As a business leader, you’re responsible for the health and success of the company. Accountable to the board, investors, customers, and employees, you must ensure the organization responds with agility to changes in the market.

However, faced with legacy infrastructure, system and data integration issues, insufficient resources and the frenetic pace of innovation, conducting business with precision and immediacy has never been more challenging.

According to Gartner, enterprise integration platforms as a service (iPaaS solutions) are helping organizations support an ever-growing range of business use cases. Not just to integrate data and applications, but to connect ecosystems, APIs, and events. No longer just an interesting enterprise iPaaS technology, it is a critical component in enterprise modernization.

So, where does your organization stand on enterprise integration? We reached out to more than a thousand technology leaders and experts across the United States to gauge progress and overall adoption. While nearly everyone agrees that enterprise integration is important, only a fraction of those surveyed have achieved it. Here’s what we learned.

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Your colleagues are dragging their feet

There is no denying that enterprise integration is a comprehensive undertaking for any organization. Many business leaders worry about the investment of time, resources, and money required to fund such initiatives. Justifying the investment is also difficult given the number of existing (and urgent) priorities in an already overextended IT backlog.

Budget is ranked as the top iPaaS implementation concern among business leaders. This makes sense given that it is estimated that 41% of CIOs consider business transformation processes, such as integration and automation, as their most significant IT investment.

Analyzing what worries your colleagues, the survey revealed five main concerns:

• 36% Budget
• Security 31%
• 28% complexity and time
• 27% lack of skills
• 27% legacy systems

These concerns are valid, especially if the project intends to follow a more traditional integration model. For example, 50% of business leaders will rely on internal resources to get the job done. This decision will be easily supported if the implementation involves an iPaaS solution that offloads repetitive, low-value work from internal teams.

However, if your strategy relies on an in-house solution with custom coding and other time-consuming requirements, your team will quickly become overwhelmed. The project will spiral out of control, over time and over budget.

With so many potential downsides, business leaders reach a state of decision paralysis, procrastinating and ultimately slowing or even blocking the advancement of the company’s digital roadmap.

The minority, also known as the 7%

We’re not surprised that most business leaders consider enterprise integration a top priority. But we’re definitely surprised that so few: 7% have successfully implemented it.

The 7% certainly aren’t letting the grass grow under their feet. These business leaders are quickly mobilizing on a long list of critical business initiatives that are now within their reach. At the top of the list is artificial intelligence (AI) and enabling automation.

These capabilities provide significant value to the enterprise. For example, AI supports the delivery of real-time data and predictive analytics to help inform important business decisions. Automation diverts repetitive and time-consuming actions away from the workforce, especially useful during a global skills shortage, allowing humans to focus on higher value activities.

Here are the top initiatives the 7% will undertake with an enabled enterprise integration strategy:

• 31% AI and automation activation
• 28% Improve data security
• 28% Improve security, reliability and governance
• 28% Reduce operating costs
• 27% faster time to market
• 24% better business analysis and decision making
• 23% Cloud migration or upgrade, digital transformation
• 21% Upgrade of legacy infrastructure

The majority, also known as 93%

93% say enterprise integration is vital to their business or a nice-to-have

Those still pondering next steps, the 93%, deal with the same challenges they have always faced, including system issues and data integration.

For example, many companies without an active enterprise integration strategy must continually rebuild existing integrations to keep the business running. Based on the business leaders we interviewed, 98% have to rebuild these connections multiple times over the course of a year. Since these integrations are required for existing core business applications, the work must continue. And so on.

According to 93%, poor integrations have a lasting impact on the company:

• 48 % Innovation impeded
• 48 % Ineffective practices
• 40 % Lack of agility
• 37 % Wasted resources

With these deficits, the business's growth potential (in the short and long term) is quite limited.

Key Takeaways for Your iPaaS Strategy

The information we gathered from the survey revealed some important takeaways, including how you can implement a cost-effective and successful enterprise integration strategy.

With iPaaS technology, organizations can easily leverage internal resources to complete projects within what many would consider an aggressive timeline. By empowering your team with contemporary tools and technology, the adoption curve between vendor selection and production is shortened to days or even weeks, rather than months.

Join the 7%! With an iPaaS platform, your business will benefit from some impressive gains:

• Accelerated entry into new markets and geographies
• Quick and agile response to market changes
• Reduced downtime
• Streamlined integration of new technologies, acquisitions and other business enablers

Add all of this up to date, accurate, real-time data from across the enterprise, and it’s hard to understand why some organizations are willing to stay in the 93%.

Read the entire Digibee 2022 State of Enterprise Integration Report for the full story.

Discover additional key takeaways as well as questions you should answer before selecting your integration platform.