Connectors are the most visible part of many embedded iPaaS offerings. And there's a good reason for that. If you are looking for an embedded iPaaS to connect your product with common apps that many of your prospects and customers use, such as Salesforce or Slack, it makes sense to consider an embedded iPaaS with those connectors.
After all, you'll need them for some of the first integrations you'll build, and having them ready on day one will speed up the process that much more.
And that's why we have connectors for many common apps.
We use the terms connector and component interchangeably in our platform. Generally, if a component connects to a third-party API, we call it a connector. But, not all components connect to external APIs. The Change Data Format component, for example, converts data between common formats (JSON, XML, etc.), and the Math component provides a variety of math utility functions, but neither component makes a network request to a third-party app.
However, we also also provide an incredibly powerful custom component SDK. This SDK allows you to use TypeScript with our platform to create any custom connector or other component you might need to tailor your integrations to meet your customers' requirements.
We've provided the custom component SDK because we understand the primary value provided by an embedded iPaaS is the platform's ability to enable building, deploying, and managing the entire breadth of integrations your customers need.
This SDK helps to ensure that you and your team are provided with the tools necessary to handle every integration scenario that comes your way, no matter how niche or industry-specific it may be.
Our connector philosophy
We are focused on building a robust and valuable library of connectors, but the reality is that we will never have everything our customers need. Rather than trying to write every possible connector (and tying your roadmap and delivery schedule to ours), we focus instead on the most common connectors our customers need.
In addition to building specific connectors that provide value across our customer base, we also focus on ensuring these connectors are real: they have the functionality necessary to make them truly useful to you, and, by extension, to your customers.
To do this, we spend a meaningful amount of time and effort updating our connectors (as customer needs change) and maintaining them (as underlying technology changes) to ensure they continue providing essential value.
We then dedicate other dev resources to our custom component SDK to enable you to build additional connectors in a fraction of the time it would take without our platform.
When you should use the custom component SDK
When a pre-built connector isn't available, or doesn't provide exactly the functionality a customer requires, our custom component SDK comes into play.
This is the same SDK we use here at Prismatic to build connectors and other components and to enable code-first integration development. It allows you to work with everything that makes up a connector (connections, actions, triggers, data sources, and more) while leveraging the rest of the platform.
Here's where our custom component SDK makes sense for creating a custom connector:
- For your product. If your company, Acme SaaS, needs some integrations and requires a connection with its API to make them happen, it makes sense for you to use the custom component SDK to create the necessary connector. Your team, after all, is the expert on your API and is most familiar with the functionality your customers require.
- For niche or custom systems your customers have. Perhaps all of your customers use an industry-specific CRM. We won't always have connectors for uncommon systems like these. But with the custom component SDK, we enable you to meet any customer integration requirement, no matter how esoteric or niche, without being blocked by what is or is not on an embedded iPaaS team's roadmap.
- To create a specific UX for your customers. Let's say we already have a connector with System X, but it doesn't support the precise functionality you would like it to have. In that case, you'll want to use the custom component SDK to create a connector with System X and tailor it to your unique requirements.
The reality is that systems change, new APIs come out frequently, and old APIs are deprecated. Your customers' requests and requirements are constantly at odds with what is already built and available. We know we can't create every connector you and your customers want. Instead, we focus on making things simple so you can react to customer and market changes to extend our embedded iPaaS and customize things for your vertical.
To support that, we've created the custom component SDK to make the process of creating a custom connector straightforward by enabling you to focus on the API call. At the same time, we handle the back-end to manage everything around being able to make that API call.
A sustainable approach for all
As you consider which embedded iPaaS will best help you meet your customers' integration needs, you probably have specific connectors in mind. We'd be surprised if you didn't.
But the right connector with System X may be the one you build with our custom component SDK.
By including our SDK as an essential part of how we solve for connectors, we ensure you have the best tools available to build all the integrations you and your customers need.
Schedule a demo and we'll show you how our custom component SDK works and how it can help you solve the full range of real-world integration scenarios.
