The future of integration infrastructure
10 years from now, the B2B tech stack will look very different. Software companies will operate on not hundreds, but thousands of specialized apps – and all of them will be seamlessly interconnected.
It’s a big step forward from where we are today, with increasingly complex and fragmented SaaS stacks creating almost as many problems as they solve.
So, how do we get there? To unlock the full value of SaaS, we first need to develop integration infrastructure that abstracts away the challenges of creating custom integrations at scale.
As the SaaS ecosystem has expanded, some solutions have started to emerge. But none of them fully deliver on the depth of connection, flexibility and scalability that product leaders – and their customers – need.
The ideal integration infrastructure would seamlessly connect any app with any other, and enable them to interact for any use case.
And the good news? It’s closer than you might think.
Integration complexity is increasing as SaaS swells
Today, B2B SaaS products perform impressively in isolation, providing functionality, efficiency and productivity gains. But they don’t play well with others.
Buyers are getting wise to their limitations, and it’s making them more sceptical when considering purchases. Integrations are top of the list of evaluation criteria.
Vendors know they need to offer a wide set of native integrations, but that’s getting harder to achieve. As the B2B tech stack swells (the average business uses 371 SaaS apps), the number of integrations vendors need to build is skyrocketing.
So are buyer expectations of the integration experience. Once, they might have been content to ask engineers for customisation support, or build manual workarounds with Zapier. Now, they expect to find, install and integrate software in a single click.
In a competitive marketplace, deep, flexible and seamless integrations are critical for SaaS apps to survive. But there’s currently no way for vendors to build them at scale.
Products like Embedded IPaaS and Universal APIs solve part, but not all of the problem. They each have significant limitations that prevent them from delivering, or worse, turn them into additional blockers.
Embedded IPaaS is great for building point-to-point integrations, but isn’t scalable. It doesn’t enable one-to-many integrations: to implement 5 integration scenarios for 20 apps, for instance, developers would need to create 100 different flows in iPaaS.
By contrast, Unified APIs offer a lot of different end points, but aren’t flexible. They’re too unified, limiting accessibility and customisation.
A framework for creating custom integrations at scale
Product leaders who have been burned by these solutions think that integration infrastructure that ticks all their boxes – one that is simple and flexible, and capable of scaling integrations to many different APIs – is a pipe dream. It requires too many deep integrations, all of very different types, with too many different systems.
But a truly universal integration layer is possible – one that leverages AI to change the way developers work, and unlock the full potential of SaaS apps.
That’s what we’re building at integration.app. Our integration layer simplifies and speeds up the process of building deep integration use cases, abstracting away complexity so that custom integrations can be created at scale.
Integration.app provides a standardised framework enabling developers to decouple integrations from APIs, and create agnostic integrations. Then, we use AI to generate app- and customer-specific implementations. It means developers can write code once, and build multiple complex integrations of any shape, depth or scale.
It creates a positive feedback loop that will change the game for product leaders. The customisation and scalability provided by our integration layer lets developers build orders of magnitude more integrations than existing approaches. That extends the value of their SaaS apps, and drives network effects for buyers. The more products use the integration layer, and the more apps they integrate with, the more customers will come to expect deep, seamless connectivity as standard.
Integration infrastructure built for the future of SaaS
Soon, it will be the only way to build. In the very near future, the value of SaaS products will be defined by their compatibility with the wider ecosystem of tools customers use. Software that only works in isolation won’t survive.
The way we leverage AI means this approach will only improve over time. With the advent of LLMs, we have the opportunity to significantly accelerate development – but AI agents still need a clear framework and robust testing to provide the quality of integration that B2B customers expect. The more products use our integration layer, the more data there is for AI agents to learn from, and the more repetitive manual work can be automated away.
To date, the value of SaaS apps has been curtailed by the bottleneck of onboarding them. That’s about to change. The integration layer we’re developing is only the first step towards a future in which buyers are able to find, test, and deploy new SaaS apps within minutes – not months.
The next generation of integration infrastructure is coming – and it’s ushering in a new era of enriched, integrated and powerful SaaS.
