The role of the system integrator is becoming more complex by the day. Traditionally enterprise companies would use a handful of fully featured applications to manage their business. The availability of best-in-breed SaaS applications has, however, muddied the waters somewhat.
The choice to create a custom business stack using the best-dedicated applications has emerged to be a common winner. If you were a football team manager you would want to make sure your goalkeeper was in goal, a striker was leading up front and defenders were keeping the opposition at bay. You wouldn’t put your striker in goal and expect him to perform like a professional goalkeeper, would you?
It just makes sense to make the most of powerful fit-for-purpose applications built around your use case and needs. Applications that scale as you grow.
However, using a wider range of services runs the risk of creating data silos; isolating your data and preventing you from using it with other sources within your business to generate insights and opportunities.
Here is where the pressure increases on system integrators, requiring them to have knowledge of a far wider range of applications than the legacy enterprise staple.
So how can integrators offer maximum coverage of integration options without spending the rest of their lives in training? Through an iPaaS visual integration toolkit of course!
6 Integration Tools that System Integrators will Love
Cyclr gives you the opportunity to rapidly create and publish user integrations in an agile environment. So let’s take a look at what tools system integrators have to create and deliver enterprise-class, bespoke integrations to their customers.
Templated Integrations
As a systems integrator, you can use Cyclr to create a library of your own template integrations.
These are integration workflows that are 80-90% complete but can be deployed into your users’ accounts and customised to their requirements.
Creating a feature-rich template library allows you to service your integration niche rapidly, even facilitating self-service, embedded integrations that you can offer to your users.
Dedicated Company Accounts
Cyclr enables system integrators to create accounts, these are ring-fenced areas for your customers where dedicated integrations are stored and run.
As the manager of the account, you can enter it in order to deploy integrations, either from your template library (comprised of integration templates you’ve created and published in your Cyclr console) or create completely bespoke integrations.
While you have the ability to completely white label these accounts and allow your customers to log into them from your own portal for integration setup, you can just as easily use Cyclr without displaying any form of the front end to your customers at all. You even have the ability to get your users to authenticate connectors remotely through our time-limited, authentication links. This is how:
Getting Users to Remotely Authenticate Connectors
Understandably, users like to keep authentications private and under their control. Even though you are creating workflows and integrations, you may not have access to authentication details. Cyclr enables you to get your customer to authenticate connectors securely and rapidly.
Inside your Cyclr Console, you can generate a connector authentication link which you can send to your customer. They will be able to authenticate the connector on your behalf, so you can get back to setting up their integrations. You can even add an expiry time/date on the link for enhanced security.
User Accounts
If you are collaborating with your client on integration creation and management you may want to add colleagues or even customers into accounts. You can create and invite users, give access to specific accounts, assigning them standard or admin access if needed.
Once added to an account, they can authenticate connectors either directly in your integration portal or by using the Connector Authentication Link method (as described above).
White-Labelled User Portal
If you want to provide your customers with an online portal to log in and check their integrations you can! What’s more, it can be completely white-labelled!
The portal gives you your own subdomain, which can be customised to your own URL on request, to allow your customers to access their account in Cyclr. From there you can let them customise their integrations or even install and set up premade integrations from your template library.
Reporting
Get a top-down view of how your customer’s integrations are running with our Account Report. This report shows you whether usage and error rates are higher than normal, indicating that something needs investigating. You can jump straight into your customers’ accounts from here, so you can address issues as they appear.
You also have access to Connector reports. These tell you which connectors are most heavily used and are currently in service.
Connector creation
While Cyclr has an ever-growing library of connectors, you may find that you need to integrate your customer’s business applications with rather niche apps. If it isn’t already in our library you have two options; 1) get us to build it for you, or 2) build it yourself!
The Cyclr platform has a complete connector creation toolkit inside it. You can even import OpenAPI specifications to do most of the work for you!
Custom Connectors give you full version control, so you can work on new versions and promote them once ready.
