Decoding IPaaS: Investigation of User Requirements for Integration

Platforms as a Service

Thomas Neifer

1 a

, Dennis Lawo

1 b

, Paul Bossauer

1 c

and Andreas Gadatsch

2 d

Verbraucherinformatik Research Group, University of Siegen, Siegen, Germany

Institute for Digital Consumption, University of Applied Sciences Bonn-Rhein-Sieg, Sankt Augustin, Germany

Keywords:

Integration Platform as a Service, Software as a Service, Data Integration, User Requirements.

Abstract:

Due to ongoing digitalization, more and more cloud services are ﬁnding their way into companies. In this

context, data integration from the various software solutions, which are provided both on-premise (local use

or licensing for local use of software) and as a service, is of great importance. In this regard, Integration

Platform as a Service (IPaaS) models aim to support companies as well as software providers in the context

of data integration by providing connectors to enable data ﬂow between different applications and systems

and other integration services. Since previous research has mostly focused on technical or legal aspects of

IPaaS, this article focuses on deriving integration practices and design-related barriers and drivers regarding

the adoption of IPaaS. Therefore, we conducted 10 interviews with experts from different software as a services

vendors. Our results show that the main factors regarding the adoption of IPaaS are the standardization of data

models, the usability and variety of connectors provided, and the issues regarding data privacy, security, and

transparency.

1 INTRODUCTION

In the course of the ongoing digitalization, more and

more cloud services ﬁnd their way into organizations

and companies. These services are usually used as

software-as-a-service (SaaS) that address many dif-

ferent application domains (e.g. Customer Rela-

tionship Management or Enterprise Resource Plan-

ning) and promise possible ﬁnancial advantages (Han,

2011). However, the constantly growing range of new

SaaS solutions adopted by organizations requires a

steady development of new Application Programming

Interfaces (API) to exchange data between the differ-

ent services and prevent data and application silos (Li

et al., 2013). The software vendors of those organi-

zations face the task to synchronize evolving multi-

tenant SaaS architectures (Vuorenmaa, 2015) with the

customer system and the other integrated applications

(Zhou, 2013). Moreover, new costs arise from the in-

tegration as well as risks regarding security and legal

compliance (e.g. privacy) (King and Raja, 2012).

https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7146-9450

https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2848-4409

https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8992-0193

https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3985-8162

In this context, Integration Platform as a Service

(IPaaS) models have emerged, which are deﬁned as

”suite[s] of cloud services enabling development, ex-

ecution and governance of integration ﬂows connect-

ing any combination of on-premises and cloud-based

processes, services, applications and data within in-

dividual, or across multiple, organizations” (Pezzini

and Lheureux, 2011). As they bring SaaS providers

and businesses together, IPaaS platforms can be de-

scribed as a multi-sided market, which aims to re-

duce the integration effort for enterprises, focusing

on the development, management and execution of

integration processes (Marian, 2012). Nevertheless,

they are facing different challenges regarding their

role as intermediaries like the critical mass problem

(Evans and Schmalensee, 2010). Furthermore, as the

majority of existing IPaaS platforms are provided by

U.S. vendors, this poses a challenge to European SaaS

providers and enterprise customers due to differences

in trust, security, and sovereignty of data (Kushwaha

et al., 2020). To promote transparency and set an open

European cloud standard, initiatives such as Gaia-X

have already been formed (Celeste, 2021). In the

context of IPaaS platforms, for example, the Open

Integration Hub could be mentioned as a European

open-source data integration framework (Braun and

Neifer, T., Lawo, D., Bossauer, P. and Gadatsch, A.

Decoding IPaaS: Investigation of User Requirements for Integration Platforms as a Service.

DOI: 10.5220/0010626000470055

In Proceedings of the 18th International Conference on e-Business (ICE-B 2021), pages 47-55

ISBN: 978-989-758-527-2

Deßloch, 2020).

Research Gap: While prior research mainly focused

on technical or legal aspects of the IPaaS, we lack a

nuanced understanding of the factors that inﬂuence

adoption. Ebert et al. claim that ”critical success fac-

tors for using IPaaS [...] have not been investigated”

(Ebert et al., 2017) to a large extent although under-

standing drivers and barriers to adoption from both a

technical and a business perspective might contribute

to a better design of those platforms. For this, it is also

important to understand the current integration prac-

tices of software vendors and why they are perceived

as beneﬁcial from the vendors’ perspective. Against

this background, we aim to answer two research ques-

tions:

• RQ1: What are current integration practices and

issues with existing IPaaS solutions of software

vendors?

• RQ2: What are perceived design-related barriers

and drivers to the adoption of IPaaS?

Addressing this research gap, this article reports

on a qualitative empirical study with 10 experts from

different SaaS software vendors. We conducted semi-

structured expert interviews with an average duration

of 56 minutes. The focus was on current integration

practices leading to drivers and barriers to the adop-

tion of IPaaS as well as desired functions and oppor-

tunities regarding IPaaS platforms of market partici-

pants in the form of SaaS providers.

Since IPaaS platforms are multi-sided platforms

(Beimborn et al., 2011; Marian, 2012), the next chap-

ter describes multi-sided platform markets and the

role of IPaaS in the platform economy. The method-

ology of this work is described in chapter 3. Chapter

4 presents the results of our study in relation to our re-

search questions. The results are discussed in section

5 and we draw conclusions in section 6.

2 IPaaS PLATFORM ECONOMY

Traditional linear business models create value

through consumers buying and using their products

or services. Platform-based business models, on the

other hand, create value through other market partic-

ipants using their platform. Here, the platform does

not own and process the traditional factors of pro-

duction, but provides an infrastructure that enables a

transaction by using a matching algorithm to mediate

the sides of the market. The strength of the platform

economy lies in its ability to remove barriers to trade

https://www.openintegrationhub.org/?lang=en

by using the increased exchange of information be-

tween different actors and the dissemination of data to

its advantage. This creates a more open economic sys-

tem with much greater user participation. To beneﬁt

from the effects between users and providers prevail-

ing in networks, the platforms mostly rely on multi-

sided market forms (Clement et al., 2019).

2.1 Characteristics of Multi-sided

Platforms

When two or more participants in a market come to-

gether to transact with each other, they are referred

to as two-sided or multi-sided markets. The differ-

ent market participants pursue different, complemen-

tary interests. They are networked with each other via

the digital platform (Clement et al., 2019). That is

why digital platforms also belong to the category of

network goods. The basic rule on digital platforms

is: The more users there are on the platform, the

greater the beneﬁt for all participants involved. These

so-called network effects work on digital platforms

primarily in an indirect way (Weitzel et al., 2000).

For example, customers on a trading platform have

no direct advantage if there are many other customers

there. Rather, it is the different, complementary mar-

ket sides that inﬂuence each other. Thus, the beneﬁt

from one side of the market depends on how many

participants are active on the other side of the mar-

ket. This type of interdependence is appropriately re-

ferred to as an indirect network effect (McIntyre et al.,

2020). A platform becomes more interesting the more

providers there are in the marketplace. This is because

customers have a greater choice and can expect ad-

vantages in terms of price and possibly also the qual-

ity of the products and services. At the same time, the

value of the platform also increases for the providers

if more potential buyers are on the marketplace. The

intermediary, i.e., the platform operator, is the entity

that brings the different market sides together, devel-

ops and coordinates the market and designs the plat-

form in such a way that it is attractive for the respec-

tive market sides (Abdelkaﬁ et al., 2019).

When developing a new platform, the platform op-

erator faces the challenge of convincing not just one

but two or more market sides of the beneﬁts of the

platform. The question arises for the operator as to

which market side it should develop ﬁrst and attract

to its platform. To do this, the intermediary some-

times has to make great efforts to establish a ﬂourish-

ing exchange between the market sides. And even if

the platform is initially accepted by users and devel-

ops positively, this does not automatically mean that

success will last. Not only do users need to be con-

ICE-B 2021 - 18th International Conference on e-Business

vinced of the platform’s beneﬁts in the early period of

market development, but they also need to recognize

a beneﬁt in the long term. So the intermediary has to

deal with different coordination problems.To do so,

he needs a deep understanding of his market partici-

pants (Clement et al., 2019).

2.2 IPaaS as an Intermediary

IPaaS platforms provide a cloud-based multi-tenant

system that helps enterprises develop, manage and

govern their integration ﬂows between the wide range

of required applications and data sources (Ebert et al.,

2017). As an intermediary, the IPaaS provider thus

connects the market side of the SaaS providers and

the businesses.

The main task here is to design the data syn-

chronization and mapping between the various appli-

cations. In particular, the connectivity of the vari-

ous SaaS and on-prem systems and the data prepa-

ration, transformation and migration into the existing

databases play a key role (Zhou, 2013). A central ad-

vantage of the IPaaS solution for companies and SaaS

providers is a reduction in the number of connectors

required (cf. Fig. 1), which is made possible by the

platform structure. Businesses and SaaS applications

no longer need to develop or provide many connectors

to various other solutions and systems; instead, only

one interface to all integrations is usually required.

This can reduce errors and increase data security and

integrity by supporting governance, management and

monitoring (Poto

cnik and Juric, 2012).

Figure 1: Relationship structure of an IPaaS market.

In addition to the main focus, further functional-

ities become feasible in the form of orchestration of

the various applications into business processes and

support for the development of individual connectors,

data mappings, and the execution of automated pro-

cesses (Ebert et al., 2017). Due to the integrated and

cross-process databases, intelligent process automa-

tion (IPA) using machine learning is also gaining in

importance here (Chakraborti et al., 2020).

The motivation of SaaS providers and compa-

nies to participate in the IPaaS platform is mainly

explained by indirect network effects in addition to

the simpliﬁcation of integration, whereby companies

can beneﬁt from an increasing number of SaaS ap-

plications through a more diverse selection. SaaS

providers beneﬁt indirectly on the one hand through

increasing business users via additional sales chan-

nels. On the other hand, direct network effects can

also be seen here through the possibility of integra-

tion between further applications and the resulting in-

creases in efﬁciency on both sides (Clement et al.,

2019; Ebert et al., 2017).

However, platform providers face the challenge of

adapting to the fast-moving cloud market and evolv-

ing in line with user needs. It is therefore of cen-

tral relevance to know the requirements, barriers and

wishes of their users (Sen and Sen, 2018).

3 METHODOLOGY

From a user-centered design perspective, it is of cen-

tral relevance to implement user requirements in the

development of artifacts (Mao et al., 2005; Lindley

et al., 2017), also to promote their adoption (Chilana

et al., 2015). To understand software vendors’ per-

spectives on requirements for IPaaS platform adop-

tion, we conducted 10 semi-structured expert inter-

views with SaaS providers from Germany (see Tab.

1) within an interpretive research stance (Bell et al.,

2018; Collis and Hussey, 2013), which has already

been applied in other studies dealing with the deriva-

tion of user requirements (Maguire and Bevan, 2002;

Themistocleous and Morabito, 2012). Our sample

was selected based on contacts to software vendors

from previous research projects. The focus of the

selection was on an inclusion of differently sized

providers of various SaaS applications to gather a

broad range of perspectives and possible customer

and application scenarios.

The interviews lasted 56 minutes on average. Af-

ter obtaining participants’ consent to collect, record,

and anonymously process their interview data, the

interviews followed a semi-structured guideline that

covered the following topics:

• Current Integration Practices and previous Expe-

rience with IPaaS to derive Drivers and Barriers

to the Adoption of IPaaS

• Desired Functions and Requirements of IPaaS

platforms

• Opportunities regarding IPaaS platforms

Decoding IPaaS: Investigation of User Requirements for Integration Platforms as a Service

Table 1: Overview of the interview participants.

ID Business Area Job / Area

SaaS providers

S01 CRM CEO

S02 Scheduling CEO

S03 CMS Product Manager

S04 ERP Software Engineer

S05 ERP Product Director

S06 BI CEO

S07 BI Integration Manager

S08 Billing CPO

S09 DMS CEO

S10 Marketing Managing Director

where:

CRM: Customer Relationship Management

CMS: Content-Management-System

ERP: Enterprise Resource Planning

BI: Business Intelligence

DMS: Document Management System

CEO: Chief Executive Ofﬁcer

CPO: Chief Process Ofﬁcer

After transcribing the interviews, the analysis was

done using the inductive approach of thematic anal-

ysis (Braun and Clarke, 2006) with a focus on 1)

current integration practices and issues with existing

IPaaS solutions, 2) required functionalities and Ser-

vices, and 3) possible opportunities for integration

platforms to improve the actual situation. After cod-

ing the interviews, the authors developed the themes

collaboratively to grant a common understanding of

the material.

4 RESULTS

Based on previous integration practices and problems

with existing IPaaS platforms, the following section

derives drivers and barriers regarding adoption as well

as the functionalities and services required by SaaS

providers. Additionally, ways to improve existing

IPaaS approaches are discussed.

4.1 Current Integration Practices and

Issues with Existing IPaaS Solutions

Especially among the smaller Saas providers inter-

viewed, integration tools are rarely used. The re-

quired connectors are generally still implemented by

the companies themselves. If IPaaS solutions are

used, the large providers are mostly chosen. However,

experiences with these platforms reveal a number of

problems.

Although many connectors are offered for indi-

vidual needs, this occasionally results in high costs.

The cost-beneﬁt ratio is not given in some cases, es-

pecially for small and medium-sized enterprises with

speciﬁc solutions, since in most cases such an exces-

sive offering is not needed and speciﬁc connectors are

not available. Some participants therefore report a

lack of appropriateness in the range of existing data

integration tools and a lack of added value for their

solution.

”[...] in the past we have looked at a few of these,

let’s call it connector suites, but honestly there’s noth-

ing there that’s at least any good for our speciﬁc pur-

pose. We’ve been operating on and off for a year and

a half, but hardly [...] had any value add, apart from

the fact that it’s relatively expensive.” – [S01]

The lack of added value is often explained by rudi-

mentary suites whose connectors do not meet the re-

quirements of the solutions. For example, various au-

thentication mechanisms demand individual logics in

the background from the solutions. Furthermore, non-

uniform data structures of the connectors and the re-

sulting need for adaptation in the form of data prepa-

ration and transformation lead to additional effort.

”[...], these solutions are too rudimentary and ac-

tually don’t know where the problem lies with connec-

tors. Most connectors have different authentication

mechanisms, different data structures, and with many

APIs a call is not enough, instead many calculations,

logics have to take place in the background of our so-

lution, e.g. generate synthetic tables, so that it makes

sense for the customers at all. [...], that’s a nagging

ongoing issue for us.” – [S06]

For most respondents, therefore, the issue of stan-

dardization is the essential factor for adopting an

IPaaS solution.

”[...] the topic of standardization. If one already

makes the whole effort to build a connector. Then

there should also be a standard for the individual data

modules. – [S04]

They are currently missing suitable deﬁnitions for

data models and data exchange. Merging the data

from the connectors therefore confronts the solution

providers interviewed with challenges. Although the

data can be analyzed in isolation for each connector,

it is extremely difﬁcult to analyze and process cross-

system data. This is due to different granularities

within the respective data and different data formats.

”[...] if I want to connect data from Facebook,

Twitter and Google Analytics within one chart, it

sounds easy from a customer perspective. But from

an IT perspective, it’s complex because the different

sources have different granularities. [...], here I get

it on an hourly basis, there I get it on a minute-by-

minute basis.” – [S01]

”We’ve been looking for years for a format for ex-

plicating documents, including our meta-information,

in a meaningful way.” – [S09]

ICE-B 2021 - 18th International Conference on e-Business

Table 2: Overview of Results.

Issues with Existing IPaaS Solutions Required Functions and Services Opportunities

Standardization Variety of Connectors Open-Source / Community

Cost-Beneﬁt Ratio Customizable Connectors Ecosystem / Cloud Initiatives

Reliability Intelligent Mapping Niche Services

Usability Detailed Documentation User Experience

Transparency Test Options Intelligent Process Automation

Data Protection and Security Data Hub Process Optimization

Good Support Data Enrichment / Open Data

Reporting (traceable data transfer)

In general, the issue of data protection and secu-

rity is also highly relevant for the respondents in the

context of existing data integration solutions and the

connectors provided.

”If an American [connector] is involved, that can

also be a criterion for exclusion [for one of our cus-

tomers]. [...] and then, of course, you simply have to

weight up how great the beneﬁt is for what we want

to do [...]. So data protection plays an important role

in the consideration, so we developed our connectors

ourselves.” – [S02]

The probability of failure plays a signiﬁcant role

in the considerations of solution providers for migra-

tion to a data integration ecosystem. Some providers

are also hesitant about support expectations in the

event of an outage and are weighing up between de-

veloping their own solutions or connecting to a plat-

form.

”So if that’s an integrated part of your own sys-

tem, you’re less likely to have a failure. So that was

our consideration. [...] And good support, that’s also

part of it.” – [S03]

In terms of usability, a quick and simple on-

boarding is of essential relevance. This also ensures

continuous use of such a platform.

”I think the key is to get a moment of success

within the ﬁrst few minutes. After 5 minutes, I have my

ﬁrst functioning small solution. This moment of suc-

cess has a lot of added value and ensures that people

continue to use the platform.” – [S01]

”From my point of view, the use and administra-

tion should be intuitive. If you do it really well, an

administrator should actually be able to do it himself

as a customer.” – [S04]

4.2 Required Functionality and Services

With regard to expectations for the functions and ser-

vices of an IPaaS platform, the respondents agree that

it must predominantly provide a wide variety of con-

nectors. If connectors are not available, they should

be available on request within a very short time.

”[Such a platform] should offer 1000+ connec-

tors with the ability to add new ones super fast. That’s

also critical. [...] a customer comes, he would like to

have a speciﬁc connector, so that you can then offer it

directly.” – [S09]

To address the issue of a lack of standardization,

customizable templates for the APIs are discussed.

Although many different connector templates are al-

ready available for the larger providers, the smaller

providers in particular do not yet offer enough of

these.

”[...], templates for API interfaces also play an

important role for us. We would like to adapt these

to our individual needs. There are already many dif-

ferent templates for Google, etc., but the smaller inte-

gration providers in particular do not (yet) offer this

on a large scale because this results in higher costs.”

– [S07]

In addition, respondents would like to see further

customization of the connectors to best ﬁt their sys-

tem.

”[...], there has to be an option like: ok, you want

to connect to Facebook, you can update the data syn-

chronization in one, six or twenty-four hour intervals,

so I can trigger that myself.” – [S06]

If the provided data schema does not meet the re-

quirements of the SaaS provider, an intelligent map-

ping function is desired, which merges the (standard)

data model with the new data ﬁelds.

”[...] or some kind of intelligent algorithm or end-

user interface where I say, this is my data schema

and whatever you get back, bring that into this data

schema and store it in the following database.” –

[S06]

Before connecting to the platform, the providers

would also like to see detailed documentation of the

interfaces and a test option for various requests to

evaluate how the data schema is designed and whether

it ﬁts their own solution.

”[...] so one wish is that you get a detailed docu-

mentation for the interface and maybe just a test pos-

sibility. That can make things just very simple. So

such a negative experience with different providers.

Decoding IPaaS: Investigation of User Requirements for Integration Platforms as a Service

We would also just be able to test different requests,

[...] whether that suits us.” – [S02]

In addition, the platform should also provide

whitelabel support in the event of a SaaS app exten-

sion through the connectors and services provided.

”[...] we would ﬁnd it exciting to use such ser-

vices without a front end to the platform. The frontend

would have to be left to us, because that’s where our

USP is.” – [S08]

Some participants also mentioned various added

values that such a platform could provide based on

the integrated data situation. They described a cen-

tral data hub that temporarily stores the integrated

data to process it for machine learning applications

and enrich it with additional data. In this regard, In-

telligent Process Automation was also discussed as an

opportunity.

”So the big advantage would be that you have an

API that you can address and could then use many

data sources, for example also open data. [...] I could

deﬁnitely imagine that something like this would be

extremely interesting for many people regarding data

enrichment.” – [S07]

”Keyword intelligent processes. Data is collected

everywhere in a data lake, right down to the last [pro-

cess] step, and through intelligent analyses I can per-

haps see automation and optimization potential at the

end. That I can also say, I don’t know, an alarm sys-

tem that predicts that my stock will soon be empty and

then directly triggers consequences. But that is still

up in the air.” – [S06]

However, the participants were not unanimous on

this. Some spoke of added value, others were critical

with regard to data protection. One participant sees a

compromise in the possibility of offering such a data

hub as an option. In this case, it must be ensured with

the highest priority that others are excluded from ac-

cess.

”I think this [data hub] lacks acceptance due to

data protection, at least in German-speaking coun-

tries.” – [S03]

”I wouldn’t want that as a customer. Except when

I can simply decide for myself: The connector is ac-

tive between app 1 and app 2 and I can say where the

data goes or with which systems I then want to work

and it is not then automatically assumed. One fear is

certainly that anyone could have access to it.” – [S01]

With regard to data protection, SaaS providers

would also like to have a means of proof to their

customers in the context of the correct and error-free

transfer of data between the various systems and ap-

plications.

”If you look at the issue of data protection, for ex-

ample, the DMS app sent data to the ERP system. And

the ERP system got into mischief with it. Some kind

of data breach or something. And then, if necessary,

you could also use the platform to say: Look, on that

day, we transferred this data to the ERP system on the

basis of the order processing contract. You could just

say that we acted within the scope of the order pro-

cessing, but from then on we were out of it.” – [S09]

4.3 Opportunities

One opportunity to overcome the problem concerning

the lack of standardization, transparency, data protec-

tion, and security is seen in an open-source approach

with a broad ecosystem of connected companies and

a large community dedicated to the common deﬁni-

tion of open standard formats.

”As many large companies as possible would have

to get together and say ”we’re doing this”. If this is

done as part of an open-source-based approach, for

example, everyone could participate and beneﬁt from

it. If you could export a standard format from such a

solution, that would be a perfect side effect, also for

the participating community.” – [S09]

”[...] and especially open-source. There are very

few people who have problems trusting it in terms

of data protection, because it is transparent in that

sense.” – [S08]

Cloud Initiatives should also be actively involved

to promote such an open-source approach and create

awareness of its relevance among SaaS providers and

businesses alike.

”There are such cloud initiatives in Germany and

I would be very happy if they address as many [SaaS]

providers and companies as possible in the direction

of adaptation, because the basic idea of an open-

source platform would be really great.” – [S09]

Moreover, niche services should be integrated, as

the existing platforms do not pay enough attention to

them and usually do not offer them.

”I would just like such a platform to explicitly take

care of relevant services, but also niche services. Be-

cause no one else offers them.” – [S02]

Another point addressed is the creation of a pos-

itive user experience. According to the experts sur-

veyed, some platforms lack a suitable usability and

user experience concept. European platforms, in par-

ticular, have a lot of catching up to do compared to

the competitors.

”The question is, for example, what does Zapier

have that Flowground does not? Zapier is an Amer-

ican company with a high level of investment, while

Flowground has a German team. And American com-

panies have understood that they have to put user ex-

perience ﬁrst. This is not done in many German and

ICE-B 2021 - 18th International Conference on e-Business

European teams due to higher costs. The urgent rec-

ommendation is therefore to bring an employee into

the team who does nothing but user experience.” –

[S05]

Regarding a central data hub, the issue of In-

telligent Process Automation & Optimization be-

came also apparent as this could support small and

medium-sized companies within the digital transfor-

mation. The experts agree that this is an important

topic for the future, which could sustainably increase

the use and acceptance of the platforms by companies.

5 DISCUSSION

Reﬂecting on our research and the presented re-

search questions, we aim to discuss the empirical re-

sults towards design implications for IPaaS that more

broadly consider the business requirements. Thereby,

the focus is on the main factors identiﬁed and those

speciﬁc to IPaaS, against the background of identiﬁed

opportunities. Therefore, generic factors such as sup-

port are less considered in this discussion.

5.1 Main Factors for Adopting IPaaS

5.1.1 Standardization

In order to promote the adoption of IPaaS platforms,

the standardization of data models is required in par-

ticular, according to the interviews. This is also con-

ﬁrmed by Merkel et al. (2015) to reduce complexity

of point-to-point integration.

To be able to offer a European alternative in the

long term, a joint initiative is therefore needed to ad-

dress the problem of standardizing data models and

creating an adequate integration platform. Neverthe-

less, the experts surveyed assume that Europe can

only act as an imitator here and that this will ensure a

lack of economic interest with regard to the resistance

to migration to the cloud, which is particularly preva-

lent among SMEs. This also slows down the consid-

eration and further development of trends in the direc-

tion of intelligent process automation.

5.1.2 Usability and Variety of Connectors

SaaS providers and their customers expect a user-

friendly and simply designed platform that provides

a wide variety of connectors and constantly updates

this offering. Furthermore, the expectation of fast

and demand-oriented integration of speciﬁc connec-

tors presents an IPaaS platform with the challenge

of having to respond to individual customer requests

(Sen and Sen, 2018). For SaaS providers, however,

this represents a critical point in order to be able to

proﬁt from the direct network effects on the platform

as part of their own solution.

5.1.3 Data Protection, Security and

Transparency

In Europe, in particular, the debate about data pro-

tection and data security is also being given a strong

emphasis, which has so far kept many SaaS providers

from adopting the established and predominantly

American providers. Therefore, SaaS providers are

demanding a European data integration solution that

meets the providers’ and their customers’ require-

ments. However, the existing European approaches

predominantly exhibit problems in usability and user

experience compared to their American competitors.

This is, according to our participants, caused by the

too low willingness to invest in this direction.

5.2 Towards an Open-source-based

Approach

If there is no common strategy at the economic level

with regard to a general standard, an open-source

IPaaS solution could be a possibility to ensure a Euro-

pean standard through a common goal and an ecosys-

tem of software providers, stakeholders, and a broad

community, and to carry this standard into the SME

sector. Through the open system, which can be seen

by all, the demands for transparency and neutrality

towards the existing providers could be taken into ac-

count.

Open source solutions can be ”based on around

solutions that could be pre-conﬁgured solutions, with

a focus on implementation methodologies and diverse

hosting options” (Grandhi and Chugh, 2012).

The suitability of open-source solutions for stan-

dardization has already proven to be a successful tool

in several other domains. For example, it proved to

be successful in the context of the deﬁnition of De-

centralized Identity (DID) for blockchain solutions

(Avellaneda et al., 2019).

However, the open-source approach does not of-

fer an adequate solution for all reported issues. Due

to the non-monetary structure of the open-source ap-

proach, a trade-off will have to take place between

transparency and neutrality and the desired services.

This applies in particular to the continuous develop-

ment and individual provision of connectors. There-

fore, in the sense of a multi-sided market (Abdelkaﬁ

et al., 2019), consideration should be given to the inte-

gration of an additional market participant in the form

Decoding IPaaS: Investigation of User Requirements for Integration Platforms as a Service

of connector developers. Those, in return for mone-

tary compensation, can keep the connectors up to date

and develop individual connectors on request. This

could provide additional indirect network effects on

the platform and increase its attractiveness and accep-

tance.

6 CONCLUSION

In this paper, we have dealt with the current integra-

tion practices of software vendors and the perceived

design-related barriers as well as drivers for the adop-

tion of IPaaS.

In terms of practical implications, our results show

that there is a signiﬁcant need to create standardiza-

tion of connectors and data models. According to

our expert interviews, this could only be realized by

a joint initiative of IPaaS and SaaS providers. In

this context, the barriers of medium-sized compa-

nies in particular to migration to the cloud must also

be overcome. To this end, the experts cite an open

source approach as a possible solution, which, how-

ever, encounters problems in the ﬁeld of tension be-

tween the expected individual and timely response to

user requirements and the non-monetary, transparent

structure. Therefore, such possible open source ap-

proaches as well as existing IPaaS platforms need to

think about expanding to other market sides that sup-

port on-demand and customized connector provision-

ing. In addition, European IPaaS providers in partic-

ular should focus more on the usability of their solu-

tion in order to offer added value compared to SaaS

providers and to be able to compete.

Our results are limited by the fact that the in-

terview participants are exclusively German SaaS

providers and not all industries in the SaaS sector

are covered. Furthermore, further research should ad-

dress the quantitative veriﬁcation of the success fac-

tors as well as investigate the other market sides.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This research was funded by Federal Ministry

for Economic Affairs and Energy; grant number

01MT20003D. The authors declare no conﬂict of in-

terest. The authors would like to thank the project

and Veerle T

urling, Rosa Maren Steinprinz and Anna

Zens in particular for their support. Furthermore, we

also would like to thank the reviewers whose com-

ments and suggestions helped to improve this work.

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