Boost your SaaS performance: Harnessing potential with iPaaS

The demand for business applications has skyrocketed in recent years. Businesses average 130 apps in their tech stack, and SaaS spend reached nearly $200 billion last year. This offers a prime opportunity for SaaS companies to capitalize.

However, as budgets tighten and the market faces headwinds, you’ll need to evaluate your own tech stack to ensure you’re making the right investments for sustained growth and profitability.

Data silos caused by disconnected applications often hinder operational efficiency and scalability. This can quickly lead to a reliance on error prone manual processes, a lack of data integrity, and limited visibility across your organization.

Luckily, there’s a solution. You can leverage iPaaS (Integration Platform as a Service) to integrate your tech stack and automate your manual processes–while also reducing costs and boosting ROI.

Let’s jump into the typical operational challenges SaaS companies face, the benefits of solving them with iPaaS, and how to get started on your automation journey.

Facing operational roadblocks

Due to the mass adoption of applications across lines of business, spurred on by the “grow at all costs” philosophy of the last few years, operational inefficiencies have run rampant. Systems are often siloed and require slow, manual data entry tasks to reconcile information between them.

This process is error-prone and data becomes outdated the second it’s uploaded to another system. As a result, your business loses the critical customer data required to make smart business decisions. And, worse, these inefficiencies can lead to frustrating experiences for employees and customers alike.

If your organization has realized the need for integration, you are likely dealing with a multitude of ad hoc requests–leading to never ending backlogs, bottlenecks, and slow project delivery.

Traditional integration approaches can’t keep up

You have several options available to tackle these operational challenges. However, traditional integration solutions can be limiting.

One way to handle integrations is having your developers write custom code. While this may work in the short term, this creates a maintenance burden over time and a “black box” when developers leave the company, as other users will have limited visibility into what the integration is doing or how to fix it.

Another option is task oriented platforms. These tools lack built-in robustness and a holistic approach. They also don’t offer sufficient governance or error handling, which are vital to mission-critical processes.

Legacy iPaaS platforms were the first-generation solutions for managing integrations on a unified platform. However, they are built exclusively for highly trained developers. These tools have a steep learning curve and a long ramp time that delays projects.

The last potential solution is native integrations. These integrations are good for simple use cases, but have limited out-of-the-box functionality and they are often implemented in an ad-hoc fashion.

To dive deeper into the different integration solutions available to you and how they compare to iPaaS, check out our blog, “Build resilient operations with scalable integration.”

Overcoming SaaS challenges with an AI-Powered iPaaS

So, how do you address the challenges you’re facing while staying ahead in a hyper-competitive SaaS market? That’s where iPaaS comes in.

Business processes can span across departments, teams, and systems, and you need all of that key data to make informed decisions–especially in a volatile market. This can make integrating your tech stack challenging.

Advanced iPaaS solutions, like Celigo, offer you a single AI-enabled platform to build your integrations. With an intuitive user interface and AI capabilities that help bridge skill gaps, Celigo’s iPaaS empowers your entire team to build, manage, and monitor integrations. This allows your IT teams to focus on digital transformation initiatives, while your business teams quickly adopt the latest technologies and complete simple integrations that they know best.

With your tech stack connected, data silos and manual tasks are eliminated, and you can easily automate all your business processes from sales to HR. This leads to increased operational efficiency, more revenue, and the ability to rapidly adapt to market shifts.

A few other benefits you could see with iPaaS include:

• Reduced costs
• Accelerated lead follow up
• Improved employee satisfaction
• Holistic data insights
• Faster time-to-value

Taking the first step

When determining where to start your automation journey, there’s a few key business processes you should consider prioritizing. Automating these processes will help you boost revenue, retain talent, and make better business decisions.

Explore three business challenges you can solve with automation:

Slow sales cycles: Inaccurate, incomplete data and manual processes throughout the sales cycle cause delays, slow follow up, and ultimately, lost revenue. With automation, you can streamline the lead lifecycle management process to decrease manual work and accelerate follow up.

Employee dissatisfaction: HR teams often face a plethora of manual tasks in their hiring, onboarding, provisioning, offboarding, and employee management processes. These tasks take valuable time away from fostering employee engagement. By streamlining these processes with automation, you can boost employee satisfaction and retain top talent.

Stale data: With data siloed across multiple applications, you lack data integrity and visibility across teams. By integrating your tech stack, you can get the holistic data you need to uncover key customer insights.

Evaluate your current business stage and start building your integration strategy with our eBook, “SaaS in sync: Leveraging integration for a competitive edge.”