Here’s an inconvenient truth of high-growth companies: Many scale and evolve so rapidly that they may not know that they have a problem until it’s too late.
Consider a hypothetical example. Fueled by organic growth, venture capital, media buzz, and maybe an acquisition or two, a company builds out its workforce and IT environment at breakneck speed. In a matter of months, employee headcount and cloud applications soar exponentially.
And there’s the problem. The company has swiftly created a set of fragmented cloud applications that don’t talk to one another. Contradictory data is scattered about, undermining customer experiences. Employees lack the collaborative digital framework they need to maximize productivity.
The company met its goals to expand quickly, but in the process created a disconnected organization riddled with inefficiencies that could take years to undo. Continued growth, cost efficiency, and employee and customer satisfaction all suffer. The ideal of an agile, data-driven business is somewhere over the horizon.
“Off the Charts” Time to Business Value
Speed, of course, is a good thing in our fast-paced and super competitive digital era—but it has to be harnessed in a strategic fashion from both a business and IT perspective. That’s a key role that an integration platform as a service (iPaaS) can play at a high-growth company.
As I noted in the first blog post in this series, an iPaaS is a cloud-based solution that helps organizations connect and manage their applications and data, integrate and orchestrate their processes, and heighten engagement with employees, customers, and partners.
At Boomi, we’ve built our market-leading iPaaS to empower our customers to instantly and intelligently connect everything in the business ecosystem — applications, data, people, processes, and devices.
Many of our 18,000-plus customers deployed Boomi early in their high-growth journey to avoid the pitfalls that bedeviled our hypothetical company. HealthBridge Financial, a fintech/healthcare innovator, is a great example. As HealthBridge CTO Tim Heger puts it: “Our time to business value with Boomi has been off the charts. We’re easily saving thousands of hours in development work with Boomi. Because of Boomi, our IT team is the ‘Department of Yes’ when it comes to fulfilling business requests.”
Let’s break down 3 of the ways that the right iPaaS can help high-growth businesses succeed.
1. Quickly Connect New Applications
A recent study verified what many people know anecdotally — the number of deployed cloud apps increases as a company grows. Companies with 50 or fewer employees run an average of 16 cloud apps, the study found. The average rises to 47 when a company reaches 200 to 499 employees.
Between 500 and 999 employees, the number of cloud apps deployed is up to an average of 93. Hit the 1,000-employee threshold, and companies are looking at “SaaS sprawl” of 177 cloud apps covering a range of processes.
Cloud apps are great, but your business can’t afford to have them exist as silos. An iPaaS lets you connect cloud apps, plus any legacy on-premises systems you may have in place, far faster than custom coding or outdated middleware. Think of an iPaaS as a foundation for a silo prevention policy.
2. Integrated Experiences for Employees
Top business and IT talent is at a premium, making hiring and retention a challenge. Remote work is the new standard at many organizations. Those two factors make it critical that companies offer integrated experiences to the workforce.
“Integrated experiences” is simply a way to describe a connected, collaborative work environment that employees find rewarding. Face it — staffers don’t relish hours of piecing together data in Excel, or asking questions on Slack, text, or email. An iPaaS eliminates those problems.
The right iPaaS provides makes it easy to set up workflow automation so that people and processes are orchestrated. It gets rid of repetitive manual data work that erodes productivity and employee satisfaction. And it aligns perfectly with a remote work environment in which information needs to be easily accessible on demand.
Integrated experiences should start with new hire onboarding. You’ll make a positive first impression when new employees are seamlessly provisioned with the tools and data they need within a day or two. That lays the groundwork for a long-term relationship, and helps the business accelerate value.
3. Integrated Experiences for Customers and Partners
Whether your business model is B2C, B2B, or both, your customers want a hassle-free relationship. They expect the ability to interact with sales, billing, support and other functions with ease, both online and over the phone.
It’s all too easy to lose a customer because of hiccups on a customer portal. Persistent billing mix-ups, unexpected inventory shortages, or a support team that can’t see what products a customer uses are other surefire ways to create friction that hurts customer loyalty and triggers churn.
Delivering integrated customer experiences requires a unified 360-degree single customer view accessible to your authorized employees and your customers. The same holds true for partner relationships, whether they’re distributors, suppliers, retailers, resellers, and other third parties in your value chain.
Putting an iPaaS at the center of an integrated experiences strategy provides the pervasive connectivity and data readiness you need for end-to-end visibility and process orchestration that build long-term customer and partner relationships.
Future-Proof Flexibility as Your Business Grows
One distinct beauty of an iPaaS like Boomi is that it can flex and scale as your business evolves. If you make an acquisition, launch a new line of business, or expand internationally, Boomi lets you quickly integrate all the moving parts of your ecosystem to achieve better outcomes, faster.
If you start using Internet of Things (IoT) devices in areas such as manufacturing or healthcare or logistics, Boomi equips you to harness that data and incorporate it into operational and analytic systems. If use cases arise around master data, API management, EDI transactions, data cataloging and preparation, or workflow automation, Boomi has you covered with multiple capabilities in our unified AtomSphere Platform.
Smart investment decisions are crucial to a high-growth company. Leaders look to allocate cash where it can generate the greatest returns. As an IT solution that delivers an incredible 410 percent ROI over three years, as documented in a commissioned study conducted by Forrester Consulting, Boomi is an investment worth making.
Want to learn more? Check out our resources on how Boomi can future-proof your business.