Two and a half years ago, Gartner famously predicted that two-thirds of iPaaS vendors will close up shop, merge, or be bought by larger companies by 2023. When we take a look around us, we see that Gartner was not far off — to be fair, they rarely are.
I remember reading their analysis back in 2019. I’d lie if I’d say it didn’t get me thinking, especially since the primary reason they offered for this prediction was the fact that the business model is simply not profitable. “The challenge for most iPaaS vendors is that their business is simply not profitable,” said Bindi Bhullar, senior research director at Gartner. “Revenue growth and increasing customer acceptance can’t keep up with the costs for running the platform and the heavy spending in sales and marketing.”
We’ve still got a year to go until 2023, but so far we’re happy to report we’re going strong. If you looked at the integration market recently, you may have noticed that a lot of smaller companies have disappeared. Indeed, as Gartner puts it, it’s easier for behemoths like Microsoft and IBM to chip away at the smaller iPaaS vendors’ market share or to buy them out.
This can explain why smaller companies cease to exist, while the market is growing exponentially.
But if your business model is built from the start with a future-proof vision, you can still be standing when most of your peers have long since sold out. At Cazoomi, all our decisions are made with an eye on the future. This has kept us going for more than a decade.
Want to know why we’re still thriving and super proud of our subscriber retention rate? Try SyncApps for free (NOT a free trial, a 100% free subscription) and see why our 25,000+ subscribers love it.
Sure, we look at trends (like the ones below), but we mostly look at what our subscribers might need in the future. And we deliver that before said future comes knocking.
We’ve identified the following trends by combining our own data (what our subscribers rely on the most and what they want us to build into our integration solutions as soon as possible) with information from research reports. This is what we came up with:
This trend has been present in Gartner’s analyses for several years now. Gartner calls hyperautomation a mix of machine learning, automation tools, and packaged software.
We think 2022 will be its time to shine.
Why?
Because we’ve seen an increased need for automation of everything. Our subscribers use automated flows for nearly everything:
Automation is, without a doubt, the best way to increase your profit with a minimal investment. Anything you can automate means less overhead. But there’s a catch:
Everyone loves personalization. OK, maybe not everyone-everyone, but at least 90% of people:
To me, 90% is enough to bet on personalization. When you think of automation or integration, personalization is the last thing that comes to mind.
Truth be told, automation used to mean the death of personal interactions. But that’s no longer the case. Today, integration and automation make personalization possible.
How, you ask? Happy to answer.
You see, customers expect companies to understand their needs and expectations:
That’s all fine and dandy when you work with a handful of clients and you have the time to talk to each of them — and I mean really talk, not just like their comments on social media. But when you handle a 10,000+ list of contacts you can’t be expected to have meaningful conversations with each of them.
This is where integration comes into play.
Why did they click on the “Buy” link in your last email campaign, but didn’t really buy anything? The data in your CRM might tell you that they’re already a client and they might have just been checking if there’s been a price change in a product they already bought.
And, best of all, you don’t need to switch between dashboards to see all this. You have the combined insights from your mission-critical tools in a single, unified dashboard with bidirectional data flows.
One of our subscribers, a luxury jewelry company, uses Klaviyo for Salesforce to better understand the most demanding demographic of all: luxury buyers. They get better insights and the opportunity to personalize their communication with integration. Read their full story here.
Data is already everywhere. Siloes, lakes, pools — we have so many names for the abundance of data that 2022 has to bring data oceans into the spotlight.
But here’s the thing: before you start hoarding data, do you know exactly what you’re going to do with it? How are you going to use it? How can you turn raw data into cash?
Too much of anything can become a problem. And when there’s too much data, the problems appear very fast.
It’s very easy to get lost in your own data. When you don’t know how to use it, you will most likely end up missing the forest for the trees. We’ve already seen a huge race for data gathering.
And that’s perfectly normal. There is value in data — tons of it. But, much like it happens with diamonds, you have to know how to extract it.
This is where integration and automation come into play. It’s not humanly possible to extract and interpret all the data gathered (even by the smallest of companies) without automation and integration. In 2022 and beyond, where data is present, automation and integration will be mandatory.
It’s no secret that the pandemic has massively increased the number of cyberattacks on pretty much everything, from large companies to solopreneurs and even individual users. Cybercrime is profitable and prevention is the key.
Yes, integration and automation are great, but not at the expense of security. We’ve already received a lot of messages asking about SyncApps’ compliance with GDPR and other similar laws, as well as about how we treat our security.
We were extra happy to pass all the tests our savvy subscribers gave us and we expect similar tests to be more and more frequent. It is, in fact, something that we encourage, since it benefits us all — nobody wants to feed cybercriminals, right?
So, for 2022 we expect automation and integration solutions to upgrade their security and data protection standards to meet the demands of their customers, as well as to mitigate the increasing risks.
Every time I write about the future of our industry, I do it with a smile on my face. I know that it hasn’t been that long since iPaaS was in its infancy, a trend itself, with a long journey ahead before becoming a stand-alone industry.
Much like the children in fairytales, iPaaS and integration grew spectacularly fast. Today, they are mature industries. But what makes me smile is how mature our subscribers are.
The demands they make and the inspiration they give us every day show us that, without a doubt, iPaaS is here to stay. When people demand more of their solution you know that the solution is a priority for them. Integration has become as essential to a business as a CRM is.
In other words: we’ll be writing many more of these posts because the future holds fantastic stuff for both integration and automation.
