Key takeaways
- Building a few integrations is relatively straightforward, but scaling integrations for hundreds or thousands of customers introduces new challenges around maintenance, customer support, governance, and operational complexity.
- As integration catalogs grow, manual processes and one-off implementations become increasingly difficult to sustain, slowing delivery and consuming irreplacable engineering resources.
- Successful SaaS companies scale integrations by standardizing development practices, investing in reusable infrastructure, and empowering teams outside of engineering to deploy and manage integrations.
- An embedded iPaaS provides the tooling, automation, and operational controls needed to build, deploy, monitor, and maintain integrations efficiently as customer demand increases.
Introduction
SaaS integrations can appear simple on the surface: write code that allows System A to connect with System B and transfer data between the systems. Done.
And that may be true for that first integration or so. After all, your dev team reviewed the requirements and said, "Yes, we can do that." It's possible that building your second or third integration also went well.
But at some point, you, your dev team, and even your customers realize that the traditional, one-off approach you're using to build integrations won't work at scale. Your customers' need for integrations keeps growing, but your integration challenges are growing even faster.
Why do you need to scale integrations?
You may have dozens of customers today, but you'll have hundreds or thousands next year. And, based on current trends, each customer will use more apps over time (one 2020 report notes that mid-market businesses use an average of 137 apps). So you'll need to create even more integrations to keep pace. One way or the other, you'll end up with many customers and many integrations.
Scaling to handle all those integrations for all those customers? That's where an embedded iPaaS (or embedded integration platform) can help and we'll use the rest of this post to examine how that works.
But first, let's look at some of the problems you can have when trying to scale integrations without an embedded iPaaS.
Problems that arise when scaling integrations
As noted, scaling integrations brings its own challenges. Some are simple; some are not. But all of them must be addressed to scale your SaaS product integrations successfully.
- How do you scale integrations without scaling all the teams (engineering, onboarding, and support) that handle the integrations? You can't afford to double, triple, or quadruple the size of your teams to address integrations. You've got to figure out how to do more with less and execute on X times the number of integrations you have now, but without increasing your staffing linearly.
- How do you ensure you don't accrue substantial tech debt when scaling integrations? Let's say you've got plenty of dev resources and are building several integrations simultaneously. How are your teams attempting to future-proof those integrations? Or are they simply knocking out as much code as they can as quickly as they can to take care of customers? If that's the case, how much future time will be spent rebuilding/refactoring those integrations?
- How do you ensure sufficient resources remain available for your core product? While a single integration may not require many resources, building out a dozen of them changes the equation. How will you ensure that your devs can primarily focus on your core app and not end up buried in integration work?
4 areas for successful integration scaling
From working with our customers, which are B2B SaaS companies across a wide number of industry verticals, we've determined that scaling integrations comes down to these four areas:
- Development
- Deployment
- Support
- Infrastructure
Let's look at each area and see how an embedded iPaaS helps your teams avoid common issues while successfully scaling your B2B SaaS integrations.
Scaling integration development
Most SaaS teams think of development first, if only because it's what comes up early in the process. If two devs can build two integrations apiece per year, what will it take to support 100 new integrations in a year? It's easy to see that adding 49 more devs is not a sustainable path.
Fortunately, an embedded iPaaS (embedded integration platform) includes a low-code integration designer, API connectors (and other built-in integration components), the ability for devs to write any code needed for niche or vertical scenarios, an embedded workflow builder for end users, and a dedicated infrastructure.
The low-code integration designer and existing API connectors mean you can shift much of the integration development onto non-devs. If you want to keep it where devs do the bulk of integration development, an embedded iPaaS will still expedite the integration process by ensuring that some portion of the integration (30%, 50%, 80%) is pre-built.
Your devs can also write custom API connectors to integrate with any application your customers use, no matter the industry. And, for scenarios outside the norm, allowing devs to write code ensures that your team never ends up short of the goal because of low-code designer limitations.
Scaling integration deployment
Once you've figured out how to scale the development of X integrations, the next step is determining how to deploy all those integrations efficiently to your customers.
An embedded iPaaS includes an integration marketplace and the ability to productize your integrations. In addition, with integrations being built and deployed much more quickly than with a traditional development approach, you can set up new customers with integrations as part of your core product onboarding process.
The integration marketplace allows you to make your integrations accessible to internal and customer users for listing, searching, and deployment. As such, the integration marketplace showcases your integrations as essential product functionality (instead of the behind-the-scenes role that integrations often have).
To assist with scaling integration deployment, you can productize your integrations by specifying the configuration values/options that are unique per customer. These values often pertain to auth and endpoints but can include almost anything. This configurability means your team can build a single integration and then deploy it to dozens (or hundreds) of customers without deploying different code for each customer.
Scaling integration support
Having many integrations only helps you move your product forward if your support team isn't buried in trouble tickets.
An embedded iPaaS includes logging and real-time monitoring and alerting. These functions help you scale integration support internally and externally.
Internally, your customer-facing teams can stay abreast of everything: what integrations are deployed (and for which customers), the status of every integration, what alerts have been triggered, and much more.
Your team gains insights that can warn them of issues before they become critical, allowing them to provide proactive support for integrations.
Externally, your customers can have a similar level of insight, allowing them to see the logs, set up monitors, and get alerts on their integrations. In addition, they can update configurations and perform first-level troubleshooting when there are problems. As a result, your customers send fewer support issues your way.
Finally, by putting so much control into the hands of your support team and your customers, your devs only need to provide support for those issues that your support team and customers can't resolve themselves.
Scaling integration infrastructure
For B2B SaaS integrations, infrastructure resources are often poorly calculated or overlooked entirely. Yes, integrations may be relatively small, discrete applications, but deploy them to a few hundred customers and watch the I/O, CPU, and memory usage climb rapidly.
An embedded iPaaS includes a cloud-native infrastructure that scales horizontally to match the integration load. No matter how many integrations and customers you have using the platform, resources are continuously reallocated to ensure optimal performance.
Integration loads can be highly irregular. Based on the time of the day, they may drop to almost nothing but then jump from that to thousands of operations per second over a few minutes time. An embedded iPaaS also includes capabilities to address this type of bursting behavior, ensuring that integrations have necessary resources despite load variability.
For those who build out their integration infrastructure, only to watch it fall over when all their customers run an integration simultaneously, using an embedded iPaaS with its secure, scalable infrastructure makes all the difference.
Are there limits to scaling integrations?
Certainly. No system is without limits. But practically speaking, an embedded iPaaS can handle the massive numbers of integrations and customers that today's B2B SaaS systems require.
And by simplifying and streamlining the integration build, deployment, and support processes, an embedded iPaaS allows you to make the most of the dev and non-dev resources you already have. Everyone benefits when you can turn integrations around more quickly, configure them appropriately, deploy them to a broad range of customers, and keep them running around the clock.
Implementing an embedded iPaaS for your integrations allows you to not only scale on demand, but also to ensure that your integrations become first-class features of your product.
Schedule a demo and we'll show you how our embedded iPaaS can support your integration scaling needs.
Common questions
Question: What does it mean to "scale integrations" for a B2B SaaS product?
Answer: Scaling integrations means being able to build, deploy, and manage a growing number of customer-facing integrations without proportionally growing your engineering, onboarding, or support teams. Early on, a SaaS product might have a handful of integrations hand-coded by devs. That approach works until it doesn't: when the integration backlog starts competing with your core product roadmap or when customer onboarding stalls waiting for a connector to be built. Scaling means having the processes, tooling, and infrastructure in place so that integrations can multiply (across more customers and more apps) without the operational overhead multiplying at the same rate.
Question: Why is scaling integrations hard for B2B SaaS companies?
Answer: The core problem is that integration complexity increases overhead. Each new customer may use a different set of apps, require different data mappings, or have unique configuration needs. Each new integration your team builds adds to the maintenance load. Every time an API changes, authentication breaks, or a customer's environment shifts, something needs fixing. Most teams underestimate this until they're managing dozens of integrations across hundreds of customers, and devs are spending more time keeping existing integrations running than building new ones.
Question: How does an embedded iPaaS help you scale integrations?
Answer: An embedded iPaaS addresses integration scaling across all four dimensions that matter: development, deployment, support, and infrastructure. On the development side, a low-code integration designer and library of pre-built connectors mean a significant portion of each new integration is already built. So devs focus only on what's custom or complex. On the deployment side, configurable integrations can be deployed to many customers from a single codebase. On the support side, monitoring, logging, and alerting tools surface issues proactively and give non-dev team members the visibility needed to handle first-line support without engineering involvement. On the infrastructure side, the platform handles the compute, reliability, and burst capacity required by customer integrations. And your team doesn't have to build or maintain any of it.
Question: Can non-devs help scale integration deployment, and support?
Answer: Yes. This is one of the biggest leverage points an embedded iPaaS unlocks. When integrations are built on a platform with strong non-dev tooling, your implementation, onboarding, and customer success teams can take on work that would otherwise fall to engineering. Non-devs can deploy a pre-built integration to a new customer, configure it to that customer's specific environment, monitor its health, and troubleshoot straightforward issues. Your devs can stay focused on building new integrations and extending your core product.
Question: What is a "configurable integration," and why does it matter for scaling?
Answer: A configurable integration is one built with a set of variables (such as API endpoints, auth credentials, data mappings, or workflow options) that can be configured differently for each customer without modifying the underlying integration code. Instead of building a new version of an integration for each customer with slightly different requirements, your team builds a single well-structured integration. It then deploys it across your customer base, with each customer's specific values filled in.
Question: How does an integration marketplace help scale integration deployment?
Answer: An integration marketplace makes your integrations discoverable and actionable for internal teams and, where appropriate, your customers. Rather than waiting on an implementation call to activate an integration, customers can browse available integrations, see what each does, and activate one themselves by providing credentials and configuration values through a guided interface. For your team, the marketplace creates a single place to manage what's available, what's deployed, and what's running. As your integration catalog grows, a marketplace makes it navigable and useful.
Question: What infrastructure does an embedded iPaaS provide for scaling integrations?
Answer: Integration infrastructure is one of the most underestimated challenges when teams try to scale on their own. A single integration running for a handful of customers may seem like a lightweight workload until every customer triggers it simultaneously and your servers choke. An embedded iPaaS provides a cloud-native infrastructure that scales horizontally to match whatever load your integrations generate. This includes handling burst behavior, in which integration activity can spike from near zero to thousands of operations per second within minutes. It also includes the reliability, redundancy, and security features that enterprise customers expect.
Question: How do you avoid integration tech debt when scaling?
Answer: Integration tech debt is created when teams ship integrations quickly under pressure. This leads to with minimal abstraction, duplicated logic across similar integrations, no versioning discipline, and no path for updating deployed integrations without manually touching each one. The solution? Build on a platform that enforces good architecture by design. An embedded iPaaS ensures that integrations are versioned, configurable, and deployed from a central codebase. This means updates roll out consistently rather than diverging across customers. Custom components are reusable, so logic written once can be shared across multiple integrations rather than copied, pasted, and forgotten. And because the platform supports code-native integration development, your team can use the same CI/CD practices, code review workflows, and testing standards they apply to the rest of your product, rather than treating integrations as second-class citizens outside the usual engineering process.
