A massive shift in integrations and automation is underway

We’ll cut to the chase. At Tray.io, we’re incredibly proud to be named a Challenger in the latest 2021 Gartner Magic Quadrant for EiPaaS. And we’re particularly excited about being recognized for who we build for and work with every day―our customers, with the customer experience we provide cited as a strength in the report.

This new recognition belies a truly significant change in the way companies integrate and automate that is accelerating, and it has implications for every company looking to deploy iPaaS.

The last few years have seen a seismic shift in what businesses are demanding from integration and automation technology, and there are two drivers behind it all. Gartner touches on both in the report.

The first driver is the move to democratization. Business teams and technologists are increasingly taking more responsibility for delivering integration and automation. They’re collectively looking to reinvent a vast array of processes from customer experience to the revenue lifecycle across every business function.

Stack complexity is at all-time highs. Teams are using an increasing number of applications and databases across many business processes. And organizations need integrations across all their tools to thrive. However, they can no longer rely on integrations built internally by developers and specialists alone, given the sheer number of integrations needed, and the short timeframe within which they must be deployed. 

Unless organizations change course, they inevitably face an integration backlog. Plus, it simply makes sense for those closest to the business processes to have a more-significant role in automating and transforming them. It’s why in the 2021 Gartner Magic Quadrant for EiPaaS report, Gartner notes, “EiPaaS is one of the essential tools that organizations are using to deliver hyperautomation, especially for business technologists who are not in IT.”

The second driver behind increased demand for integrations and automation is that integration is now foundational for business leaders’ most important business initiatives. The pandemic accelerated what was already underway: The need to digitize and adjust to changing business conditions at unprecedented speed. The report also commented that “Organizations are also adopting EiPaaS to accelerate digital transformation, respond to drastic business changes, contain costs and increase flexibility.”

What’s changed is businesses now see integration and automation as the vital nervous system that drives and differentiates their businesses across every functional area. They are connecting their disparate marketing, sales, services, and operations stacks to power an endless range of initiatives from all aspects of lead management, order management, renewals, analytics, and thousands more. The need for integration is so critical that buyers of apps now expect packaged integration even within the business apps they purchase. Agile integration is table stakes for every company.

We designed the Tray Platform for the future of integration and automation

When we founded Tray.io in 2012, it was clear that the pervasive deployment of SaaS applications within business functions, the proliferation of APIs, and the fluidity of business processes that touch so many of them would require a disruptive new approach to integration and automation technology.

We knew that ensuring consumer-grade ease-of-use to build sophisticated API-based integrations would be paramount. Today it’s called “low code,” but ultimately, the goal was to give anyone, even business users, the power to build and manage their own integrations...without the arcane developer environments. Instead, focused on providing drag and drop fluidity, building a model where the business logic looks precisely like the real-world processes that business users are used to thinking about every day. 

The second disruption we designed for was collaboration. Integrations are moving away from specialist roles and becoming a team sport. Mid-size organizations and enterprises now approach initiatives with hybrid teams who often work together in real time, not using separate tools. So, we designed our platform to enable secure, managed, auditable sharing and collaboration between business teams, technologists, and IT. The new way teams work is collaboratively: Composing new workflows and processes, often out of existing APIs, components, and services, and even publishing those back to be reused by other teams for further composition.

The proliferation of cloud apps would mean ensuring connectivity to any app, database, and API must be standardized. The “old way” of doing things meant more nickel-and-diming for connectors or connections, an unsustainable model for companies with rapidly growing and changing stacks. As such, our approach from day one was to make all our connectors built-in and available out of the box. We offer a huge library of pre-built connectors for all the most popular software tools on the market, as well as extended connectivity to just about anything else by way of our Universal Connector.

Finally, the massive increase in workloads and the unpredictability around them, from e-commerce-related demand spikes to bulk data migrations across cloud data warehouses, would require tapping into all the elasticity the cloud had to offer. And so we made sure to build our platform on elastic, serverless architecture to eliminate the need for constant care, feeding, and all the operational overhead that comes with legacy architecture. 

What all this means: Our goal is to deliver to game-changing cost and velocity benefits for customers. One of my favorite quotes from a business operations manager at one of the largest and fastest-growing online travel and hospitality sites sums it up: “Tray.io’s speed of innovation is astronomical. It’s a technically amazing product that turned an 8-week project into a week’s work and saved us $100,000 in development resources.” This is exactly why we built the Tray Platform.

Businesses now expect every app they buy to connect out of the box

There is one more big change to discuss: Buyer expectations. Not just for integration platforms such as the Tray Platform. For every app they buy.

At the outset of the explosion of SaaS apps within organizations, buyers first grappled with the need to connect them all. At the time, software buyers typically resigned themselves to the fact that they’d have to figure out integrations themselves. But now, software buyers now expect the apps they buy to integrate with the apps they have, from day one. So if you’re buying apps such as Eventbrite, Typeform, HackerOne, or any other product, the expectation is they must provide packaged integration processes, which can easily be enabled to work with your stack. 

If you’re reading this and you work in product or services at a software company, you’re probably already getting integration requests from your customers. Integrations may even be at the top of your roadmap, but they also require a massive amount of engineering resources to build. Which is why we created Tray Embedded: To enable any software or services organization to deliver integrations at 10X velocity without compromising the customer experience. 

Integration and automation technology are changing, creating new challengers

We’re incredibly excited to have been named a Challenger. Building a strategy around where the market is headed has meant that more than 47,000 customers are now collectively leveraging the Tray Platform and Tray Embedded. And we’re also thrilled to continue and increase our commitment to customer success, with Gartner Peer Insights reviewers sharing a 93% Willingness to Recommend, a 4.6/5 rating for Evaluation and Contracting, a 4.6/5 rating for Product Capabilities, a 4.7/5 rating for Integration and Deployment, and a 4.8/5 rating for Service and Support. Because succeeding with integration and automation takes more than software alone. 

At Tray.io, we’re looking forward to continually challenging the status quo so that our customers can too. Because integration and automation velocity now delivers game-changing value. To see how Tray.io can work for your business, schedule a demo.