a few APIs internally can be manageable
- Better Suited for Complex Use Cases: Integrations can be handled internally if the scope of API integrations is shallow (i.e. you just have a few simple use cases for your integrations)
- Learning Curve: Your team and potentially your clients will need to learn how to use the platform
Related: 3 benefits of using an embedded integration platform
Features of an embedded iPaaS
Once you’ve decided to invest in an embedded iPaaS, you’ll want one that offers the following features:
1. Pre-built connectors
Your clients likely use a diverse range of applications, leading to numerous integration requests. An embedded iPaaS should offer a high volume of pre-built connectors to meet this demand.
This also takes the sweat off your back, as you don’t have to invest in internal dev resources to build and maintain the connectors. Chris McClave, the CTO of Trakstar, a platform that offers a suite of HR products, explains further:
2. Low-code UI
Relying on engineers to implement integrations and automations might work in the beginning, or in fairly complex scenarios. However, over time, this approach diverts them from focusing on key initiatives and core product features.
That’s where a low-code UI can help.
By offering a low-code UI, your product team, professional services colleagues, and users can leverage an embedded iPaaS to independently, quickly, and easily build automations and integrations into your product.
3. Customizable platform bots
Your customers likely spend significant chunks of their work day on a business communications platform, like Slack.
Research from Slack confirms its users spend 90 minutes on average actively using the platform on a given weekday.
An embedded platform can capitalize on this by providing platform bots that act as a productized extension of your platform.
These bots allow users to access data and actions from your product within their business communication platform. They can even bring the automations built in your platform directly to the communication platform.
The VP of Sales and Customer Success at Qstream, an enterprise microlearning solution, elaborated based on his own experience.
4. Enterprise-grade security
Given that an embedded iPaaS connects various applications and handles business-critical, sensitive data, it must offer robust governance and security features. These include role-based access controls, data masking, and an admin dashboard for monitoring and tracking usage. Additionally, the platform should demonstrate its efficacy in safeguarding your data by complying with regulations like GDPR and SOC 2 Type 2.
Picking an embedded iPaaS solution
Unfortunately, the embedded iPaaS landscape is filled with vendors that fail to address all the necessary features. Instead, vendors typically fall in one of two ends of the following spectrum:
- Simple: The embedded iPaaS is low-code and intuitive, allowing your team to quickly take a significant number of integrations live. However, these integrations often offer limited functionality, tackle low-value use cases, and fail to scale as your customers’ needs evolve.
- Complex: The embedded iPaaS offers an API management layer, robust security and governance, and it can tackle complex use cases. However, it requires significant technical expertise to use, making it difficult for citizen integrators to utilize the platform. This limitation prevents the platform from addressing the high volume of product integrations and automations that need to be built.
Workato’s Embedded Integration Platform
Workato offers an Embedded Platform that accelerates product innovation and adoption by offering integrations at the speed and depth your customers demand.
With Workato, you can:
- Take embedded integrations to market 3x faster with access to 1000+ pre-built connectors to SaaS applications and databases and hundreds of thousands of automation templates—which we refer to as “recipes”
- Enable less technical resources to implement integrations and automations in minutes via our low-code UI – freeing up engineering resources to focus on you core product
- Seamlessly embed our Enterprise Automation Platform directly into your product with the configuration options that meet your needs
- Use a centralized admin dashboard to easily track usage and manage permissions
- Drive new revenue and differentiation by productizing your integrations and automations
- Leverage our patented Workbot to build chatbots that can be incorporated into your product’s workflow automations—or that simply allow clients to access data and actions from your product without leaving their business comms platform
To learn more about how Workato’s Embedded Platform can help drive efficient, product-led growth you can schedule a demo with one of our integration experts.
