It’s hard to believe there’s so many iPaaS (Integration platform as a service) offerings out there now. I’m currently doing a review for a client to determine which product best meets their needs to integrate several solutions, mostly cloud based, and one of the requirements was that the methodology used an iPaaS based solution. I had written a Windows service many years ago to handle one of the integrations so times have certainly changed since then.

What became quickly apparent was the need for a matrix to determine how to select the products that “could” be used and then further narrow those down using trials.

The matrix I formulated was based off of the requirements of course so meant that I was looking for a product that met at least all of them as follows:

  • User friendly graphical UI

  • Extensible – this was a must as some of the integrations deal with products that aren’t mainstream and wouldn’t have off the shelf solutions

  • Supported out of the box connector for their CRM system

  • Cost – needed to be reasonable, preferably a fixed monthly/yearly cost not bound by traffic volumes

I won’t report my specific reviews of some of the products but suffice to say, there’s some very expensive iPaaS solutions out there. Interestingly, some of the cheaper options actually perform better (in my opinion) so once I’ve narrowed down the list to the few contenders, I’ll edit this article to report back on progress.