How cloud-based integration platform as a service can be used for leveraging development of a new product or new service. Based on a case study.

1. How to Use iPaaS for New
Product Development
- Case Study -
Building a new product on top of integration middleware
to address a new market segment

2. Introducing Apora
 Apora is a digital agency
with offices in Netherlands
and India
 Specializes in Zoho CRM,
Oracle Sales Cloud,
Google Apps and other
SaaS business apps
 6 years of customer-
specific implementation
and integration projects

3. Confronted with big changes
 Competition in the system integration business is
getting higher and stronger
 Many SaaS vendors turned to the direct sales
strategy, some more successfully than others
 Small and medium businesses increasingly use
cloud-based applications and systems _
 SMBs‘ demand for integration is rising, though
custom-built integration solutions are in most cases
out of their financial range

4. Recognizing the potential
“Already startups use up to 20 to 30
applications on average. Small and
medium businesses are no exception
either.”
- Bharath Kumar,
Cofounder and Director at Apora

5. Apora decided to address SMBs
 Offering its expertise as integration as a service can
allow Apora address the largely underserved SMB
segment
 Distributing it as self-service will help Apora reduce
own integration and development costs
 The new product should be offered as an
independant brand _ creation of Aplynk, Apora‘s
daughter company

6. Main challenges
 Aplynk needs to be created in the shortest possible
time to validate the go-to-market strategy
 For Aplynk, Apora needs a uniform integration layer,
which is neither the area of the company‘s expertise, nor
part of its core business
“We knew we had to find a ready-to-use
integration platform to keep focus on building
integrations.”
- Bharath Kumar

7. Specific requirements
 The integration platform Apora was looking for was
supposed to:
 Be flexible,
 Be highly secure
 Allow scalable delivery via standardization
 Enable creation of two-way integration flows
 Major requirement: The customer ownership had to
stay with Apora

8. Specific requirements
“There are zillions of platforms out there, but
the end customer ownership usually goes to
integration middleware vendors: In most cases
you have to sell their licenses together with
your solutions.
We didn’t want to expose our customers to an
integration middleware provider in such a
way.”
- Bharath Kumar

9. Solution: elastic.io iPaaS
 Scalable
 High performance
 Secure
 Predefined connectors
 SDKs for custom connectors
 White-labelled

10. Building Aplynk on elastic.io
 The elastic.io platform is now used as uniform
infrastructure for all Aplynk integration solutions
 Available connectors have been adopted and
modified according to specific requirements
 New connectors have been created with the Node.js-
based SDK
 The Aplynk marketplace dashboard is the rebranded
elastic.io dashboard interface

11. Aplynk marketplace

12. elastic.io dashboard rebranded

13. Distinction through quality
“Of course there are many similar products
like Aplynk. But most available out-of-the-box
solutions only connect A to B, and are offered
mostly as point-to-point integration, whereas
we believe in a multistep, two-way integration.
Creating such a product was only possible
with a standardized iPaaS as its basis.”
- Bharath Kumar

14. Benefits: Technology
 One infrastructure for all integrations _ Reduced
development time by up to 80%
 Cutting own development costs
 Built-in tools for testing and debugging new connectors
on the go
 Built-in comprehensive monitoring and logging of
integration flows across all integrated systems

15. Benefits: Business
 Successfully addressing the new market (SMBs)
 Gaining new revenue streams
 In addition, facilitating delivery of customer-specific
integration solutions
 Creating value for Aplynk‘s partners and software
vendors

16. Apora|Aplynk: Full Case Study
For more details,
read the full case study,
accessible under:
https://goo.gl/B6FmgX

17. Contact
elastic.io GmbH
Quantiusstrasse 21
53115 Bonn
+49 228 53 444 221
www.elastic.io
info@elastic.io