Consulting Software Engineer at Singhpora Consulting
Real User
Top 10
2024-04-30T06:06:42Z
Apr 30, 2024
iPaaS is a natural evolution of the cloud transition that has been in progress for the last 10-15 years (as an aside, 'serverless' cloud services are now part of the mix). Integration Platform as a Service (iPaaS) is a subset of Platform as a Service (PaaS). There are primarily two types of IT systems in organisations: 1) Core business systems (like ERP, eCommerce, or even some custom developed systems for highly specialised use-cases), and 2) General purpose machines or servers for a variety of reasons, including integration workloads between core-systems, or even hosting ad-hoc applications. Whereas core systems could transition into a variety of SaaS products, for the second category, the transition is into IaaS or PaaS, depending on whether the organisation needs plain hardware, or hardware with some managed platform services on it (e.g. Instead of renting an intel machine with 16GB RAM from a cloud provider, you instead rent a "Weblogic" server or "Apache Tomcat" server and pay for it per hour, with the intenion of deploying your own application or workloads on it). iPaaS is thus a similar PaaS product with an "Integration Middleware" deployed on it, ready for you to deploy your own integrations. Examples are Oracle's Integration Cloud, Mulesoft, and others offered as iPaaS offerings. There are of course pros and cons to this (less control at the platform level traded with convenience of platform setup and management). For the foreseeable future, the need for integration middleware is likely to persist, as mid-sized to large organisations can have a fairly large number and diversity of core systems addressing different business needs, and not all of these systems are built for native integration with the set of systems unique to that organisation
What is iPaaS? Due to the growing need for reliable and secure digital transformation strategies, organizations have begun to adopt cloud integration solutions such as iPaaS, or Integration Platform as a Service.
iPaaS is a natural evolution of the cloud transition that has been in progress for the last 10-15 years (as an aside, 'serverless' cloud services are now part of the mix). Integration Platform as a Service (iPaaS) is a subset of Platform as a Service (PaaS). There are primarily two types of IT systems in organisations: 1) Core business systems (like ERP, eCommerce, or even some custom developed systems for highly specialised use-cases), and 2) General purpose machines or servers for a variety of reasons, including integration workloads between core-systems, or even hosting ad-hoc applications. Whereas core systems could transition into a variety of SaaS products, for the second category, the transition is into IaaS or PaaS, depending on whether the organisation needs plain hardware, or hardware with some managed platform services on it (e.g. Instead of renting an intel machine with 16GB RAM from a cloud provider, you instead rent a "Weblogic" server or "Apache Tomcat" server and pay for it per hour, with the intenion of deploying your own application or workloads on it). iPaaS is thus a similar PaaS product with an "Integration Middleware" deployed on it, ready for you to deploy your own integrations. Examples are Oracle's Integration Cloud, Mulesoft, and others offered as iPaaS offerings. There are of course pros and cons to this (less control at the platform level traded with convenience of platform setup and management). For the foreseeable future, the need for integration middleware is likely to persist, as mid-sized to large organisations can have a fairly large number and diversity of core systems addressing different business needs, and not all of these systems are built for native integration with the set of systems unique to that organisation