Why Embedded Integration is the Future

As we said in our 2020 integration predictions, apps will have integration embedded under the covers and not added as an afterthought.

Mirza Salihagic Mirza Salihagic

For cloud applications to survive and thrive, they require built-in integration with other apps and services.

Here are five of the main things that will drive embedded integration:

  1. Customer adoption and retention

The ultimate goal for every software product is user adoption and retention. But, with growing numbers of apps and services available on the market, it is becoming more challenging to win and keep users engaged within your product.

By providing in-app integrations to third-party sources you are unlocking additional capabilities for your users, empowering them to do more with your product. This increases the productivity of your users and makes your offering stickier. Embedded api integration solutions are designed to help you easily create and deploy integrations directly within your product, fully baked-in to your user experience.

  1. Lower development and maintenance costs

Building integrations without the right tools and specialized integration know-how requires a lot of work. In some cases, it can take up to 70% of your development and maintenance efforts. Your developers need to explore the API of the app that you want to integrate. They need to build and test the integration. They need to monitor the API to make sure that if the API changes your integrations won’t break – over and over again for every new integration.

Embedded integration solves this, providing intuitive tools to create and publish the integrations you need in a more efficient and standardized way. Pre-built app connectors ease the pain of dealing with API documentation and changes, so you can avoid maintenance chaos. Companies using an embedded integration solution report savings of 50% or more.

  1. Faster innovation

Taking care of app integrations is stealing time and distracting your team from building the differentiating capabilities of your product. It is slowing down your time-to-market for new features and capabilities. With embedded integration you can sidestep that distraction, and gain a considerable head start on your competitors. Once it is set up, you can add new integrations with a click of the button and easily manage them across their lifecycle.

  1. Better insights

Monitoring traffic and usage patterns of hard-coded integrations is tricky. Without knowing how integrations are being used, you are not able to optimize your offering. Embedded integration comes with the ability to track and monitor transactions and usage statistics, allowing you to understand your users better and see which integrations they use most.

  1. On-demand scaling

Anticipating demand on integration resources can be difficult. This impacts not only the technical performance but also your budget. Built on the foundation of an iPaaS (integration Platform as a Service), embedded integration simplifies horizontal scalability. It allows your integration services to be highly available, resilient to failures and to grow as you encounter spikes or increases in usage, automatically.

Talk to us about Software AG’s webMethods.io Embed, a cloud-based embedded integration engine designed to help you enable your users to easily connect and integrate data from a variety of systems, apps, and devices – all from within your application experience.