What is a platform integration? Here’s what you need to know

A platform integration solution can play a critical role in keeping software applications in sync and in automating key business processes.

To help you build impactful integrations at scale, we’ll break down effective use cases and the platform integration tools you can use to build them. 

But first, let’s align on the definition of a platform integration.

Definition of platform integration

A platform integration, otherwise known as an integration platform, is a 3rd-party tool that helps your team build and maintain integrations, typically via application programming interfaces (APIs).

In addition, these platforms can either help you build internal integrations (i.e., integrations between the applications your organization uses) or customer-facing integrations (i.e., integrations between your product and your customers’ applications).

Related: API connection overview

Examples of using integration platforms

To help make our definition more tangible, let’s break down a few popular use cases for internal integration platforms and then share a couple of impactful customer-facing integrations.

Enable finance to reconcile payroll expenses and close the books faster

To help your finance team access payroll-related expenses quickly, easily, and without any issues, you can integrate your payroll solution with your ERP system and build a flow that works as follows: following each payroll run, your payroll system automatically POSTs payroll journal entries to your ERP system.

Empower your business analysts to make critical financial decisions

To help your business analysts make timely, informed, and critical decisions over time, they’ll need access to the most recent financial data in the application they use for analysis—a business intelligence (BI) solution.

To help facilitate this, you can connect your ERP system with your BI solution and sync fields, like invoices, on a specific cadence (e.g., every 24 hours).

Related: Examples of API integration 

Automate user provisioning

To help your customers add users to and remove users from your product with ease, you can connect with their HRIS solutions and implement the following flows:

• Once a customer adds an employee to their integrated HRIS, that employee is automatically available to add in the customer’s instance of your platform. Moreover, they can be provisioned with a certain level of permissions by default based on their role, department, location, etc.

• Once a customer removes an employee from the integrated HRIS, an admin at that customer account gets notified in your product and can go on to remove them with the click of a button

Related: A guide to automated provisioning

Types of integration platforms

There are a wide range of integration platforms that support either internal or customer-facing use cases. 

That said, the former (internal integration platforms) generally include two types of solutions:

• Integration platform as a service (iPaaS): helps you develop API-based integrations and build workflow automations that work across them. They also typically offer thousands of API connectors and hundreds of thousands of automation templates to accelerate adoption, along with additional solutions and services, like an API management platform

Common iPaaS solutions include Mulesoft, Boomi, Jitterbit, and Zapier

• Robotic process automation (RPA) software: lets you build custom software scripts (i.e., bots) that can mimic human tasks at the UI-level, such as copying and pasting data between applications. Popular vendors include UiPath, Automation Anywhere, and Blue Prism

The latter (customer-facing integrations) are also dominated by two types of solutions:

• Unified API: enables you to add hundreds of integrations to your product through a single, aggregated API (i.e., a unified API). Unified API solutions often specialize in specific software categories (though not always) and provide varying features and support when it comes to managing and maintaining your integrations 

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As you evaluate tools in the market, you’ll likely come across Merge, Finch, Codat, and Apideck  

• Embedded iPaaS: empowers you to add one integration at a time to your product. It also offers a workflow builder (like a traditional iPaaS) that lets customers implement workflow automations between your product and the integrated application(s)

Also, depending on the embedded iPaaS vendor, you may be able to implement the solution in ways that either give customers more or less control over their integrations and workflow automations (e.g., allowing customers to build their own automations with your embedded iPaaS).

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Common embedded iPaaS solutions include Workato, Tray.ai, Paragon, and Prismatic.

Benefits of integration platforms

The benefits of using integration platforms vary depending on whether you’re considering internal or customer-facing integrations.

Here are some of the benefits of internal integration platforms: 

• Time savings: by outsourcing the integration development and maintenance to a 3rd-party, your engineers can focus more of their time and effort on core product initiatives 

• Improved employee experience: building and maintaining an integration is incredibly arduous, stressful, and never-ending work (at least until the integration gets deprecated). By allowing your engineers to offload at least some parts of these projects to a 3rd-party integration platform, they can spend more time on the projects they actually enjoy and are uniquely equipped to tackle 

• Cost savings: assuming the integration platform is effective, it can free up hundreds of engineering hours every year. And, given how expensive engineers are, the return of using the integration platform could be well worth the investment

And here are some of the benefits of customer-facing integration platforms:

• White label integrations: You can offer the integrations in your own brand’s look and feel and without having to mention the vendor, making it seem as though your team built and maintains the integrations

• Scalability: Using a universal API solution (or unified API solution), you can add hundreds of integrations to your product through a single integration build

• Ease of maintaining and managing the integrations: Certain product integration platforms can also help you maintain integrations (through their own engineers) and manage any via tooling like automated issue detection, fully-searchable logs, and more.

Taken together, you’ll be able to offer healthy, reliable, and performant integrations over time without having to involve your developers.

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