Ampersand Bets on Native Integrations
Ayan Barua, CEO of Ampersand, on going upmarket with deep native product integrations
This is really a statement that the center of gravity has moved from IT run integration projects to product teams shipping integrations as part of the product itself. In the old iPaaS model, a buyer assembled workflows between internal systems with a separate tool. In Ampersand's model, the software vendor owns the Salesforce or NetSuite connection, exposes setup inside its own product, and keeps handling tenant quirks, permissions, rate limits, and custom fields over time.
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Classic iPaaS was built for internal business process automation. It let an enterprise wire apps together with drag and drop workflows, but it was not designed around a SaaS vendor needing a polished, customer facing integration that feels native inside the product.
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Unified APIs improved the developer experience by giving product teams SDKs and one schema across many apps. But that abstraction works best when data looks similar across systems. Enterprise CRM and ERP buyers often need custom objects, tenant specific mappings, and high volume syncs that break the lowest common denominator model.
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Ampersand is betting that the valuable layer is not the common schema, but the infrastructure around deep native integrations. That means YAML based configuration, embedded setup UI, bidirectional sync, and detailed logs that show whether a failure came from bad data, missing permissions, or a shared API quota getting exhausted.
The next step is that integrations stop being a side project and become standard infrastructure, much like auth and cloud hosting did before. As more SaaS companies sell into the enterprise and more AI products need fresh operational data, the winners will be the platforms that let vendors ship deep integrations quickly without inheriting a permanent maintenance burden.