Companies are increasingly adopting an API-driven strategy to help them grow faster and add entire functionalities to their infrastructure without having to build them from scratch.

This growth in API use has, in turn, led to services that help you integrate your APIs efficiently.

But should you be using these services? And if so, which one(s)?

This article helps answer these questions by exploring what API integration services are and providing examples of API integration service providers and their offerings. It also explores the benefits and drawbacks of using API integration services to help you decide whether these services offer value for your business or whether there are alternatives that might serve you better.

What is an API integration service?

They are solutions that facilitate the connection of diverse APIs with your applications and systems. They function as a bridge to maintain and manage the flow of data and interactions between external API services and the systems in your infrastructure.

Some API integration services are focused on point-to-point connections revolving around specific applications you want integrated with your systems. Other service offerings include full middleware platforms that can create complicated workflows of actions and reactions that integrate and use many other systems and applications.

Related: What is cloud API integration?

API integration services

To get a better idea of these services, let's take a look at the value propositions of some of the most popular API integration service offerings, including the API integration needs these offerings seek to meet and the businesses and industries they serve.

Accenture

Accenture is a well-known multinational professional services firm. They provide a wide range of services and solutions across operations, digital, strategy, and consulting:

Accenture partners with API-related platforms, such as MuleSoft, to extend these platforms' capabilities with an enterprise-scale API integration package. The package includes advice and strategy, end-to-end implementation, and continuous support after execution. The aim of this service is to help organizations streamline integration processes, minimize the cost of API integrations, and maintain integrations more effectively with the help of Accenture's tested API templates and framework components.

Accenture's services give you access to their extensive industry experience paired with their global consulting presence. They also offer a broad range of integration services that can cater to diverse business needs and use cases.

However, all these benefits and services come at a higher cost compared to alternatives, which makes this option more suitable for larger enterprises.

Related: A guide to integration partners

Asper Brothers

Asper Brothers is a software development company based in Poland that's focused on helping start-ups build software products and solutions. Among their other offerings, Asper Brothers provides API integration as a service, wherein they provide clients with skilled professionals to facilitate custom API development and automated API testing:

The company is noted for its focus on web services with no particular tool or platform preference. Their tool-agnostic strategy allows them to be flexible in creating solutions that align with a business's needs. Moreover, their integration package includes full support and implementation, and they can optimize the performance and security of your API connections.

Asper Brothers is a smaller and more flexible outfit compared to Accenture. However, Asper Brothers offers limited scalability and may lack the resources to implement highly complex integration projects.

Sunrise Integration

Sunrise Integration is a software development company based in Los Angeles that specializes in developing high-performing e-commerce software solutions and applications for web and mobile. One of the company's offerings is its API integration services for streamlining and improving business operations:

Sunrise Integration's focus on e-commerce means their professionals are experienced at implementing and managing e-commerce APIs for a range of tasks that include accounting, ordering, inventory management, tracking, and payment and shipment fulfillment.

Sunrise Integration also extends support for building and managing integrations across multiple enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems, customer relationship management (CRM) solutions, and business-oriented platforms, such as Salesforce, Zendesk, Twilio, and Heap. Additionally, Sunrise Integration offers a big data analytics package with predictive machine learning capabilities. These capabilities add up to a range of comprehensive solutions for multiple aspects of a business, enabling you to connect diverse integrations and have a holistic view of your company's evolving needs.

However, Sunrise Integration is smaller and has less brand recognition than their larger competitors, which suggests the company may have fewer resources for large-scale enterprise projects.

Related: Endpoints vs webhooks

Simform

Simform is a product engineering company based in India that provides data, cloud, and DevOps engineering consulting offerings to enhance the technological aspects of your business and streamline your business operations. One of their offerings also includes an API integration as a service.

Simform's value proposition is that it allows you to decrease the time and costs of API integrations across API categories, such as sales, marketing, e-commerce, logistics, and communication. Simform's consultants can work remotely to create and manage custom APIs over an extended period and integrate existing business systems or third-party APIs.

Simform uses several software platforms, such as MuleSoft, Azure, and Boomi, to connect your applications and data through API layers. Simform also works in partnership with providers of platform as a service (PaaS), software as a service (SaaS), and other software solutions, such as Twilio, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud, Stripe, and Cloudera, to reduce development time and costs.

Simform is relatively large, with a wide range of professionals available to help businesses scale products. However, Simform's expertise lies within a specific set of tools and their associated packages, which can be a potential drawback if your company already uses competitive tools or platforms.

Infomaze

Infomaze is a software development company based in India with expertise in custom software development for web, mobile, and IoT applications. They have extensive experience across sectors such as health care, retail, e-commerce, manufacturing, telecommunications, logistics, legal, insurance, and real estate:

Infomaze offers API integration services as well as the opportunity to hire specific API developers full time. They boast expertise in establishing connections between various B2B and B2C applications, including CRM, ERP, human resources management systems (HRMS), ticketing systems, accounting and payment gateways, social media, mapping solutions, and email services.

Infomaze offers a tool-agnostic process that's tailored to your system architecture and the software integrations you need.

Apriorit

Apriorit is a multinational software development company that focuses on cybersecurity. They offer consulting, development, and research services to clients who need to build secure and viable digital products, along with API integration services to extend the functionalities of your infrastructure.

Apriorit can help you build your API strategy, choose the right technologies for your business use case, and manage, scale, and secure your API ecosystem. Apriorit also offers post-development support in the form of performance optimization and troubleshooting to ensure your API services are maintained and up-to-date.

Pros of using integration services

The main advantage of API integration services is that they streamline the process of setting up and connecting applications to your infrastructure.

Manually integrating APIs requires you or your developers to be proficient with the APIs of the tools you are trying to integrate, even if you're building one-off integrations for your less sensitive applications. Using the expertise of a specialized API integration service provider allows you to develop and integrate the API service of your choice more efficiently.

Many API integration services also offer automation features, which allow you to programmatically complete routine tasks and workflows faster with fewer errors. They also help you manage your data processes, which gives you more visibility into your API connections through analytics and monitoring.

Cons of using integration services

API integration services also have downsides.

The most notable is that they come with a price tag, often a big one. Pricing is structured differently across providers and offerings, but usually, it involves an initial cost for the integration as well as an ongoing maintenance and/or support cost to keep your API services updated and running smoothly.

Using these services also becomes more complex as the number of different systems, APIs, and data formats increases. As complexity increases, the potential for technical glitches, unexpected errors, system downtimes, and compatibility issues also grow. Even though these service providers can continue to handle this complexity on your behalf, it comes, again, at a cost.

This effect can be compounded by the fact that using an API integration service means relying on an external provider with its own support schedule and third-party changes and updates.

API integration services are also inherently associated with the security risks that come with dealing with external parties. You're entrusting the provider to facilitate and manage potentially sensitive data and secure this data from unauthorized access or data breaches, so you need to ensure that you're thoroughly vetting your options.

Final thoughts

Businesses across industries can benefit hugely from an API-first strategy, but that means dealing with the myriad of API integration challenges that go with it. Many technical service businesses are stepping into this gap by providing API integration services.

So, are these services worth the investment? If your organization relies heavily on all kinds of APIs to streamline operations and enhance workflow, then yes, investing in API integration services could be worth it.

However, managing complex, resource-intensive integrations can be made easier by using a unified API solution like Merge.

Merge allows you to interact with hundreds of external services with a single API to simplify your API development and deployment process. The platform also provides Integration Observability tooling that allows your customer-facing employees to manage the integrations themselves.

So, before locking yourself into a contract with an integration services provider, schedule a demo with Merge to see if the solution can help your team build and maintain integrations independently.