Taking Your Cloud Business Higher With Integrations

In recent years, business leaders increasingly accept that cloud computing represents the future of enterprise operations, with 81% of businesses reporting the use of cloud-based applications in 2020 alone. This means that Cloud Solution Providers (CSPs) are now empowered to create more specialized solutions for niche audiences and use cases.

However, this also means that businesses usually end up with multiple separate solutions that might not have the right integrations to build seamless workflows. This is compounded by the fact that the average employee uses a whopping 36 cloud-based services in their daily workflow. Integrations are crucial for these employees to maintain high levels of efficiency and productivity and for businesses to address the fragmentation of their workflows

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Why Integrations are Important for CSPs

A significant reason for the growing adoption of cloud computing in recent years is the convenience it promises. CSPs provide their customers the ability to offload the management and maintenance of critical infrastructure to a service provider and free up time for high-value tasks. Without the appropriate built-in integrations however, this benefit is negated by the amount of time and resources IT teams are forced to spend manually syncing data from multiple sources. This also increases the likelihood of human error in service delivery, which can cost businesses in terms of customer satisfaction or even retention.

The Need for a Comprehensive Integration Framework

As more cloud applications become available, businesses need to develop comprehensive integration frameworks that will allow them to plan and choose the right services they can add to their existing application stacks. Recent evidence demonstrates that this has been a major problem for companies. For example, in the last three years, 1 in 2 companies has abandoned a cloud application due to integration issues. Businesses that rely on cloud services to ensure service delivery can also experience missed deadlines and incomplete data banks as a result of poor integration frameworks.

For CSPs, this means that the ability to integrate the services they provide to customers is almost as important as the actual cloud services they sell. This is where the interworks.cloud’s integration framework comes in: CSPs, resellers, and cloud distributors can offer easy integration and data synchronization across cloud applications to end-users without additional development effort or software.

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Integration with Third-Party Systems

The availability of specialized cloud solutions has steadily increased as more companies transition to cloud computing. In a bid to maintain profitability in an increasingly competitive market, large cloud providers are expected to expand their offerings and take a walled-garden approach to service delivery. Rani Osnat, Vice President of Strategy at Aqua Security, shared in a recent interview that “the cloud-native ecosystem will see further consolidation, with the dominant players solidifying their leadership in the market. Even for a fast-growing segment, this space can’t contain so many Kubernetes distributions, point solutions, open-source projects, et cetera, for a long time.”

This means that resellers and cloud distributors have to work harder to offer tailored solutions for high-value clients with specific needs, such as those in the finance and healthcare sectors. The way to do this is with natively compatible connectors that can link existing cloud services that customers use with services that CSPs want to sell to them. This allows businesses to subscribe to new services that improve specific workflows, such as Zendesk and Quickbooks, without creating incompatible links between workflows and operational departments.

Integration with Multiple Payment Gateways

B2B payments have always been complicated, and over the last few years, digital payments have become an increasingly common way for businesses to make payments for service delivery, with the volume of digital B2B payments doubling in the past half a decade. However, this also creates challenges for CSPs. Digital payments are processed through gateways that differ from one financial institution to another.

As more CSPs sell to cross-border customers, this becomes even more complicated as location-specific payment gateways, such as PayU in South Africa, muddle an already crowded financial marketplace. With interworks.cloud’s integration capabilities, CSP partners can connect to various payment gateways that allow customers to pay for subscriptions on their preferred platform. These payments are then consolidated in an integrated Marketplace to give sellers a clear and holistic view of their cash flow.

The Bottom Line

While businesses will continue to embrace and adopt cloud solutions in the coming years, CSPs must ensure they can keep up with an increasingly complex cloud Marketplace. Integration standards can provide added value to their customers by assuring them that each cloud service they purchase will be natively integrated into existing application stacks.

Learn how introducing the right integrations can take your cloud business to the next level. Book a free demo with interworks.cloud today.