Today, more companies are actively embracing cloud business applications. In fact, a whitepaper from elastic.io insists that around 90% of small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) in the USA have already adopted cloud.
Nevertheless, it is evident that sophisticated integration solutions are often too expensive for SMBs. In turn, this creates a gap between the "increased SaaS consumption and the ability to integrate cloud-based services efficiently."
In order to address this, some innovative enterprises are choosing to implement system integrators. Nevertheless, the current offerings from system integrators are costly and thus inaccessible to SMBs.
The state of system integrators
In effect, system integrators standardise repetitive integration scenarios and subsequently industrialise them in order to address a large number of price-sensitive customers. Indeed, "system integration is a project-driven business with high human costs and fluctuating revenues."
At present, system integrators are unable to " the market of small and medium-sized businesses" due to their individualised and costly solutions. With this in mind, it is now integral that providers standardise their most common use cases.
Adopting standardised system integrators
According to the report, standardised system integrators are now crucial. Nonetheless, it is also important that these solutions maintain a "decent level of complexity" — without making them too specific.
As a result, this will enable system integrators to "make a strategic step ahead of automation solution providers" and their generic offerings. Meanwhile, standardising common use cases allows system integrators to industrialise them and thus address as many SMBs as possible.
Despite this, the latter is "hardly possible to implement" without introducing the concept of self-service. In order to implement both standardisation and self-service, elastic.io has developed an integration platform as-a-service packaged as a white-label service.
Expanding revenue streams
By using a powerful white-labelled integration platform, system integrators are able to easily provide standardised and ready-to-use solution packages. This therefore opens up new revenue streams in the SMB market, while reducing human overhead costs.
By allowing system integrators to reduce pricing for these solutions, they become more affordable and accessible. As the report observes, "system integrators can take a strong position in the SMBs market if they can reduce own delivery costs by standardising repetitive integration scenarios, then industrialising them as self-service solutions in order to scale up.”
Check out our latest podcast, in which technology influencer Dr Sarah-Jayne Gratton discusses how to remove the confusion surrounding AI
