Power-up with in-app integrations

All this is great, but the truth is there are just too many of them. Instead of being able to do things faster, we waste our time because content and functionalities are spread out across multiple applications and User Interfaces (UIs).

We hop from an app to app, navigating through different UIs to get things done. Not only does this decrease productivity for users but it also causes a lot of users to give up on using some applications.

Keeping the customer 'appy'

In order to remove obstacles for the users we see increasing number of companies enhancing their solutions with connectivity to third-party apps. The goal of these in-app integrations is to keep their users engaged and increase their productivity within their own product.

For example, collaboration tool Slack users can select from a large number of available integrations and add the apps they need to get stuff done faster - within the Slack application. Isn't this one of the key success factors for Slack?

It is not really surprising that SaaS vendors are the first ones to incorporate in-app integrations into their products. Innovation and speed-to-market are key for customer adoption and retention. More connectivity helps to enrich applications with additional, premium capabilities or simply close the functional gaps that they might currently have.

So in-app integrations can help extend the products with additional capabilities, increase the productivity of users and make applications stickier. But how do you do it?

Headless integration

One option could be to build your own integrations - write the code. But if you start coding and maintaining every integration that you need, you can end up in a mess. Your product team will spend a lot of time exploring the APIs that you want to connect to, writing the code, maintaining it, and monitoring the changes in APIs - in order to make sure that your integrations don’t break. All this effort requires developer time, taking it away from building the differentiating capabilities of your own app, and it slows down your time to market.

The goal of embedded or headless integration is to solve this problem. As the name says - it allows companies to 'embed' integrations with third party apps into their applications so users can interact with other apps and services right within your own app experience ('headless').

This approach doesn’t require coding for each integration and saves a lot of time for your developers - so it speeds up the delivery of in-app integrations while allowing your team to focus on building what matters most - your core product.

This is why Software AG has released webMethods.io Embed - an embed-able iPaaS - empowering product development teams to efficiently embed in-app integrations into their products to enhance their offering with connectivity to a variety of cloud apps and services.

If you want to learn more and see our product in action we invite you to join us for the upcoming webinar on webMethods.io Embed.