Dear prospective SaaS application / business consultancy partner,

One of the oldest known, and famous, proverbs from Africa is:

“if you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together”.

The more you think about this, the more you see it applies to so many areas in life. In our business of integrations, this is no exception. We are not necessarily referring to the practical aspects of setting up an integration - we are pretty fast, even if we say so ourselves.

We refer more so to building great partnerships in business, where at times conversations can take a few months before the partnership materialises. However once the partnership starts working, the synergies and monetary benefits, but more importantly, the value generated for the end-customers, goes that much further. Way beyond a fast, transactional arrangement. This in turn enables lasting, long-term business growth on both sides of the partnership.

A busy world

What is not so ancient, is how fast we need to move in today’s world. In a busy world, there isn’t always time for lengthy conversation cycles. Time was always money, but the exchange rate appears to always increasingly move in favour of time.

This means that we are permanently and increasingly time poor. Anything not urgent tends to get pushed to the side. Often the immediate is prioritised over low hanging fruit… And we all know Pareto’s principle - where it is actually 20% of the input, that generates 80% of the output.

Anyway: you probably guess where we are going with this. We want to encourage you to make some time to consider what integrations can do for your business, and your clients. We would love to have 30 minutes with you to explain, but if you are not convinced yet, please keep reading below.

Accelerating by slowing down

Integrations are really important, but often not urgent, low hanging fruit to consider. Especially if you are part of a SaaS software company, a managed service provider or a consulting practice that focuses on business process improvements and automation. Even if you are working in one of those companies, and you wonder what we mean. Bear with us.

In your daily work with end-customers, there are always many other 'mouse traps', or tools that can be used, developed and sold. However few are so powerful across the board, as system integrations. Integrations can be so much more, than just shipping data from system A to system B.

Over the last few months, we have written blogs that cover important areas of risk that any business needs control over, such as: Identity & Access Management, Master Data Management, Cyber Security, Data Privacy. In addition, we have posted about different business functions that benefit from integrations, such as Human Resources, Sales, Marketing and Communications and Information Technology.

The truth is, there are so many applications of integrations, it would be impossible to write about them all. But the fact of the matter is, they help churches through to government, via financial institutions and health care organisations,with mitigating risk as well as enhancing business process value.

By investing a little bit of time to put your thinking cap on up front, you will be able to save a lot of time down the track. For yourself and your clients. And that means that your SaaS application, managed service reach or business process consulting practice will get that much more powerful, with integrations as a feather on your bow.

SaaS platforms

You can amplify the value your platform brings to your end customer, or further mitigate any business risks for them by augmenting your offering with integrations.

Imagine that as a SaaS provider, you could tell all your prospective customers that no matter what system they want to integrate your application into, you can offer them integrations to virtually any other system on the market. It might just give you that edge over the competition, to close the deal. Integrating your SaaS platform with other platforms your client uses, will extend its functionality and therefore value to the customer. And/or it can mitigate data risks, since data flows seamlessly through to the next stage of the process.

On top of that, your SaaS application will get some extra exposure, because we also have a page on our website, showcasing all the systems we support.

Managed service providers and business process consultants

Do you steer away from offering integrations to your customers, because they are a hassle to build and maintain?

If you do offer them, you may recognise the following: No-one seems to notice your integrations until they break, and then they cause really big issues that absorb a lot of time?

This is why it is a good idea to work with a dedicated, specialised managed service provider for the area of integrations. We are open to white-labling discussions, so that it looks like you offer the service yourself. Except you don't have the associated worries!

Imagine being able to go to market, being able to offer integrations 100% worry free! You add additional value and mitigate more risks for your clients, with all your other services running in harmony. For your practice, this can mean venturing (further) into the domains of providing services for Identity & Access Management, Master Data Management, Cyber Security, Data Privacy, and many more.

This is great, but why Harmonizer?

Working with Harmonizer will mean a lot of upside for you, with little downside. This is the type of optionality you should pursue for any good deal, we reckon.

The upside is:

• Support for all integrations is maintained by us. Any changes to the system like new or changed features will also reflect in the support we build.
• We monitor integrations at an operational and data integrity level, picking up any changes to APIs or business processes before they break.
• We also intensely monitor the information security level of our integrations. We are ISO 27001 certified in 2022.
• No monetary investment is needed, your client only pays a reasonable, fixed, monthly subscription fee per integration.
• No time commitment is needed, all we require is some API documentation and preferably a test environment.

Our experience with the downside of integrations is limited to non-existent, however should you encounter any, we can turn the integration off at any time. Your notice period will be no more than a month, meaning it is super flexible and no (financial/business) long-term commitments are required to be made. This mitigates any downside risk.

Sounds interesting?

Ready to discuss the ancient truth of going far together? Or perhaps just floating a new idea? Or maybe you want to have a further discussion to challenge our service offering in any way - or you could request a demo to see what we are all about :) We would love to get in touch with you!

Or just reach out to have coffee with us. Coffee is always on us, don't be shy.

Yours in sync,

The Harmonizer Team

Photo from Pixabay