10. Avoid contract nightmares. Negotiate predictability and simplicity Let’s cover some examples of potential contract challenges. First example: You sign an API volume usage-based OEM contract for an embedded integration platform. After a year, your actual usage is much higher than the contracted estimates. Millions of dollars over the limit. So, it’s time to call the vendor’s account manager for an emergency renegotiation. It’s not a great position to be in—but more common than you think. Second example: You sign the OEM deal, but that same year into it, your customers are experiencing slow performance and API timeouts. It turns out you’ve got to buy more worker cores from the vendors for the load—and it adds up to $100Ks’ more in license costs. You didn’t want to buy too many cores upfront because you were never sure you’d need the capacity—and now it looks like you’ll have to. The fact is, with integration, it’s easy to find yourself in unexpected situations based on how many embedded integration platforms approach commercial terms. For example, sizing API volumes is complex, as is estimating throughput when you haven’t built or deployed your first integration yet. The problem with models that use such estimates is that they are notoriously hard to predict and often misaligned with the value being generated for the business. “Application leaders often focus on short-term needs, which results in nasty ‘price shocks’ when platform use scales beyond the terms of the initial contract.” — How to Compare the Disparate Pricing Metrics of Integration Products, Gartner, 26 October 2020 1. Pick an integration usage metric that won’t cause future headaches It is crucial to ensure you directly align your contract terms to the value that your integrations deliver for your customers and company—using metrics that are predictable and scale with growth. Usage metrics like API usage or transaction volumes are hard to predict, hard to assess in terms of how much value they deliver to the customer—and even harder to ensure it’s profitable to sell integrations around, especially if you’re planning to charge for integrations through fixed-price subscriptions. Instead, it’s better to rely on usage metrics for which it’s easy to estimate both costs and 25