One-Click Automated Integration with Recipes (Pre-Built Process Integration Packages)

This blog is co-authored by Payal Paranjape, Informatica.

The enterprise technology landscape is rapidly evolving, driven by the proliferation of SaaS applications and a growing dependence on cloud infrastructure. Because up to 70% of apps used within companies are SaaS-based,¹ the need for seamless integration across diverse systems is more pressing than ever. Furthermore, 92% of organizations are adopting a multi-cloud strategy,² highlighting the growing need for robust cloud integration solutions. Companies are also embracing low-code and no-code platforms. This reflects the rise of non-traditional developers and business users who regularly use low-code/no-code platforms and require data for their day-to-day business activities, building integrations without relying heavily on integration specialists.

However, with the increased complexity in IT environments — including the adoption of multi-cloud strategies and the deployment of an average of 473 applications per enterprise³ — modern organizations face significant integration challenges. As companies grow, integrating more cloud-based applications and managing increasing data volumes becomes time-consuming and difficult. About 61% of business executives recognize digital transformation as a top priority, but only 21% state that the entire C-suite oversees these initiatives.⁴ These integration challenges not only slow down innovation but also increase operational costs and reduce efficiency.

Additionally, the shortage of skilled resources is a major challenge today. Enterprises are currently developing GenAI apps and business processes using hand-coding, which demands specialized skills. According to McKinsey, 60-80% of C-suite executives reported difficulty finding the right AI/machine learning (ML) talent with the necessary skills,⁵ leading to development bottlenecks. The demand for such skills is sky-high, and the process of hiring these highly specialized resources remains unclear.

The current data landscape is complex, with structured data and the majority of data being unstructured. A robust data strategy is crucial for extracting value from GenAI. According to Harvard Business Review, 93% of CDOs feel a data strategy is crucial to generative AI value.⁶ Data quality is one of the most significant challenges when trying to derive value from any data, as poor data quality leads to poor outcomes.

Enterprises are looking for solutions that address the needs of both IT teams and business users for faster, more scalable and cost-effective integrations.

Understanding the Needs of Modern Enterprises

To overcome the modern challenges laid out above, today’s enterprises are looking for an integration solution that:

• Democratizes integration: Empowers not just IT teams but also business users to develop and customize integrations, reducing dependency on highly skilled personnel. Pro-code, low-code and no-code solutions make this possible.
• Boosts productivity: Businesses are under pressure to achieve quick time-to-value. Rapidly integrating diverse applications and automating workflows via pre-built templates are key.
• Enterprise-grade scalability: Companies need solutions that grow with them and adapt to evolving requirements while remaining cost-effective and operationally efficient.

Recipes are predefined integration solutions designed to connect, automate and standardize business processes that require integration across multiple applications. These are repeatable integration assets applicable to various well-defined SaaS and software applications, APIs, databases, data lakes, data warehousing platforms, business processes and B2B assets. Recipes can also be leveraged to efficiently build, streamline and maintain automated workflows across disparate cloud and on-premises systems, including generative AI (GenAI) and large language models (LLMs).

Recipes offer a powerful way to overcome the integration complexities of today’s digital businesses. Recipes — or prebuilt process integration packages — are rapidly emerging as the iPaaS solution that overcomes the challenges with traditional manual or customized app integration while making things faster and smarter. These are reusable integration assets, an alternative to developing integration processes from scratch, enabling faster deployment and seamless automation of business processes.

Figure 1: One-click integration setup with recipes

Integration Platform as a Service (iPaaS) provides recipes across the following categories:

1. Common recipes: Automate standard enterprise processes and app-to-app integration scenarios using pre-built solutions instead of starting from scratch. These accelerators save time, reduce errors and improve visibility in integrations and workflows. Examples include:

• Incident management
• Account synchronization
• Order-to-cash
• Employee onboarding
• Lead-to-cash

2. Industry-specific recipes: Tailored solutions for key integrations specific to various industries such as healthcare, retail, the public sector and financial services. Examples include:

• Patient data transfer between hospitals and insurance, patient management, etc. in healthcare
• Financial transaction management (e.g., SWIFT messaging) in banking
•  Order management in retail

3. GenAI-powered recipes: GenAI recipes automate and enhance workflows through out-of-the-box connectivity to LLMs and AI models. This simplifies the integration of AI capabilities into business processes with seamless orchestration and integration with external applications. Examples include:

• LLM-powered automations, like AI-driven loan processing
• AI agents
• Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG)
• Prompt engineering

Benefits of using prebuilt process integration packages or recipes from an integration platform as a service include:

1.       Democratize integration

• Implement integrations and workflows with one click — no coding required.
• Provide a self-serve, in-app experience for business users to implement integrations without IT support, freeing technical teams for strategic projects.
• Enable users to scale integrations without deep technical expertise, making the process more agile and accessible.

2.       Enhance productivity

• Offer a one-click setup to jumpstart workflow automation and reduce repetitive tasks.
• Allow customization to handle complex use cases while maintaining speed and ease of deployment.
• Include comprehensive documentation and tutorials for quick, effective implementation.

3.       Scale operations

• Ensure scalability with enterprise-grade capabilities that handle high data volumes and complex integrations.
• Apply best practices to enhance quality, security, compliance and reliability.
• Support future-proofing by enabling seamless integration of new applications as business needs evolve.

Are you interested in learning more about recipes? Improve your developers' productivity and empower non-traditional developers and business users to build integrations without any technical expertise.

Just fill out this form and set up integrations with one click!

Learn more about the recipes here.

_{¹ https://www.saasacademy.com/blog/saas-statistics
² https://spacelift.io/blog/cloud-computing-statistics
³ https://productiv.com/state-of-saas#growth
⁴ https://backlinko.com/digital-transformation-stats
⁵ https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/quantumblack/our-insights/the-state-of-ai-in-2023-generative-ais-breakout-year#talent
⁶ https://hbr.org/2024/03/is-your-companys-data-ready-for-generative-ai}