iPaaS 101: What Is It and Why It Matters

After many years of relentless bombardment with acronyms like SaaS, IaaS, PaaS and BPaaS, I would not blame procurement professionals if they were shell-shocked, cynical and unresponsive when yet another term joins this list. Still, the reality is that all of these acronyms have been useful designators of significant milestone developments tracing the increasing virtualization of information technology, from collections of assets that businesses owned and managed to what in effect are services that can be consumed with relative efficiency and flexibility. The most recent of these acronyms, iPaaS, may be the most relevant of the series acronyms since SaaS, when application software shifted from something installed and managed on-premise to being a virtual service or cloud offering.