Integration Strategies Report

Butler Group believes that demand in the integration market is exceptionally strong, and will remain so for the next two years, as companies concentrate on integration driven by CRM, Enterprise Portals, and Web-based applications. Beyond that point, underlying market growth will continue, but growth rates will depend on how quickly demand for B2B integration regains momentum. Butler Group forecasts that the market for integration products will exceed US$10 billion by 2007 - a Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of 26.4%.

The leading vendors in the integration market are BEA, GXS, IBM, iPlanet, MicrosoftMicrosoft, Mercator, Peregrine, TIBCO, SeeBeyond, Sybase, Vitria, and webMethods. IBM has the largest market share, and its acquisition of CrossWorlds will help it to maintain this position. Butler Group believes that the companies that will outperform the market in 2002 are BEA, Microsoft, TIBCO, and webMethods. There is likely to be further consolidation in the market over the next year, particularly if overall IT spend takes longer than expected to recover. Alles zu Microsoft auf CIO.de

Conclusions

The goal of end-to-end integration is an agile and flexible IT architecture that can respond quickly to business needs. For most companies this is a distant dream, and integration is seen as a problem to be solved, rather than an opportunity to add value to the business. The key to changing this is to adopt a strategic approach to integration, that provides the technical and business framework to guide and measure individual projects.