What is Embedded iPaaS - SaaS Integration Solutions?

Embedded iPaaS (integration platform-as-a-service) solutions, also known as embedded integration platforms, enable B2B SaaS companies to ship and maintain the native integrations their customers need significantly faster. Essentially, engineering teams would use an embedded iPaaS to build integrations that feel like native product features for their application.

Today, every B2B SaaS company gets consistent requests for integrations from their prospects or existing customers. However, they struggle to ship these integrations quickly enough because of insufficient engineering resources, and companies want to focus their engineers on core differentiating product features, not integrations.

Embedded iPaaS solutions streamline the process of building these integrations and minimize the resources required, by offloading the complexities of interacting with 3rd party app APIs, such as authentication, rate limits, concurrency, and debugging customer issues. Instead, engineers would only need to think about defining the integration logic.

However, before we get into more details about the different features and capabilities of embedded 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 iPaaS

You may have heard the term iPaaS (integration platform-as-a-service) 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 requires connectivity between various APIs, and remove 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 this increasingly competitive landscape.

As such, it is only logical that companies try to offload engineering resources wherever they can across other workstreams by using these 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 emphasize a much larger issue - the fragmentation of the SaaS ecosystem and internal technology stacks. This is precisely where embedded iPaaS solutions come in. 

What is Embedded iPaaS?

Embedded iPaaS solutions focus on simplifying the process of building customer-facing, embedded integrations. Contrary to regular iPaaS, which serve the end-users of these SaaS apps for internal automations, embedded iPaaS platforms tackle the fragmentation issue at the application level, by making it easy for engineering teams at SaaS companies to integrate their applications with their users' 3rd party tools.

With embedded integrations, end-users would not need to configure or build any workflows/integrations on their own - it would simply come out of the box for them as soon as they authenticate via SSO for the various integrated apps.

Here are 2 common examples of embedded iPaaS workflows:

Messaging Notifications: If you want your customers to receive Slack or Teams notifications whenever an event occurs in your app, to the channel of their choosing.

CRM Sync: If you want data from your app to update records in your customers’ CRMs (ie. Salesforce / Hubspot etc.), or for new leads/accounts/opportunities in their CRMs to also show up in your app.

Here's a product tour of what it looks like to build a HubSpot sync for your application in Paragon.

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, per workflow. 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 changes, you will inevitably need to deal with inconsistencies in business logic across different integrations, 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 embedded iPaaS solutions?

Primarily, all embedded iPaaS solutions aim to solve the issue of resource allocation and accelerate the deployment of integration roadmaps. This is done through 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 signficant engineering investment.

Not only that, leveraging an embedded iPaaS will allow you to easily scale across multiple app integrations, as the use cases are often very similar across 3rd party apps in the same product category (ie. Pardot/Marketo for marketing automation, Slack/Microsoft Teams for chat, and Salesforce/Hubspot for CRM).

This not only increases your team’s ability to ship integrations much faster, 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 embedded iPaaS solution

Beyond the basic capabilities mentioned above, however, there are clear distinctions between the top embedded iPaaS solutions in the market and the rest.

When picking a solution for your team, you need to make sure to consider the following criteria:

1. Is this tool extensible enough for your developers to use?

2. Does the embedded iPaaS provide full parity to the underlying APIs?

3. Does the embedded iPaaS enable you to build your own custom integrations?

4. Does the embedded iPaaS enable you to provide a seamless end-user experience for your customers, if any?

5. How does the embedded iPaaS store your customers’ data - is it secure and/or do they offer on-premise deployment?

6. How scalable is their infrastructure? Have they demonstrated the ability to handle high request concurrency and volume?

While most embedded 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 Paragon 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 customers. 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 workflow builder, Paragon provides an integrations-as-code Typescript framework for authoring all integrations on Paragon.

Here's a quick product tour that can get you familiar with the experience.

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

In Summary

If your prospects or existing customers are asking for native integrations with their other SaaS apps, consider leveraging an embedded iPaaS solution. This will allow your team to be laser focused on shipping core, unique product features without backlogging your integration roadmap, which will have an outsized impact on both customer acquisition and retention. Just make sure to ask the questions outlined earlier when you are evaluating the 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!

For more details, check out our guide on the top embedded iPaaS solutions in the market.