How iPaaS can reduce business costs and boost productivity
Active International, a company helping its clients create value by exchanging underperforming assets like unsold stock for credits to plan, buy and execute media campaigns, needed to generate high-value leads.
But identifying prospects and growing their client base required an enormous amount of industry data - data which was being analysed at painstaking length by human media buyers and business development directors.
The company needed a more scalable solution. So, in collaboration with IBM, they developed a suite of cloud-based tools to automate their processes, including high-performance data warehouses, flexible data stores and chatbot interfaces. Among other capabilities, the technology allows the company to vastly reduce time and spend on research and buy media for clients at the best possible price.
The resulting productivity gains delivered a major boost to potential billing for Active International: an estimated $80 million in year one.
The technology that made this possible is integrated Platform as a Service (iPaaS). iPaaS facilitates the integration of any cloud-based and on-premise apps, plugins, IoT devices, and data silos to create new and powerful functionality.
Applications Across Industry
iPaaS has improved efficiency across many different industries. A realtor out on the road, for example, can use iPaaS to connect their phone’s address book to their customer relationship management (CRM) system, hosted in their office, to access their client data remotely.
A HR manager can use iPaaS to integrate their hiring and payroll processes and create new automations that reduce the hours of manual effort they need to put in. Companies with large numbers of cloud applications, like those spanning email marketing, advertising, and analytics, can use iPaaS to integrate them all.
Organisations of all sizes are rapidly adopting iPaaS. Research suggests that 90% of companies purchasing public cloud Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) will purchase it from an integrated provider by 2022.
Let’s look at the three ways in which iPaaS can increase a business’s profitability.
Cost-efficiency
A company can start using iPaaS with minimal cost and without straining existing IT systems. Developers aren’t needed to write custom code. iPaaS handles all the integrations, and there are no fees for ongoing iPaaS maintenance or software and hardware upgrades.
iPaaS is managed entirely by the vendor, so spend is limited to a fixed monthly or yearly subscription fee. iPaaS users who are less tech-oriented will have no problem getting started; most platforms come with easily digestible, plain-English tutorials.
Productivity
iPaaS can automate any number of workflows and processes. That can make for massive time and cost savings, particularly at enterprise-level. iPaaS can also ingest data from customers, staff and IoT devices to provide real-time analytics on user behaviour.
Agility & Scalability
Agility is at the core of iPaaS. A business can add any number of new connectors, enabling it to quickly and inexpensively add new products and adapt to new markets or operating conditions.
iPaaS is highly scalable. It can increase or decrease capacity to meet demand in real-time. iPaaS delivers both load scalability and structural scalability. Access to virtually unlimited cloud computing power means that applications will never slow down, regardless of demand. You pay only for what you use, so iPaaS can work out cheaper than running a legacy system 24/7, even when demand is low.
The Bottom Line
Your business can benefit from iPaaS if you currently run a mix of on-premises and cloud-based applications. Integrating your independent applications in new, innovative ways can potentially reduce your costs drastically and increase your business’s productivity exponentially.