Industry executives and experts share their predictions for 2024.  Read them in this 16th annual VMblog.com series exclusive.

iPaaS getting up to speed on tech trends

By Andre Sluczka is the Founder and CEO of Jetic

A recent report found that the iPaaS market is experiencing significant growth, with a projected robust compound annual growth rate of 32% from 2023 to 2030. With companies increasingly embracing cloud-based solutions, the need for seamless integration between these applications will play a significant role in the growth of iPaaS solutions. Additionally, automating tasks, improving business agility, and supporting API deployment are, and will remain, strong reasons to use integration tools. In this article, I will review four trends coming for the iPaaS market.

iPaaS platforms will become cloud-native

The adoption of Kubernetes is established, with up to 94% of surveyed organizations reporting deploying services and applications on it. While running stateful workloads on Kubernetes used to be a no-go, this is no longer the case, and companies are increasingly moving all their workload to the container orchestration tool. And while most integration platforms are currently hosted, this is about to change.

Businesses increasingly need to be in control of their data to comply with security requirements and data regulations laws. This is especially true for industries such as governments, defense, financial and health sectors. And because integration is a very sensitive part of company infrastructure, hybrid, and multi-cloud deployments powered by cloud-native container orchestration tools will help ensure data consistency.

Vendors will need to address the long tail of connectors

Because companies have an exponential rise of data sources and destinations, mixed with the need to maintain legacy systems - such as mainframes in the banking industry - the iPaaS market will need to provide more flexibility to address that long tail of application and system connectors. Just looking at the number of SaaS companies, with about 30,000 of them, iPaaS solutions cannot possibly keep up with their customer's needs by simply offering a catalog of connectors developed in-house. To achieve that, they will need to empower their users to build their own system and application connectors to handle any integration use case.

Focus on User Experience and Ease of Use

In the upcoming landscape, iPaaS providers are poised to enhance user experiences by prioritizing intuitive and user-friendly platforms. A key focus will be on empowering non-technical stakeholders to effortlessly create integration workflows as businesses progressively embrace a data-driven approach to decision-making. Whether for business analysts or non-technical stakeholders, the need to seamlessly access data is emerging as a fundamental requirement in every industry.

OSS is coming to the iPaaS market

While businesses increasingly embrace open-source software, most Integration iPaaS providers only provide hosted and closed-source solutions. However, the tide is shifting as end-users express a growing interest in cost efficiency, avoiding vendor lock-in, and the flexibility to build upon open-source software. A recent Forester report highlighted that 27% of iPaaS buyers were unsatisfied with the cost and licensing of their current integration solution. The iPaaS market is anticipated to respond to this demand by progressively integrating open-source software options into their offerings, providing users with more choices that align with the principles of openness, transparency, and customization.

The shift is inevitable

While the Enterprise application integration (EAI) market has been lagging behind adopting some of the larger technology trends, this is about to change. Being in compliance with data laws won't be negotiable, and businesses that cannot make data-driven decisions may face challenges in adapting to the rapidly evolving market landscape. Vendors of iPaaS solutions can take advantage by adding agile cloud-native and mature open-source attributes to their offerings.

##

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Andre Sluczka is the Founder and CEO of Jetic, the first and only cloud-native API and application integration platform based on Apache Camel.