The consolidation and integration of technologies serves to improve efficiency and reduce bottlenecks for consumers, the enterprise, and everything in between. Imagine if you had to use a dozen email clients that could only send emails to that specific client? Sending emails would be a very time consuming and inefficient process as you logged into one email client after another with no way to track all of your outbound emails in one place. Integration Platforms as a Service (iPaaS) solves that simple example on a grander scale and whether it is enterprise or consumer-focused, the complexity of the integration(s) can range massively.For example, an enterprise may want to consolidate all of its many software systems, such as ERP, CRM, and DMS, for greater insight into how their overall business works. This is where business intelligence can come in and help the enterprise make data-driven decisions that affect all aspects of their business. For example, many companies may see data gleaned from an iPaaS solution to re-architect their infrastructure from legacy systems, point solutions, and custom integration code, and move it to a particular deployment.An iPaaS solution geared for the enterprise can connect these systems, but connecting them is where it ends. To get these systems to work together to advance the efficiency of their daily processes, a business process management (BPM) solution is required. Integrating systems is one thing, orchestrating the work the systems and people who use them is another matter entirely.As iPaaS continues to mature, it could very well begin to merge with other solutions that extend systems once they are integrated. Be it system integrators (SIs), ISVs, or new technologies that make software and those that use it more efficient, they will be ripe for the consolidation that iPaaS provides. Workflow seems to be the ideal space for this but further, there is an entire market in software tooling where iPaaS can play an increasingly larger role.So what does this mean? iPaaS can solve more problems than it currently does - and - it will. The market for enterprise software tooling, particularly related to microservices, containers, and cloud in general, is a billion-dollar market that is growing exponentially. iPaaS solutions will continue to emerge to solve the integration needs of these companies that are more system focused that human-focused. RPA can play a role here as can BPM.
