Setting a new standard in integration and automation

At Incentro, we’d been searching high and low for one. Then we crossed paths with Workato. As a relatively young company that expanded into Europe less than five years ago, Workato doesn’t yet have the global clout of certain competitors. But there are perks to being the new kid on the block: Workato is cloud-native. Traditional platforms, on the other hand, are still lumbered with their on-prem past (even after cloud migrations) and require a vast amount of technical expertise just to use them.

What is iPaaS? 

An Integration Platform as a Service (iPaaS) is a digital platform that integrates data and apps, and connects workflows. The platform doesn’t manage the data itself, but how it all fits together. This makes iPaaS integrations much easier to manage and control than the “spaghetti ball” you get from connecting individual applications. 

The 2024 Gartner Magic Quadrant for iPaaS named Workato as a Leader, ranking the company top in “completeness of vision.” This recognition is thanks to Workato’s ability to empower organizations with faster time-to-market, operational efficiency gains, productivity boosts for IT teams, lower operational costs and greater agility. 

Intuitive design = lower complexity 

Organizations are wrestling with ever more complex application landscapes. Many applications, ranging from ERP and CRM to specialized tools for each department, must be able to communicate with each other and share data to perform effectively. Traditionally, this required laborious integrations – ones only specialists could build and maintain. Each connector relied on in-depth technical competence and a string of custom code. Platforms like Workato are breaking the mold with no-code solutions, providing intuitive platforms that can be used without constant specialist integration support. 

This enhances the manageability of more complex application landscapes and eliminates the need to hire an army of technical brains. Instead, your current teams can build and maintain integrations independently, while your IT department holds the reins of security and governance to eliminate shadow IT.

Central governance delivers maximum control and speed 

Many organizations were sold the promise of tools that would make their lives easier. Instead, those tools just caused more headaches. Self-service RPA is one example: an awesome idea at first, but it soon swamped IT departments. 

Workato adopts a fundamentally different approach. The platform offers granular governance, allowing specific user permissions to be granted to different teams without sacrificing centralized control. This means that HR’s IT team works only in HR applications in a protected environment, while your central IT team remains in full control and governs permissions and access. 

The result is a win-win: teams can work autonomously within their domain; IT spends less time on service management and control, and more on innovation. No more shadow IT to “clear up” down the line, no more uncontrolled data streams, and no compromises in terms of security or compliance. And on top of that, your organization remains agile at all times. 

Accelerated implementation provides instant value 

It’s a battle for attention. Marketing wants to synchronize customer data between CRM and marketing automation. HR wants to ensure applicant data is consistent between the recruitment platform and HR system. Finance wants real-time insights into data from multiple sources. You want to help, but your IT budgets are very tight. Precious development time is being squandered on squashing bugs and maintaining existing connectors, leaving little room for new implementations. 

Workato’s cloud-native architecture makes all that a thing of the past. Your ignition key is your browser – no need for local development environments and server configurations. Pre-built connectors and templates accelerate the deployment of common integrations, freeing up time usually spent on management to focus more on new projects. 

Cost efficiency thanks to smart architecture 

We’ve entered a new economic age. Following years of low interest that spurred a focus on growth, businesses now have a new fixation: getting operating costs under control. CFOs are more critical than ever about IT investments. They want transparency on the direct costs, how those costs will evolve as the business grows, and how many specialists are needed for implementation and service management. 

Workato’s unique pricing model is adapted to this new reality. It shuns big up-front investments in infrastructure or expensive specialists, and avoids nasty surprises from unexpected management costs or resource expansion. The platform scales according to your use. And because it’s truly low-code, you don’t need a team of integration experts to run it. 

In other words, the most advanced integration technology is finally available to small and medium-sized businesses, larger companies and global enterprise organizations. It’s therefore easy to see why the iPaaS market is growing by 25% each year. While that growth is thanks to increasing cloud adoption, another crucial driver is the democratization of technology that was once the reserve of enterprise organizations.