Over the past decade, we have seen an influx of digital applications akin only to the parabolic explosion of .com sites in the late 90s and early 2000s.
As of 2021, there are over 3.5 million apps available on the Google Play Store and 2.2 million on the Apple App Store.
And this doesn’t take into account the thousands of applications and sophisticated SaaS programs that are used daily in the business and e-Commerce world.
While the plethora of such programs created a new level of online existence and brought society into a new cyber stratosphere, by doing so, we have also ushered in an unforeseen layer of confusion.
With so many disparate platforms, who is responsible for making them speak to one another?
At the end of the day, as a business owner or CEO, you will be the one held responsible for making sure each aspect of your enterprise links together.
In many ways, during prior years, this was a simpler task. Turn the clock back thirty years to see how.
As the leading executive over an organization, what you had to worry about was how to take your product and market it to the public the product was designed for.
Right. Isn’t that what any business anywhere does now as well?
Yes.
But without the Internet, cloud services, email and millions of applications, consider the way you coordinated your activity.
What you had was face to face meetings, the telephone, flying across the country (or world) and a computer you used mainly for data entry.
Those who make it in today’s business world are not using computers only for data entry. Those who are will soon be forgotten.
If you aren’t one of those stressed-out, frenetic executives trying to keep track of all your sales on a network of spreadsheets or word docs, then you might not know what I’m referring to.
But yes, even high-powered, productive companies as of right now, today, are still tracking their sales and orders on a network of manual data entry programs.
In other words, they are showing up to the Indy 500 with a horse-and-buggy.
At this point, you are probably wondering what any of this has to do with an iPaaS.
An iPaaS, or integration Platform as a Service, is a platform that coordinates applications and programs and allows them to speak with one another.
Take a simple example of a company selling online products. As a distributor, you have a network of applications that all need to be coordinated in order to succeed. Starting with your bank to finance the transactions to the warehouse and then incoming customers on Amazon or Ebay and CRM software such as Salesforce and e-Commerce platforms like Shopify – the list goes on.
Without a central authority, a platform that connects everything you need to be connected, you will lose touchpoints and lose business.
Especially as you begin to scale.
An iPaaS is meant to accomplish functions such as the proper relay of data from one point to another, indication and isolation of where errors occur in data transfer, connections to other applications via APIs, validation of users’ access to certain levels of data and disallowing independent decisions and activity.
Contact us today and find out how MindCloud can help with your integration needs.