From Universal APIs to iPaaS

Integrations have shifted from nice to have features into table stakes distribution infrastructure. A B2B SaaS vendor now has to connect not only to the system of record like Salesforce or HubSpot, but also to the adjacent tools customers already run every day. That turns integrations into a product surface that affects win rate, onboarding speed, and support burden, which is why many teams now buy embedded integration infrastructure instead of staffing a growing connector maintenance team.

• The real work is not just one API call. It is OAuth, redirects, retries, schema mapping, custom fields, and ongoing maintenance every time a partner app changes its API. Alloy is built around handling that plumbing so product and engineering teams can focus on the workflow and user experience inside their own app.
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• Universal APIs speed up the first batch of integrations by giving one common schema across systems, which is useful for straightforward read and write use cases. But once customers need custom CRM fields, custom objects, or configurable workflows, teams usually need a deeper embedded iPaaS layer instead of a thin common model.
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• This is also why marketplaces alone are not enough. App ecosystems often start with partners building connectors, then quality slips as those connectors age and no one owns fixes. Vendors that bring integrations in house, or run them through embedded infrastructure they control, can ship updates faster and avoid revenue loss from broken connections.
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Over the next five years, the hard part will move from generating connectors to owning reliability and depth across a much larger software graph. AI will make it cheaper to produce integration code, but the winners will be the platforms that can maintain dozens or hundreds of live connections, expose customer specific data cleanly, and turn integrations into a standard part of every SaaS buying decision.