As the IT industry evolves each year, so do the technology buzzwords within the industry. Application Integration has been called many different things over the last few decades. The evolution of middleware and various integration patterns have given a total paradigm shift to what application integration is all about today. Then again, with the advent of a lot of newer technologies, one might wonder if application integration still makes sense. With talk of real-time business intelligence, Big Data, cloud-based solutions etc., does application integration matter anymore? Believe it or not, application integration is more relevant today than ever!
Of all the reasons as to why application integration is important today, let me tell you what I think are the top three reasons –
M & A activities – Many industries such as Retail, Wholesale & Distribution, Communications etc have had increased M & A activity compared to October of last year. With each acquisition, an organization inherently acquires all the IT assets of the acquiree. This just adds more complexity to an already complicated IT landscape of the acquiring company. Imagine dealing with two systems of record, redundant CRM applications and multiple customer masters! On top of all this, there will be a lot of new systems that the acquirer will have to support as well. In essence, the IT team at the acquirer needs to have a strong integration plan in place ahead of the actual acquisition to support the seamless on-boarding of the IT assets of the acquiree. A well-established integration infrastructure can help in off-boarding legacy or redundant applications and also in on-boarding new or acquired applications. Without this, the IT team will end up with writing a lot of point-to-point code and this could translate to a lot of time, cost and resources.
Consolidation efforts (Data Center / ERP) – In the last few years, every company has gone through some form of consolidation as a part of its cost-savings initiatives. With the advent of superior virtualization technologies, a lot of companies have been able to reduce the number of data centers or physical servers they had to a handful of virtualized servers. From an application landscape consolidation standpoint as well, companies have adopted a single ERP (SAP, Oracle or something similar) as their system of record. They have been able to eliminate a lot of their redundant applications by consolidating to this ERP solution. Both forms of consolidation discussed here demand a strong need for an integration backbone, without it it may become very difficult for the organization to adopt such a change.
Cloud adoption – Needless to say, adopting cloud-based applications or a cloud-based infrastructure has become a key trend in today’s IT world. Almost every company today is looking to, if not already, adopting a SaaS application for one of its core business functions. Even though the cloud solution can solve a lot of problems for the company, the SaaS application itself becomes another integration endpoint. Remember that it contains data and interfaces critical for other applications to connect with the IT landscape. Again, application integration becomes highly relevant in this context to allow for easy connectivity with such SaaS applications from its on-premise counterparts.
The industry analysts and pundits may end up calling Application Integration by a different name next year but the core values it brings to the IT evolution still remain critical and relevant. Start looking at your IT landscape and see if you are prepared for any of the these changes in your organization. Where else do you see application integration being more relevant in your organization?
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Great article! Nicely tied to the buzzwords.
Thanks Vimal. Checkout my other posts at http://www.softwareag.com/blog/reality_check/index.php/category/integration-insights. Welcome your comments on those too.