March 2022 Summaries

An embedded integration marketplace offers significant advantages for both customers and B2B SaaS companies by enhancing the visibility and usability of integrations. Customers benefit from easy discovery, configuration, and self-activation of integrations, which streamlines processes and reduces costs, while also allowing them to independently manage and support their integrations. For the company, this marketplace enables the creation of productized integrations that are scalable and part of the core product, reducing the workload of customer-facing teams by empowering customers to perform initial setup and troubleshooting. It allows development teams to focus on the core product without the need to build separate interfaces for integrations. Additionally, the marketplace increases integration adoption and customer retention by making integrations easily accessible and adding to the overall stickiness of the product, making it harder for customers to switch to another service without losing their established workflows.

Integration marketplaces are becoming a best practice for B2B SaaS companies, offering a solution for managing the increasing demand for software integrations. However, building such a marketplace in-house is often too costly and resource-intensive for many companies. An embedded integration marketplace, procured from a third party, provides a cost-effective alternative that seamlessly integrates into a company's application, offering functionality that appears native to the users. This solution allows developers to focus on core products while providing customers with a comprehensive integration experience, including tools for configuration, monitoring, and troubleshooting. Embedded integration marketplaces are often part of an embedded Integration Platform as a Service (iPaaS), which offers a range of features, including low-code integration design, custom workflow building, and robust support tools, all underpinned by cloud-native infrastructure to ensure scalability and security.

The rapid expansion of SaaS companies, which now number over 15,000 in the United States, has led to an increased reliance on multiple applications by businesses, with small businesses using an average of 102 apps, mid-market businesses 137, and enterprises 288. Despite significant investments in integrations, many B2B SaaS products offer a suboptimal customer experience, as integrations often feel bolted on, lack visibility, and require cumbersome vendor interactions for activation and support. To improve this experience, an integration marketplace can be implemented, allowing customers to explore, activate, and manage integrations independently, similar to application marketplaces like Salesforce's AppExchange. This approach enhances the user experience by providing a central catalog, self-activation features, and self-serve support tools, thus placing more control in the hands of the customer and helping to maintain long-term customer satisfaction.

Building integrations with SOAP-based APIs can initially seem complex, particularly for developers unfamiliar with SOAP, due to its verbose nature and numerous associated terms and acronyms like XML and WSDL. SOAP, which originally stood for "Simple Object Access Protocol," facilitates CRUD operations by defining a protocol for predictable communication between systems through web services comprised of operations that accept specific inputs and provide structured outputs. Despite its complexity, tools like SoapUI and Postman can simplify the process by parsing WSDL files and generating sample requests, while programming libraries in languages like NodeJS can automate much of the request and response handling. Further simplification can be achieved using embedded integration platforms as a service (iPaaS), which offer pre-built connectors and low-code integration builders to reduce the need for manual coding, making it easier to work with even complex SOAP-based APIs.