So let’s start with the what and the why. It turns out that software needs to be able to talk to other software. A little bit, too. When more and more software applications came out with new acronyms in the late 1990s and early 2000s, the corporate world, and Silicon Valley, quickly realized that for businesses to be truly effective in the digital age, all their software needed to be able to talk to each other. The API, or application programming interface, is the first step in enabling easy two-way communication between applications and software systems. It was and still is a great solution for developers who can customize code connections between applications, but what about everyone else? There had to be a way to make it easy for any business user to connect applications and even configure features and data transfer between them. But how?
Introducing iPaaS. These new platforms were aimed at specifically addressing this market. The market of people who wanted to be able to connect systems and applications and configure features without having to be a member of IT. However, it is quite a complex and nuanced market, which is how the different versions of iPaaS came to be. Zapier and Mulesoft both have the same goal, but their customers are very different and that is what can be said about most iPaaS customers across these different approaches to iPaaS.
We can start with no-code iPaaS. These tools, like Zapier and Microsoft Flow, are so easy for a grade school student to use. While they are typically aimed at consumers and small to medium-sized businesses, a growing number of large enterprises are starting to use them. They are designed to be easy to use and the biggest difference between them is Microsoft’s focus on all things Microsoft, while Zapier is an open source app store where a connection between Salesforce and Pardot can be established in 5 minutes or less.
But what if you need more than a path to go from a form in WordPress to Salesforce? What if you need to add a bit more complexity in terms of the workflow between these two applications and the data they share via API? Enter enterprise iPaaS, which, like its no-code cousin, has the same ultimate goal. The question for buyers is how complex should the integrations between applications and systems be? How sophisticated? The more complex the solution, the more likely you’ll want to look at one of the top five enterprise iPaaS solutions at the top of the article. Less sophisticated integrations can be easily built on Zapier.
