- June 10, 2026
- 7:06 am
In late June I’m presenting at GITEX Europe Berlin during the UK Innovation Hour. The talk is forty minutes; this is the five-minute version. If it lands, come and find me at the UK Innovation stand on either day.
Mark Dixon
Business Development Lead, W3Partnership · ex-CIO (Standard Life, Direct Line, Barclays) · ex-Partner, IBM Business Consulting Services
The session at a glance
Why iPaaS++ is Different. Faster, lower TCO, client-first integration.
Event: GITEX Europe Berlin 2026
Stage: TechTalks · UK Innovation Hour
Dates: 30 June – 1 July 2026
Venue: Messe Berlin
The honest reason this talk exists
I’ve spent my career on both sides of the integration table. As CIO at Standard Life, Direct Line and Barclays I signed the cheques and lived with the consequences. Earlier, as a Partner at IBM Business Consulting Services, I led some of the engagements that delivered them. Two views of the same problem — and the same conclusion at the end of both.
Enterprise integration is a solved engineering problem. It is not a solved commercial one. That’s what the talk is about, and it’s why W3Partnership built iPaaS++ in the first place.
Three reasons iPaaS programmes fail
Our founders started W3 Partnership in 2007 after watching the same three failure patterns play out across project after project. They built iPaaS++ in 2017 to fix each one.
- Too slow. Twelve- to eighteen-month implementations are still the norm. By the time you’ve got value, the business case has moved on.
- Too expensive. A six-figure upfront licence. Expensive certified specialists you have to hire or train. Then an annual maintenance bill that turns up every year for the rest of time.
- Wrong incentives. Most iPaaS vendors are sold the way the vendor (and the PE house behind them) wants them sold — not the way that’s right for the client.
Five things we say that our competitors can’t
The substance of the talk is five differentiators. They matter individually. Together they change the economics of integration.
1. Two to four times faster
First live integration in 6–8 weeks. Full integration estate live in 3–4 months. A traditional iPaaS implementation runs 12–18 months to the same point. We deliver in a fraction of the typical timeline because we don’t ask the client to learn the platform — our team has done it on every prior engagement.
2. Certainty, sooner
Speed isn’t just about time saved. It’s about confidence. Clients see working integrations in weeks, not a 12-month plan and a prayer. Short delivery cycles are predictable; long ones aren’t. Business cases stop drifting.
3. Lower total cost of ownership
No upfront licence. No certified-specialists payroll. No professional-services bill. We charge a monthly subscription that starts when the service is live in production — not when you sign. Aligned incentives, not extracted ones.
4. UK Government approved
Public-sector-grade assurance is unusual in this market. We’ve been a UK Government approved supplier since 2014. ISO 27001 and 9001. Cyber Essentials. If we can meet that bar, we can meet yours — and these are independently audited, not marketing claims.
5. Client-first by design
We are privately held. No PE owner driving revenue at any cost. Every employee is an iPaaS practitioner — we don’t employ content-free salespeople. And if iPaaS++ isn’t right for you, we won’t sell it. There are three scenarios in our public materials where we recommend other platforms over our own; that level of honesty is the only durable form of trust in this market.
The structural reason we can deliver faster
The single biggest difference between iPaaS++ and a traditional iPaaS is what the client never has to do.
- You don’t buy software.
- You don’t hire or train certified specialists.
- You don’t maintain a niche skill set after go-live.
- You don’t pay a separate professional-services partner.
- You don’t become an iPaaS shop to get integrations your business needs.
We do all of that. End to end. As a black box. That’s the structural reason 6–8 weeks is achievable.
“iPaaS is flat-pack furniture and a toolbox. iPaaS++ is pre-assembled, quality furniture.”
— A W3 Partnership client
A note on AI
Yes, we use AI. It accelerates connector generation and test creation. But our experts grandfather everything the AI produces — every line is reviewed before it ships. The “low-code / no-code” pitch you’ll hear elsewhere in Berlin pushes that review work back to the client. Most clients don’t have the skills to debug AI-generated integration logic — which is precisely why they hired an iPaaS vendor in the first place. We don’t expect you to spot when the AI is wrong. We do that for you.
If this resonates, come and say hello
I’ll be at GITEX Europe Berlin for both days, primarily on the UK Innovation stand. If a single thing in this preview has caught your attention — the speed claim, the commercial model, the client-first stance, the credentials — please come and find me. I’d rather have a real conversation than push a deck at you.
If you can’t make Berlin, the easiest next step is a 30-minute call. We listen first; no scripted demo, no hard sell.