Integrations as Core Product Infrastructure
Zachary Kirby, co-founder of Vessel, on building the Vercel for integrations
The important shift is that integrations are becoming core product infrastructure, not side projects for spare engineering time. As SaaS vendors are expected to connect to many customer systems, the hard part is no longer just writing one Salesforce or HubSpot connector. It is handling auth, field mapping, per customer customization, sync reliability, and ongoing maintenance across dozens of APIs, which makes specialist platforms the default buying decision.
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The category split is getting clearer. Workato grew around internal automation and low code workflows for IT and business teams, while embedded tools like Paragon and Prismatic are built for software companies shipping integrations inside their own product.
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Unified APIs win the first mile by giving one schema across many apps, but they often cover only the common fields. When customers want custom objects, permissions, or tenant specific logic, teams move toward deeper, code native infrastructure like Ampersand or hybrid platforms like Vessel.
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This is also why spend shifts from labor to software. Paragon says customers build 70% faster than in house, Prismatic is estimated at $8M revenue in 2023, Merge at $20M, and Workato at $150M, showing the market now supports multiple layers of outsourced integration tooling.
The next phase is vendor selection becoming about depth, control, and economics rather than whether to outsource at all. Broad workflow platforms will keep serving internal automation, while customer facing integrations will consolidate around infrastructure that can be embedded in code, tuned per account, and maintained like cloud infrastructure.