5 Trends Powering the High Growth of the Integration and Automation Sector

Did you know analysts project the Integration Platform as a Service (iPaaS) market to sustain a compound annual growth rate of 40% annually? This means it has the potential to reach a market size of $10.3 billion by the year 2025. In this article, we’ll take a look at some of the key trends that are driving this high growth rate in the integration and automation sector. 

1. Proliferation of SaaS point solutions across the enterprise

The high growth and low cost at scale of cloud computing have enabled the explosive growth of new SaaS applications and associated business models.

Companies can now avoid the cost and overhead of building their own applications and, instead, purchase subscriptions to applications that are built and maintained by expert vendors. This allows companies to focus their effort and resources on work that is most valuable to their customers. 

An expected implication of the rise of these modular SaaS applications – built independently by different vendors – is that they’re not designed to effectively communicate with each other. This results in the formation of siloed work. 

In situations where these SaaS app providers do offer integrations, these integrations are not broad enough to cover the wide range of use cases that modern businesses need; as a result, this generates the need for a general integration platform, like iPaaS, where businesses can build and manage a wide range of integration use cases from one place.

With a tool like iPaaS you can house all of these connections within a single hub and control the flow of data between apps in use within your organization. This gives you better security and governance over all of the apps in use across departments – not just IT. 

2. The democratization of software and the rise of no-code platforms

The advances made in user experience design have enabled vendors to build simple, easy-to-use software products that appeal to both non-technical users and the traditional developer. 

The iPaaS sector is no stranger to this democratization of software, and no code platforms that use simple user interfaces and visual flows are now appealing to a broad range of users who are discovering new uses for integration and automation in the work that they do on a daily basis.

The most innovative outcomes arise when the complexity barrier of using integration tools gets eliminated by a low code platform, thus allowing users who know their businesses very well to quickly and easily apply these integration tools to automate their work.

By using a low-code/no-code iPaaS tool, you can empower technical employees throughout your organization to build out their own integrations and automated workflows. This alleviates the pressures put on IT to build out these types of functions and means your organization can be more agile and flexible when it comes to making changes or modernizing systems.  

Organizations fatigued by the vast number of applications and legacy systems in use are keen to have a single place where they can orchestrate all their integration and workflow automation needs

3. The growing complexity and decentralization of organizations

Today’s organizations often have to support remote teams and span many geographical jurisdictions. 

Even within an organization, lines of business and functional departments have their own strategic goals and technology budgets. Many maintain their own technology stacks that need to seamlessly integrate with the broader organization. 

Businesses must also compete for customer attention in new ways and find creative methods to reach them. This often results in the creation of new jobs within their organizations that require their own sets of workflows.

This trend of increasing complexity within the organization is likely to maintain its growing momentum, pointing to a larger and more important role for integration and automation. With all integrations and workflows housed in a single hub, you get better visibility into the work being done throughout your organization and can better support all of your resources quickly and efficiently.

4. The move towards a one-stop hub for all integration and automation needs

Organizations that are fatigued due to the vast number of applications and legacy systems in use are keen to have a single place from which they can orchestrate all their integration and workflow automation needs. 

This means successful iPaaS vendors will need to build a unified solution that addresses broad and general use cases including process automation, building connectors and managing APIs on a single platform.

Vendors who achieve this will be able to delight their customers with the simplicity and low cost of such an approach and should be able to drive higher growth in helping their customers achieve their biggest strategic objectives.  

5. Clarification of market views around integration and automation

The trend towards remote work and the growing importance of cloud-native integrations already had strong positive momentum, even before the disruption caused by the pandemic in 2020.

The resulting changes in how we work have only served to accelerate pre-existing trends in how work and automation have been evolving. 

This has clarified market thinking and driven broad acknowledgment of the importance of having a simple, easy-to-use, cloud-native integration platform that can help companies prepare and respond to rapid changes in their external environment.  

To learn more about iPaaS and what to look for when evaluating vendors, read: 6 Tips for Finding the Right Enterprise Integration and Automation Platform.