What is integration hub / cloud integration?
According to many reports, the market for hybrid cloud integration platforms is expected to see a 14% compound annual growth rate between 2018 and 2023. The drivers of this activity are many and varied. Some organizations are looking to use integrated resources to support real-time applications and services, while others are eyeing the increased automation capabilities for back-office and customer-facing platforms. Integrated clouds also provide better support for mobile applications and offer easier deployment and scalability options across the board.
But what should CIOs look for in this new branch of IT technology? For one thing, their platform should provide ample protection for data both at rest and in transit. In some areas of the world — primarily Europe — this is not merely intelligent thinking but a regulatory requirement.
Another key capability is establishing proper authentication between data controllers and processors since this is the area that today’s hackers are most likely to target.
Additionally, integration should be comprehensive for all use cases involving transferring batch data to enterprise applications. This is particularly important for heavy loads, as data scientists pull new digital assets into their workflows; or if marketing teams track real-time events to gain new insights or launch new channels.
Why is integration important in SaaS?
Integrations are important in SaaS products because they play a critical role in making their solutions more comprehensive and more appealing to their customers and more profitable for them as providers. To a great extent, integrations are what allow an organization with established, pre-existing systems to adopt and use new SaaS solutions. This is because they now know that these solutions can integrate with their existing solutions and work well with them, so there’s less effort involved when they start using the new SaaS product.
Integrations also help SaaS vendors create more sticky products, so that customers would not be keen on replacing these products and systems as soon as a competitor launches a new version with some features that the current product is lacking. They wouldn’t want to bother setting up their other systems to work with this new offering when they already have a system that plays well with their existing systems. With every single one of your customers’ systems that your SaaS product connects to, your solution becomes more important to your customers, making integrations vital for product stickiness.
What are the requirements for cloud integration?
Accommodating SaaS platforms with information managed in the data center requires a lot of work on the IT organization. With enough time and programming staff, companies can create custom-coded connections between internal and cloud applications. However, keeping a custom solution up-to-date can take significant, ongoing maintenance.
One of the characteristics of a SaaS environment is that the developer of that application often changes the structure of the application without notifying customers. These changes could potentially impact the integration process.
Overall, you need a shared and standardized way to link your applications wherever they’re managed — the five main requirements for creating this standardized approach to integrating data across internal data center applications and public and private clouds.
1. Connectivity
You need to connect many different types of applications and data quickly and easily without requiring a lot of ongoing maintenance. You also need to consider other types of integration, including data migration, process integration, or some unique new type of integration, including taking data from an internal application and displaying the data in a SaaS application.
You may need to make connections between two applications, or you may need to connect one application to many application endpoints. Even more important is the ability to scale quickly from a one-to-one integration to a one-to-many integration. In addition, different connectivity protocols or techniques may work better in different situations, so you must be prepared to choose other options for different business requirements.
2. Transformation
In a typical business, you often have to map the data about customers in your line-of-business application (such as accounting) with data about those same customers in your SaaS application. If you’re lucky, the formats of both these data sources will be the same. However, many times, applications are designed or managed by different groups that never communicate. For example, the IT organization manages the data in the ERP system, whereas the sales department has its staff to manage the data in their SaaS CRM system.
Business management needs to ensure that the accounting system is consistent with the sales management system. Your IT staff is most likely familiar with the data format specifications in your legacy applications. Still, it doesn’t have the same level of understanding of the specifics of the data in your SaaS applications.
3. Service level integration
In a hybrid environment, you’re required to bring services together from different environments as though they are one unified environment. This type of service management is critical to the use of a hybrid environment. The goal is not simply to create the combined value of public and private cloud services, but also to create an overall SLA (service-level agreement) to support the combined environment. This service level must be planned to ensure appropriate security, governance, performance, monitoring of this new virtual cloud world.
4. Business logic
The systems with the data you value include business logic and processes that control how the data is managed. You can’t simply connect data elements without a deep understanding of how these systems behave from a business process perspective. It is helpful, for example, if you can graphically define the flow of data between source and target applications.
What integrations does Engati currently support?
Ticketing & CRM integrations
- Salesforce
- Zendesk
- Freshdesk
- Google Sheets
- Google Calendar
- Zapier
- JSON API
- WebView
- Send SMS
