Integration Strategies Report

For many enterprises, deploying pragmatic solutions to business integration requirements is a necessity. There are always competitive pressures, the need to bring solutions to market more quickly, that drive short-term solutions. Without a long-term integration strategy, however, companies end up with a series of integration projects that have no overall direction and can have conflicting objectives.

Overall integration costs are substantially higher, because there is little opportunity for reuse, maintenance of the individual solutions is more complex and time-consuming, and each project suffers a recurring overhead of start-up and management expenses. In the worst case, where there have been conflicting objectives for individual projects, it can lead to a tangle of integration links that jeopardise the future development of the IT architecture.

Technology Issues

Three factors are shaping the development of the integration market - business processes, application servers, and packaged integration solutions. Butler Group has, for some time, advocated a business process-driven approach to integration, and the market is now aligned with this view. It is considered essential for integration servers to include a business process layer, and vendors who did not yet have this functionality have obtained it through acquisition or partnership. Companies that have reacted more slowly to this need, including Mercator and iPlanet have lost some ground. Conversely, companies such as SeeBeyond and Vitria whose products have been built from a process perspective have been able to take advantage of this trend.

Another noticeable trend has been the predominance of the application server, and for many vendors, the assimilation of integration technology into a wider infrastructure platform. This applies to IBMIBM, which now brands much of its integration technology (including MQSeries) under the WebSphere banner, and also to BEA, Sybase, and iPlanet amongst others. The J2EE standard supported by these vendors incorporates many of the technologies required for integration, including transaction management, distributed objects, messaging, and XML handling. It also defines the J2EE Connector Architecture (JCA) as a specific interface for application integration. Alles zu IBM auf CIO.de

Several companies, including TIBCO and Vitria, have introduced packaged application suites, which are targeted at departmental projects, and often include pre-packaged templates or patterns for specific business problems. Butler Group believes that these solutions are only to be recommended where they are seen as building blocks in a wider strategy. There is a temptation for customers to believe that they offer a short cut to integration, but whilst they can speed deployment for individual projects, which is to be welcomed, they are not a panacea for all integration requirements.

Integration Strategy

Butler Group believes that the following steps are the key to more effective integration:

Market Analysis

There has been considerable consolidation in the market over the past eighteen months, with a number of high profile acquisitions taking place. We believe that this partly reflects general market conditions, but is also symptomatic of the integration problems that customers have faced. At the time when the dot.com boom still flourished, and public net markets were considered the next big thing, many of the smaller integration vendors were focused on a predominantly B2B integration strategy. Now that this concept has deflated, the centre of attention has moved back to internal application integration, and whilst some of these vendors have made a successful transition, others have been swallowed up by the larger infrastructure vendors.