In the post-Covid times, enterprises have woken up to the undeniable significance of on-demand, affordable and accessible applications hosted in the cloud. They don’t want to take any further chances and prepare for another Covid situation that forces everyone towards remote working. Exactly, why, the market for iPaaS services is growing at a remarkable CAGR of 40%. In the next 5 years, the industry’s market cap could easily surpass USD 10.3 billion, says Yash Mehta, an IoT and big data science specialist.
That being said, the road for EiPaaS isn’t straight. With growing demand comes growing expectations and these products have to scale up.
In the given scenarios, EiPaaS solutions must provide fundamental enterprise security offerings like user authorisation and fraud detection. They must also comply with evolving privacy standards of the Payment Card Security Council and privacy regulations issued like the GDPR.
Furthermore, developers should be able to use these EiPaaS solutions to test, deploy and automate processes. This allows them to work faster and gives them more time to market across different environments. Data teams must always have the resources to design, integrate, develop and deliver apps across a given enterprise irrespective of the ecosystem (internal or cloud) they are developed on.
While we are at it, an ideal EiPaaS tool allows you to easily integrate with all the present platforms like Microsoft Azure, AWS, Google Cloud, and virtually hosted architectures as well.
Why EiPaaS?
EiPaaS solutions are a benchmark for adding new applications and integrating existing apps through IoT in an enterprise. This standardisation makes it easy for data managers to move data around within an organisation along with the required integration functionality.
By implementing an EiPaaS solution, businesses can enable quicker and easier integrations, eliminating the need for big project teams and lengthy planning procedures. The development and operations teams can easily subscribe to start with the integrating process. This means more results from less work without needing to use any specialised skills.
EiPaaS in recent times has improved tremendously and allows for enriched integrations in a relatively less time frame without the need to add new integration functionalities.
Another benefit of EiPaaS is that it eliminates the need of hiring expensive developers who develop code for custom integrations. Users can now opt for annual or monthly iPaaS subscriptions where the service provider/vendor is responsible for managing and storing all your interconnected data. This is a much more cost-effective approach as compared to adding developers to your payroll.
EiPaaS solutions also help optimise B2B integration processes making the communication process seamless. Enterprises can develop a unique process that allows them to share information with clients on different apps across different channels. You can also skip out on publishing customer APIs or combining other service APIs as iPaaS is a secure and scalable solution for managing APIs.
Unlike a few years ago when only selective names were delivering integration services, the options and expertise today are much better.
Going forward, sectors such as Consumer Goods, Telecommunications, the Public sector, BFSI, Healthcare, and Retail are expected to embrace advanced EiPaaS solutions.
Here’s a quick review of the top 3 EiPaaS solutions to look for in 2023.
Informatica’s PowerCentre
This solution is an ideal choice if you are looking to process huge amounts of data. It is thus good for all ETL or extract, transform and load jobs. Informatica’s integration solutions are thus a valuable resource for those looking to migrate large volumes of data or exchanges between data warehouses or databases.
Informatica’s PowerCentre integration solutions allow users powerful data visualisation and tool transformation capabilities. This is a user-friendly tool that gives you:
- Public, private, and hybrid scenarios support high performance and multi-cloud integration.
- Comprehensive tracking and monitoring for B2B gateways to allow cloud partners to come on board easily.
- Orchestration services and cloud-native App Programming Interface integration for managing APIs.
- Use pre-built templates that come with ready-to-use functions and other transformations for managing complex integrations.
- Use Informatica’s prebuilt set of data quality rules for filtering, cleansing, and enriching data.
K2View
This is probably the only data fabric that has been deployed on a public cloud. It also offers both on-premise and hybrid deployment options. It works in a very simple way. Business entities like products, customers, orders, suppliers, or other important things correspond directly to the data products and thus manage both the metadata and data for every instance related to any particular product.
- Every data product is eventually unified on its very own Micro-Database™ to achieve unparalleled performance.
- Enterprises also get the advantage of using one data schema for several use cases like data pipelining, customer 360, and test data management.
- The patented entity-based technology supports an open, modular and scalable architecture because of which several processes like data integration, enrichment, transformation, preparation, and development are all pushed to a single extensive platform.
- It supports end-to-end, high-scale, and volume operations in real time. This is done by using bi-directional data movements between the sources and their targets.
What you get in the end is integrated data from a trusted source that is delivered in a fraction of a second. This data can either be consumed by application or can be pipelined further into data warehouses or lakes for analytical purposes.
Mulesoft AnyPoint platform
Salesforce acquired Mulesoft in 2018 but it continues to operate as an individual offering. It continues to be a leader in the Gartner Magic Quadrant and has received some impressive customer reviews on various platforms like TrustRadius, Gartner Peer Insights, and Forrester Wave.
AnyPoint Platform is the company’s flagship product and it runs on a low code GUI-based integration platform called Composer. It unifies multiple integrations, APIs, and connectors as well.
Here are a few features of Mulesoft AnyPoint
- Build code-based or code-free API integrations with the help of reusable assets that can be deployed across different ecosystems like on-premise, cloud, and hybrid.
- Monitor and integrate APIs with singular interphase that comes with prebuilt APIs, connectors, templates, and other integration assets that allow for better reusability.
- Use the CloudHub platform as a service for hosting integrations.
- Stay on top of security automation and other out-of-the-box compliances.
Cloud Hub Capability is what differentiates Mulesoft from its competitors. It enforces a well-managed, elastic, and multi-tenant hosting environment depending on the needs of the integration landscape. Its globally distributed architecture makes it more resilient and allows users to define role-based access to the cloud via AnyPoint.
Conclusion
So far we discussed the transition of integration as a platform service into a more matured EiPaaS. Amidst the interoperability of cloud apps, the explosive rise of EiPaaS solutions is inevitable. While we discussed the 3 most popular platforms, several others are preparing the industry for the better. What EiPaaS platform are you using? Do share your experience.
The author is Yash Mehta, an IoT and big data science specialist.
About the author
Yash Mehta is an internationally recognised IoT, M2M and Big Data technology expert. He has written a number of widely acknowledged articles on Data Science, IoT, Business Innovation, and Cognitive intelligence. His articles have been featured in the most authoritative publications and awarded as one of the most innovative and influential works in the connected technology industry by the IBM and Cisco IoT departments.
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