BYOA vs Monolithic Applications (rise of the IPaaS)

Integration costs are the often understated and hidden costs of any larger enterprise project. Countless hours of developer and system administrator efforts are devoted to figuring out how to connect disparate systems into a cohesive solution.

Years ago, IT could count on the monolithic application to lessen integration efforts. If the application was solely encompassed by a single mainframe application or a large ERP applications (SAP, Oracle) you would spend the majority of the time configuring the systems and trying to convince departments to adapt their processes to the confines of the new ERP.

Inevitably one of two things would happen, either individual departments would spawn their own shadow IT applications or IT would get requests to customize the core ERP.

Shadow IT applications have found a fertile land to thrive due to cloud computing environments. Shadow IT applications come into an organization when a department can't get the IT department's time/help or a department head has some mandate and $$ to achieve new goals. For a small startup business, you might just find the most popular online application to solve your business problem. You need accounting software? There are dozens of online choices such as Quickbooks or Freshbooks. You need a CRM? Pick among Zoho, Hubspot, Highrise, or Salesforce. Need a dashboard? Pick between Cyfe, Klipfolio or Periscope. Whether you are a department in a large enterprise or a brand new startup, there are plenty of Bring Your Own Application (BYOA) choices available today. No one is stuck with accepting the monolithic application anymore.

While choice is good, silo'd applications provide only a short term high. When data flows freely, all participants benefit and more importantly your company will benefit.

The good news is that new Integration Platform as a Service (IPaaS) companies are thriving to solve the problem of silo'd applications. The IPaaS platforms become the glue linking BYOA choices. Below is a quick review of 3 ready to go options (Zapier, Mulesoft, SnapLogic) and one DIY solution (Amazon Step Functions) for lessening the cost of application integration. You can have the freedom of choosing the best of breed applications and be able to integrate them in a cohesive manner.