Integration creates best-of-breed enterprises

In today’s digital era, enterprises need to move away from traditional processes and governance towards an iPaaS solution.

The digital economy has forced enterprises to reshape their businesses if they wish to compete with traditional and new players. Fifteen years ago, the main technology story for large enterprises was one-size-fits-all ERP suites that offered integrated financial, ordering, manufacturing, stock control, HR and payroll systems. It was never the best solution technically, but at least all the modules worked together.

But the commercialisation of cloud computing and the platform it has provided to allow the integration of disparate (but best-of-breed) systems means CXOs no longer have to compromise when selecting the best solution for their businesses, and their stakeholders.

This has alleviated a number of hindrances associated with former business processes. For example, a consulting firm recently identified that ERP implementation costs were significantly higher in 2015 than 2014, climbing from US$2.8 to US$4.5 million. In the same period, a higher number of ERP projects failed. Meanwhile, SaaS and cloud adoption increased, and may soon match or exceed on-premises options.

This transition has granted passage to integration platform-as-a-service (iPaaS). And it’s a rising market. According to Gartner, “The enterprise iPaaS market expanded notably during 2015, exceeding $400 million and growing more than 50% in terms of providers' subscription revenue when compared to 2014.”

Consequently, Australian enterprises — many of which are exceeding the maturity levels of their United States-based counterparts — have moved beyond kicking the tyres and are periodically introducing best-of-breed technologies to replace (or supplement) archaic one-size-fits-all platforms.

Large organisations — or even individual departments within those companies — don’t want to be held hostage inside inflexible and rigid environments. They need specialised resources to address their unique challenges to remain competitive in a tough economy. Today, it’s about introducing separate providers for finance, e-commerce, point of sale, telemanagement and so on.

With iPaaS, enterprises can integrate these systems and other cloud applications that have been acquired over time to enable seamless flow of data. This simple, low-cost and scalable cloud integration is helping organisations choose tailored solutions for each business unit’s specific needs while encompassing a modern hybrid architecture. This in turn introduces measurable efficiencies for organisations where multinetwork, multicloud applications can be easily managed with simple customisation tools, automatic upgrades and maintenance by the service provider.

The impact on productivity and subsequently the bottom line is significant. iPaaS lowers total cost of ownership of an enterprise’s systems by enabling efficiencies through the likes of citizen integration and golden records within a single-instance, multitenant framework. This eliminates key issues associated with the one-size-fits-all approach, namely the need to keep everyone trained so that the system is used properly.

Electronic signature and transaction management technology company DocuSign is one of many enterprises using iPaaS to integrate an expanding number of applications on which its teams rely. As a technology leader, DocuSign uses various platforms and bespoke applications to deliver the best possible experience to its users. With iPaaS the organisation is able to achieve this objective by building custom and complex integrations very quickly so that data governance processes are seamless. One of the key benefits of DocuSign is that this eliminates a series of time-consuming and costly manual processes that in turn help reduce TCO and deliver faster time to value to the organisation.

In order to succeed in today’s digital era, enterprises need to move away from traditional processes and governance. Yesteryear’s platforms didn’t deliver on their promises because of their restrictive, all-encompassing architectures. iPaaS, in contrast, provides options.