When do integrations start to slow down your growth?

It’s easy to view integrations as a technical issue. New systems are added. Products are developed. Customers set new integration requirements, and the integration landscape gradually becomes more complex. Each new need is reasonable in itself, but together they change the conditions for both product development and growth.

Integrations almost never remain isolated projects. As the business grows, so does the number of systems, markets, partners, and integrations. Gradually, an integration landscape is built up that becomes an increasingly important part of the company’s product and delivery capabilities.

This is where many companies make the same mistake. Integrations continue to be developed as standalone projects, even though integration work has long since become a strategic capability.

Are many integrations really the problem?

There is a persistent notion that having many integrations automatically leads to high complexity. At Lundatech, we repeatedly see a different pattern among product and SaaS companies. It is rarely the number of integrations that poses the biggest challenge. Problems arise when the integration environment has grown incrementally over several years without a unified integration strategy.

We encounter organizations that manage hundreds of integrations without the pace of development being significantly affected. At the same time, there are companies where a significantly smaller integration landscape has become an obstacle to continued growth.

The difference rarely comes down to the number of integrations. It comes down to how they were built.

When each new integration is developed based on a specific need, the result is often a solution that works perfectly in the here and now. But when the same approach is repeated over several years, an environment emerges where each new integration becomes slightly more complex than the previous one. Eventually, the development organization begins to spend more time managing what already exists than developing what comes next.

When do integrations become a business issue?

The tipping point often occurs long before anyone starts talking about integration platforms or architecture. It’s first noticeable in the business. Development capacity is increasingly tied up in integration work. The product roadmap fills up with maintenance, customer customizations, and integration-related initiatives, while development of the core product takes a back seat. The conversation then begins to focus less on individual integration projects and more on priorities, development capacity, and the long-term development of the business.

It is not a single integration that causes the problems. It is the cumulative effect of past decisions. Each custom adaptation may be justified from a business perspective, but together they create an environment where changes take longer and become more difficult to implement.

Integration challenges therefore rarely arise suddenly. They emerge gradually as the business grows.

How Companies That Successfully Scale Their Integration Efforts Do It

At Lundatech, we see a clear difference between companies that succeed in scaling their integration efforts and those that get bogged down in a growing integration debt. The most successful organizations do not view integrations as a series of standalone projects. They view integration capability as something that should be reusable, further developed, and managed over time. Instead of building each integration from scratch, they invest in shared components, standardized workflows, and an architecture where new integrations can be developed without complexity increasing at the same rate.

One example is the SaaS company Next, which has over 17,000 customers and approximately 160,000 users. As the company expanded into more markets, its integration efforts needed to scale without diverting resources from its core product. Together with Lundatech, Next built an integration strategy centered on a common data model, a clear API, and standardized connectors. The solution is delivered as a white-label offering: Next owns the brand, the offering, and the customer relationship, while Lundatech builds and manages the integrations behind the solution.

Today, a customer can typically activate an integration in just a minute. At the same time, Next has launched significantly more integrations, drastically reduced support workload, and freed up more time for its core product. The company also estimates that it would have required at least twice as many resources if the equivalent integration environment had been built and managed in-house.

This demonstrates what a more structured approach to integration can mean in practice: faster time-to-market, less support, more stable deliveries to customers, and more room to develop the core offering. The goal, then, is not to reduce the number of integrations. The goal is to create a structure where the business can continue to build, manage, and further develop integrations without each new requirement increasing complexity. This is where a modern integration platform transforms the way work is done. The focus shifts from individual integration projects to a shared environment where integrations can be developed, monitored, and refined in a consistent manner. At the same time, standardized approaches to security, traceability, and monitoring make it easier to meet increasing regulatory requirements.

Integrations Are a Strategic Asset

For many product and SaaS companies, integrations are now just as important a part of the offering as the product itself. Integration capabilities affect how quickly new integrations can be launched, how easily customers can get started, and how well the platform can continue to evolve over time. Integration capability is therefore no longer just a technical support function. It is a competitive advantage.

Companies that recognize this early on are better positioned to grow without the development organization becoming a limiting factor. They don’t necessarily build fewer integrations than others. They build an environment where each new integration strengthens the offering rather than increasing technical debt. That is also why we at Lundatech view the integration platform as more than just a technical tool. Used correctly, it becomes part of the organization’s long-term ability to develop, manage, and scale the integration landscape without complexity growing at the same rate.

The Next Step

Once integration work has become a strategic part of the business, the next step is to create an integration environment that can grow in tandem with both the product and the business. Learn more about how Business Cloud enables faster launches, more stable integrations, and a scalable integration strategy.

Have you started to notice that integration work is taking more and more resources away from your core product? Contact us to discuss how Business Cloud can support your continued growth.