Turning Per Customer Code Into Config
Ayan Barua, CEO of Ampersand, on going upmarket with deep native product integrations
This reveals why enterprise integrations are won or lost in the last mile of tenant specific behavior, not at the API login screen. In SAP and similar systems, two customers on the same product can still expose different fields, workflows, permissions, and embedded custom ABAP logic, so an integration team often has to inspect each customer environment almost like a separate software product. That is why shallow common models break down as vendors move from SMB into large enterprise accounts.
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Ampersand is built around turning per customer code into per customer configuration. In the interview, the core workflow is object and field mapping, tenant specific rules, and observability for permissions, rate limits, and sync failures, so implementation moves from months of engineering work toward a productized setup flow owned partly by RevOps and admins.
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SAP itself documents both key user extensibility and developer extensibility, including customer defined fields and custom ABAP functions. That is the concrete reason enterprise ERP integrations are harder than SMB SaaS integrations. The connector is not just reading a standard schema, it is dealing with software each customer has modified for its own business process.
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This also explains the competitive split in integration tooling. Unified APIs and embedded integration products like Merge or Paragon help teams stand up broad coverage quickly, but Ampersand is aiming at the fat head accounts where winning depends on handling custom objects, high data volumes, and tenant by tenant quirks that generic abstractions leave out.
Going forward, the center of gravity in integrations moves toward software that can understand and operate inside each customer environment without bespoke engineering every time. As AI agents increase demand for fresh enterprise context, the winners will be the platforms that can safely map, monitor, and write into deeply customized systems like SAP at scale.