What is iPaaS?

What is iPaaS We Recently Read About? iPaaS is special group of cloud service for the delivery of systems integration to address SOA, EAI, Data and more. Before we go in to the explanation of what is iPaaS, we should point towards two previously published articles – Cloud Based Integration Platform as a Service (iPaaS) and iPaaS and API Economy Among the Cloud Natives. Cloud-based integration’s another name is Integration platform as a service or IPaaS/iPaaS. Apart from this current article, the older articles might give you some idea about the concept. iPaaS emerged nearly seven or eight years ago, possibly to support synchronization between on-premises systems and the early type of SaaS used by the Small Business at that time.

What is iPaaS? iPaaS is More About Running the Business

Unlike the typical Cloud Computing Service Models, iPaaS grown dramatically for the small businesses for the integration without practically the need of anything on-premise – it maybe the on-premise servers, softwares or manpower. Quite funny, IPaaS (i is capital letter) means Intellectual Property as a Service. Garner defines iPaaS as :

Integration Platform as a Service (iPaaS) is a suite of cloud services enabling development, execution and governance of integration flows connecting any combination of on premises and cloud-based processes, services, applications and data within individual or across multiple organizations.

This actually very less amount of text to explain iPaaS. What we want to say – iPaaS is more about business integration, it is not exactly like our normal PaaS. Definitely, where is a software running, there will be chance of software development. When there was no cloud computing, this integration you used to hear as business to business (B2B) like words. That is an example typical category. You will still see many such B2B platforms – they are online websites for connection. They will appear horrible to you. They are horrible at designing as they used different own set standards because these were part of industrial marketing. The idea that an ordinary consumer can enter the marketplace was not exactly present.

Even a decade ago, subscription model pricing (read this article on opex and capex if you are not understanding the meaning of the word) was not quite famous.

There are points which probably need to passed for a service to be claimed as iPaaS :

Deployed on a cloud infrastructure
Has an opex subscription model based pricing
No need of software development / Ready to use
No need to manage the platform
Presence of integration management

We deliberately avoided numbering the points.

Still Can Not Understand What is iPaaS? Read This Too Easy Example!

Suppose, you are the owner of a very small company which uses two services – one from SAP and another from SalesForce. Now, how these two will get connected to work as a part of a full working system? Even if they were Free Softwares, it could be quite difficult to “connect” each other. At this point, API is hugely used. These iPaaS services basically work like a connector between two different services. Different’s difference can be by company or category. A small company can not spend a huge behind software development. Now if you think about the SMACT part – the adoption of Social, Mobile, Analytics and Big Data, Cloud Computing and the Internet of Things; you will understand why a typical iPaaS service offers integration from CRM, Twitter to LinkedIn.