Embedded iPaaS in SaaS Applications with Prismatic’s Michael Zuercher

This is Textron tv. Hey guys, thanks for the throw. We're here with Michael Ger, who CEO for Prismatic, and they just landed a huge amount of cash to drive what's known as an embedded iPad, and I'm gonna let him explain what that's all about.

But Michael, welcome to the show. Thanks for having me. So what exactly do we mean by embedded iPads?

I think people think of iPads these days at least as something that exists in the cloud as a service that I access. But is that whole function moving and getting embedded in other places? What's going on, my friend?

Yeah, so I mean, what we've seen in the last few years is that, uh, end users more and more want native integrations to be part of the solutions they buy instead of buying solutions and tying them together with an IPAs. And so that's put a lot of, uh, responsibility on SaaS vendors to provide integrations as part of their products. Embedded iPASS is a way to provide a platform to those SaaS companies to make that process easier, uh, as they connect their products to the other products that their customers use.

Is this a concept that will eventually be extended out to enterprises who build their own applications, stick 'em up in the cloud, and in a lot of ways have the same issues? Yeah, I think there's, there's kind of a spectrum there where, you know, we are focused and the embedded IPA space is mostly focused on SaaS companies who have all of the integration challenges that iPath solves, but also have the challenges of doing that in a large heterogeneous customer base where you may have thousands and thousands of customers for which these integrations need to work in slightly different ways in different situations. And so, you know, certainly in the enterprise with, with homegrown applications or applications built internally, uh, you know, integrations are, are really key part.

There is a bit of a difference though in that you don't have the, the, the large customer base that has some of its own challenges with it. So if I'm a customer of a SaaS company, what am I gonna see as a result of this? What kind of capabilities or how will this improve my experience?

So anybody who's used, you know, just about any SaaS application today knows that it's very common to have a set of integrations where you can connect to, you know, depending on the industry you're in either other applications in that industry or some really common horizontal tools like, you know, QuickBooks or ServiceNow or, or whatever. What, what embedded iPASS is encouraging and allowing is for that number of integrations that these SaaS platforms offer to proliferate. Uh, and that's something that end users want.

And, and by making it more possible for SaaS vendors to do that efficiently, I think we're seeing more and more and more integration points, uh, in the SaaS market. Are these integration points gonna be surfaced via connectors or is this via APIs that are invoking and if both, when do I pick an API versus the connector? Yeah, so we, we think that the best experience for most end users is an integration hub or a set of integrations that are just kind of native to whatever SaaS application they're using.

So the way that actually looks to an end user is, you know, you go to the integration screen, you see, you know, maybe 50 things that this application can connect to. You click the connect button, put in a username and password, and, and that's your entire exposure to the actual, you know, experience. Everything else happens behind the scenes to make that happen.

Right. Um, what is your sense of how much effort is required by the SaaS provider to embed this capability in their platforms? What's involved in that and how long before you think this all just becomes commonplace?

So I, I think, you know, that's a, that's a great question because, you know, essentially SaaS vendors can of course do all of this without a platform. And the, the problem is, you alluded to, is that, that that effort is very high and there's almost always a higher and better use for, for development teams in a SaaS company than, uh, you know, than building the plumbing of integrations. And so with a product like Prismatic, you can, you know, embed it very quickly, uh, often in a week or less, and at that point start, uh, you know, building workflows and, and, uh, you know, and, and integrations as part of your product.

So it takes that, uh, plumbing basically out of the equation where you don't, you don't have to build any of that. It's just very quickly embedded in your product as far as how long it'll be till it's, till it's commonplace. I think we're already seeing it become commonplace.

I think the SaaS companies that are growing the fastest and have the most aspiration around providing a really good experience for their customers are already starting to, you know, pretty commonly adopt solutions like this. How smart can all of this get, and I'm asking the question because I think as we go along, one of the issues that people get confronted with is, well, there's just so many things to integrate. So what's the right thing to integrate?

What's the one that will create the most optimal workflow for me? Is this something I can throw AI at? I mean, what's the future look like?

Yeah, certainly AI has a, has a place, and I think an increasing place in, in taking some of the monotony out of building these kinds of, of workflows for a SaaS company. Uh, I don't think we're to the place yet where there's just a, you know, a magic button that that's, uh, you know, that that reduces their, or eliminates the need, uh, for SaaS companies to provide the domain expertise and that kind of thing. Uh, you know, but, but certainly the tooling is getting better and better and, and essentially just making it more and more efficient for SaaS companies to, uh, to provide this As we go along.

Um, do you think that, um, we're gonna see a lot of times these integrations require somebody with a lot of expertise, but are we looking at the democratization of these integrations because it will become simpler and can the average business person kind of invoke this as we go along? Yeah, I think, I think democratization is a big part of the embedded IPAs, uh, you know, category and, and, and increasing popularity. Um, what, what the way that we look at it is the, we want SaaS companies to spend the time that they spend on integrations.

We want it to be specific to the domain that they're in. That's where they're an expert. That's where they can really provide, you know, a lot of unique value to their customers.

What we don't want them to have to do is reinvent the same, you know, plumbing over and over on which to build these integrations. And so prismatic really provides an infrastructure, a platform on which they can build the domain specific things that again, are where they're going to provide the most value for their customers. Do you think we might be on the cusp of an era where we can see an even bigger proliferation of SaaS companies because the infrastructure is becoming simpler for them to go build and deploy?

I know we see a lot of them already and there's some consolidation going on, but it feels like the barrier to entry's getting even lower. Yeah, I think, you know, I think whether integration platforms come along, you know, and, and increasing popularity or not, the proliferation of SaaS tools is going to continue. I think, you know, we've seen that in so many vertical markets where solutions get better and better at unique parts of the value proposition.

And, and you end up with lots of point solutions, I think embedded iPath and certainly, you know, the, the reason we started this company five years ago was to really say like, to make that serve end users well, the integration problem needs to be solved for SaaS companies. And so we set out with just the very simple premise that we're going to solve the integration problem for SaaS companies. We're going to help 'em connect their products to the other products their, their customers use.

Embedded IPAs was kind of the solution, uh, you know, to to that, to that problem. So to your point, there's a lot of folks out there who are making cases for SaaS platforms that are essentially vertically integrated. They've got all these applications that are on a common platform and they have a common model and you know, for better or worse that maybe easier to work with, but it also locks you into one vendor.

Is your approach saying essentially we can have best of breed, but we can have the level of integration that's required to make all that work in a way that's useful? Yeah, I think a good, good integration hubs inside of SAS platforms empowered by embedded or, or built on embedded IPAs, I think is a way to make best of breed actually serve end users well. Uh, and I think, you know, the pendulum will always swing in different markets between best of breed versus, you know, consolidated or, or, or, or larger kind of core systems.

I think integrations are what makes best of breed work really well, and there are other major advantages to best of breed, uh, you know, that, that make it the right solution. In a lot of situations. I think in the post covid era, business execs went out and bought whatever SaaS app seemed to be handy and put all kinds of stuff up into the cloud.

Do you think it people just need to take a step back and kind of look at all these applications and figure out which ones have integration engines that'll let, let you build workflows that, um, you know, work for the organization versus just creating a lot more work for the IT folks per se? Yeah, I think there's no question that, that a lot of SaaS applications come into organizations now, you know, outside of it out. It is not always the one that brings them in.

And I think it is often then, you know, saddled with, okay, great, we've got all these things that that individual groups are using. How do we make this a like an overall strategy for the business? Or how do we make it actually serve the business well end to end?

I think integrations are, are a key part of that, and I think IT groups, you know, increasingly are looking and saying, sure, we could go build the integrations between these things internally, you know, using a, a MuleSoft or a Boomi or something like that. But, but man, it makes a lot more sense if those solutions just have integrations built in. And so I think, I think it is increasingly kind of focused on integrations as part of the part of the buying equation, um, you know, when they're, when they're buying SaaS.

And I think that's kind of filtering down to the strategies inside of groups, uh, inside of companies as they buy their own point solutions. So what's your best advice to folks as you kind of look at this whole landscape at the moment? I mean, I know on the one hand we want SaaS providers to do the right thing and uh, theoretically we want IT leaders to pressure them to do the right thing, but, you know, how do we get from where we're today to that?

I think we're seeing it happen already. Uh, I, you know, if you look at tools five years ago versus tools today, the, the, the number of integrations provided by SaaS Solutions out of the box is increasing, you know, very, very rapidly. I think, you know, sure we can say we want SaaS companies to, to quote, do the right thing and quote, but I think at the end of the day, they're just looking to serve their customers and I think end users are making more and more clear that integrations are just a core part of making the strategy work for their business.

And so SaaS solutions are responding by saying, okay, fair enough. Then let's come up with a really solid integration strategy and, and that brings us back to embedded IPAs because as the SaaS companies are saying, how do we get our integration strategy kind of up to that, like that top tier? Well, it turns out that using a platform like Prismatic makes it a lot easier to bridge that, bridge that gap from where you are to where you're trying to get if you're a product leader.

Alright, folks, you heard it here. SaaS arguably is too much of a good thing at this point. So we gotta figure out how to get our arms around embedded IPAs to make it all work together.

Hey Michael, thanks for being on the show. Yeah, thanks very much, Michael. All right, back to you guys in the studio.