Celigo
Integration without Limits

The enterprise ecosystem is a growing hub of purpose-built applications today. Built to address every conceivable challenge that a company could encounter, most of these business applications are simple to use, easy to set up, and hence, companies—and even departments—are procuring and maintaining them without any dependency on IT teams.

However, there is a growing challenge that accompanies this explosion of business applications. Although these applications are functionally efficient, they tend to work in silos, generating and consuming their own data. These data silos grow along with the number of applications, ultimately leading to manual processes, and management via spreadsheets and email. Contributors siloed across different departments won't be able to see how their individual data and processes fit within the workings of the wider organization or how the data from one department or one application can be leveraged by the next. Meanwhile, the fluid exchange of information is critical to any growing organization as they seek application interoperability and integration without any compromise on data governance capabilities. Here, integrating hundreds of applications within an enterprise and automating business processes using traditional methods are not practical. This is where Integration Platforms-as-a-Service (iPaaS) makes a difference.

iPaaS is a breakthrough in enterprises’ pursuit of a platform that can build integrations between different SaaS applications and automate processes. Headquartered in San Mateo, CA, Celigo brings the power of iPaaS to enterprises through its robust platform. The company seeks to augment the capability of powerful, yet independent SaaS applications through seamless integration and interoperability. "Celigo’s iPaaS is designed for IT professionals and business users to quickly connect applications to automate business processes," says Jan Arendtsz, the CEO of Celigo.

An Integration Platform Built with User at the Centre

Celigo’s platform is unique in the way it operates. By abstracting APIs, the platform already houses pre-built integrations across hundreds of applications. All that a user needs to do is pull down an application from Celigo’s drop-down menu and map it to another application for integration. Whether it’s Salesforce or Shopify or ServiceNow, Celigo has a large number of pre-built integrations to choose from. “We’ve done all the hard work in terms of making it easy to be able to connect to those applications by putting your credentials and guiding you through mapping the information to another application,” says Arendtsz.

For un-abstracted APIs or applications that are not present in the platform, Celigo facilitates custom integrations using universal adapters, including REST API, Webhook, HTTP, FTP, and more. The idea is that, if there’s a way to communicate the information from one source, Celigo offers a way to automate the data transfer using its platform.

Celigo’s iPaaS is designed for IT professionals and business users to quickly connect applications to automate business processes

This feature expands the number of applications that an enterprise can connect to by a huge factor.

A key value proposition of Celigo’s iPaaS is the prebuilt integration apps and templates within the platform, which can be leveraged to more easily integrate applications based on specific workflows. For example, consider the entire “lead to cash” business process, wherein the chain of data transfer is typically between a CRM (which captures the sales and lead information), all the way to the ERP and the accounting department. This is a well-established and important business process, and Celigo offers prebuilt integrations for the same.

Because it is built with an underlying iPaaS, Celigo’s platform provides users with a level of robustness and customization that wasn’t possible in the past with direct API integrations or purpose-built point to point connectors. Celigo liberates IT departments from the heavy workload as they can, in many instances, hand off the keys of integration to users in the accounting department or sales department because of Celigo’s intuitive design. It also helps companies to free up technical resources from building and maintaining costly, custom integrations.

Celigo’s iPaaS delivers its diverse functionalities and capabilities via a user-friendly dashboard. Users can easily configure, monitor, and troubleshoot integration flows using the dashboard. It removes costly errors caused by manual data entry and gives users the ability to rerun flows or view details of how the data is being transferred from one application to another. This visibility is a key highlight of the platform and a huge advantage. Most API integrations demand users to build this functionality in addition to the connection. But, with pre-built functionalities, Celigo makes it easy to pull up all the flows that have been run, such that users can see the entire data that has gone through the system. By checking the workflow, users can figure out the erroneous data as well as examine the errors, as the platform highlights areas that require rectification. Beyond visualizing the status or errors, Celigo also notifies users about any integration mishaps. Furthermore, the platform offers controlled data governance, which enables users to ensure that only the right people have access to the data.

NetSuite Integration for All

Some of the most popular integration capabilities of Celigo are built around the NetSuite ecosystem. Celigo has amassed a vast experience around NetSuite over the last decade, which has enabled them to build a portfolio of best in class integration apps that connect popular applications such as Salesforce, Zendesk, and Shopify into NetSuite.

Celigomakes integration to NetSuite easy, meaning that users can pull the NetSuite UI into the Celigo mapping tool and connect it to any other application. As such, instead of finding the code and the name of the field, users can click on the field that they want to populate and fill it with the information they want—the platform will do the rest. “It is like a fully managed SaaS application that connects two other applications," says Arendtsz.

The company also built popular line of tools called “CloudExtend,” which connects NetSuite to productivity applications such as Excel, Outlook, and the G-Suite.

With these pro-NetSuite capabilities, it is no wonder that Celigo is one of the largest partners of NetSuite, having more than 3000 NetSuite customers under its belt. One of them, a SaaS company in the UK, was going through a digital transformation process and was looking to achieve NetSuite-Zendesk integration. Celigo stepped in to facilitate necessary connections, including the critical integration between NetSuite and Salesforce. The client was soon able to expand their use-cases and standardize all of their integrations. This helped them save a substantial amount of time and money while tightening distributions and reducing maintenance costs. Just by switching to Celigo, another client, Titan Distribution, was able to save over a quarter million dollars in maintenance costs in the first year alone.

"We’ve done all the hard work in terms of making it super easy to be able to connect to applications simply by putting your credentials and then mapping the information to another application"

Maintaining integrations with fewer technical resources is a huge benefit of Celigo’s platform. For a large client that had to enter data from 12 different locations manually, Celigo set up the single platform to automate integrations, ensuring that the data could be entered using just one form. This resulted in a reduction from 50 errors a week to 1 error per week, with a massive savings on both time and effort.

Enhancing Capabilities for a Bright Future

Celigo has grown organically since its inception. Located in the heart of Silicon Valley, the company has always been a keen admirer of SaaS. As Arendtsz says, “It’s an exciting time to be here, to see the growth in the iPaaS market.” Being a frontrunner in iPaaS, Celigo is currently exploring the potential of AI in advancing the use cases for integration. In parallel, the company is investing heavily in terms of user experience -- growing the user design team and the implementation team to make sure that customers are always at the front and center of its development. “We are very excited about the future and wish to make the experience much better for our customers,” concludes Arendtsz.