The Convergence of App Connect and iPaaS

Written by Mir Musthafa Ali Pasha

Middleware Practice Head at Royal Cyber

With increasingly complex integration requirements and compressed timelines, many software company executives are struggling to keep up with the ever-expanding ecosystem of applications, products, and services. Their internal business organizations rely on or must interact with customers, partners, and across external application ecosystems.

As a result, customers are now demanding that software providers take more responsibility for the integration, instead of just publishing an API or referring customers to third-party integrators. As a quick fix, a few companies have reacted by buying an iPaaS vendor.

APIs are growing at 30x a year, but odds are your integration team isn’t. New application ecosystems are emerging overnight, expanding rapidly to keep pace with new APIs, applications, and connected things. Software companies realize that, and while they might offer a complete suite of solutions, their customers may not want to utilize every component. They often integrate into external services in order to tie into external data truth sources.

As software executives evaluate their current integration capabilities, they are finding that their existing services do not help their customers achieve the integration outcomes that they want. What are the factors leading to this lack of control?

  • Existing point-to-point integrations are one-off and not scalable
  • Customers are forced to create rouge integrations that are difficult to reuse and maintain
  • No common way to preserve the data sources of truth within different products, resulting in data islands that are expensive to connect
  • No single, uniform tool kit serving as a standard front door for customers to realize their desired integration outcomes
  • A lack of flexibility to support custom data without creating customer-specific integrations
  • Reliance on proprietary integration platforms, forcing customers into high-cost solutions
  • Disjointed user experience (not branded) that decreases customer’s trust

IBM App Connect enables you to quickly connect endpoints from across your ecosystem and utilize the data on them to achieve business objectives. As one of the most flexible integration solutions available, App Connect allows you to integrate your data -your way!

Integration Platform as a Service (iPaaS)

Characteristics of an iPaaS:
  • Vendor operated and managed platform

  • Model-driven, no-coding development tools

  • Prepackaged integrations

  • Embedded API management

  • Rapidly increasing range of capabilities

Best Used For
  • Mid-complexity integrations

  • Shorter time to value

  • Cloud/ Mobile center of gravity

  • Unconventional integrators

Ease of access
  • App Connect iPaaS is a fully managed service running on IBM Cloud

  • Nothing to download for SaaS –SaaS connectivity

  • A lightweight agent provides secure access to on-premise systems

  • Offers support for IBM DataPower enterprise gateway

  • Start for free with the Lite plan to experience full capability with no expiration

Ease of use
  • 100+ smart connectors to a range of endpoints –apps, databases, files, services...

  • Extensive support for events within those endpoints

  • Technology connectors for third-party or niche endpoints support a number of protocols including SOAP, REST, JDBC

  • Integration flows can be shared between users and re-used as building blocks

  • Allows for IT specialists to focus on solving complex challenges

  • Enables access to apps and data across the business without compromising security

If your organization is considering acquiring or building an iPaaS, we’d love to share how painless adopting App Connect would be in comparison to the alternatives. Not to mention, a faster time to market and significantly higher ROI. You can email us at info@royalcyber.com or visit www.royalcyber.com.

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