To crisply state what was discussed in the report, here are the predictions -

• By 2016, midsize to large companies will spend 33% more on application integrations than in 2013.
• By 2016, the integration of data on mobile devices will represent 20% of integration spending.
• By 2017, over two-thirds of all new integration flows will extend outside the enterprise firewall.
• By 2018, more than 50% of the cost of implementing 90% of new large systems will be spent on integration.

I will let you read through the report to understand the details of the “whys”. However, my thoughts are in total sync and agreement on what has been said. Let us discuss a few reasons as to why these predictions are very realistic.

1. As discussed in a previous post of mine, Application Integration is more relevant today than ever. For reasons explained in that post, it only makes more sense that midsize to large companies will spend more on integration in the coming years.
2. Mobile is an explosive market. Every enterprise I have talked to, in the last six months, has “Mobility enablement” as one of their top priorities. It is just natural for them to treat the mobile interface as yet another composite application reaching into the backend to deliver the data and logic from various applications. So, integration spending is necessary in this regard.
3. Mobile and SaaS integrations lend themselves to the more critical requirement of being able to access your back-end applications from outside your firewall. Again, I concur with Gartner on the statement that more number of integration flows will extend beyond your DMZ.
4. With the explosive growth of SaaS offerings, companies will probably spend more time and money on integrating such applications than in actual development. So, it shouldn’t be a surprise if the last prediction comes true as well.

There is a lot of emphasis on B2B growth in the report. I agree with the assessment but I don’t think that that alone will be a major factor for some of the predictions. Do not under-estimate the mobile growth. As a matter of fact, it is going to enhance the B2B space as well.

The other thing that I really love in this report is the recommendation given to CIOs, Managers and Architects to focus on your ICC (Integration Competency Center) implementation. This is a favorite topic of mine. Maybe, in one of the subsequent posts, I will talk more on this. For now, I am signing off as it is getting close to the Welcome Reception at the Gartner AADI show. Look forward to more posts from the show. You can also follow my tweets from the show at my handle @AppInt4All.

The post Gartner Predictions 2013 for Application Integration: My take appeared first on Reality Check.

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?

The post Is Application Integration Dead? appeared first on Reality Check.

As an IT director / manager / CIO of a company, you need to sit up and read this if you say yes to any of the following. And if you say yes, rethink your integration strategy.

You get high with flat-file based exchange!
As mentioned above, flat files may not always be the scalable solution given the complexities of today’s IT environment. So, rethink!

Your developers start playing punk-rock every time two applications need to be connected
If your IT team is developing point-to-point code every time two or more applications need to be connected, then you are spending a lot of time, money and resources. So, rethink!

When business asks for a quick change, you start rolling up your sleeves…to do a project plan!
Agility is fundamental for an IT organization. If you are unable to have quick turnarounds for all business change requests, you probably do not have a good integration middleware in place. So, rethink!

You have no idea who will lose their job when you turn off that 20-year old application
Ironically, a lot of IT managers do not know their IT landscape that well. As a result, they are unable to confidently off-board an old application just because they are not sure of the impact. Leveraging good EA (Enterprise architecture) modeling tools can also help understand how applications are connected in your environment. So, rethink!

When your CIO says that you are adopting a new SaaS CRM, you say goodbye to your family for the next 6 months
On-boarding a new application should not be complex and a several months-long effort. With a loosely coupled architecture in place with your integration middleware, adopting a new application should be fairly easy and not painful. So, rethink!

When you say that all your systems are “connected”, what you don’t want to say is that you have a real hairball on hand!!
Sometimes, application integration is misconstrued or just implemented incorrectly. IT managers find it difficult to accept that they have a hairball of point-to-point connections on hand. If you don’t untangle it now, you are going to have a bigger mess soon. So, rethink!

All this is relevant and will make more sense when you start planning for growth and scale. In my next post, I will discuss the five important things to consider for a scalable integration strategy.

The post Have you Changed your Approach to Integration? appeared first on Reality Check.

Okay, I may have been a bit dramatic there but the reality is that companies are adopting SaaS applications by the dozen everyday. Personally, in the last 3 years, I have seen the mentality of an average IT manager in the Bay Area mature from skepticism to fear to apprehension to acceptance when it comes to moving functional applications to the cloud. Third party industry analysts have seen the same surge in adoption of SaaS applications. The purpose of this post is not to validate this trend but to understand why companies are doing so and also, if they are doing it for the right reasons. In this post, I will address SaaS, PaaS and IaaS in the same breath when I say cloud adoption. I will go into their differences in a later post.

On-premise infrastructure cost savings – If at all anything, this is what companies consider as the #1 reason for adopting the cloud. The common belief is that by moving to the cloud, the company can save thousands of dollars in infrastructure and support costs. It may be true but remember that cost is not the only factor that should determine a move to the cloud. One should first consider if the move actually aligns with the business benefits that the company plans to reap with this approach. As a matter of fact, one could even argue that the NPV (Net Present Value) of on on-premise solution may be lower than a cloud-based solution if it is a long-term investment!

Options to scale massively – This is probably the #2 reason that companies give for adopting the cloud. Yes, if you need to increase your throughput multi-fold or setup a test bed temporarily with 1000 instances of your application, it is easily possible with a cloud infrastructure. The on-premise solution is not even imaginable on these grounds.

Operational costs savings – If you have too many support / maintenance staff along with an army of developers that support custom enhancements for a single application, then that might be right candidate to move into an equivalent cloud-based solution to save on all the operational costs.

Build vs buy decisions – There is no better time to start talking about the cloud than at the start of a brand new project. With hardly any CAPEX on the cloud project, you have the flexibility to roll back the project if it does not go well.

Loosely coupled architecture – When adopting cloud-based solutions, you have more open connectivity options (WSDL, SOAP etc) than proprietary interfaces. This helps in enabling / extending your SOA landscape and also, to create a more loosely coupled architecture for future growth.

And then, there are a few companies that just move to the cloud because everyone else is doing it. These companies are the ones bound to fail. Hopefully, after going through the list, you understand that adopting the cloud and cloud-based applications is not so bad after all. So, the next time you have that nightmare, it is important that you remind yourself that your cloud strategy is well-aligned with your business benefits. As for the CIO calling you honey, I can’t help you with that!

Last words of wisdom – Take it slow. I have seen a large high-tech manufacturer in the Bay Area adopt a cloud strategy over the last three years over several phases. They have moved 11 of their 18 core applications like CRM, HR, Healthcare etc into the cloud over the last three years. It takes time since cloud adoption comes with its own set of challenges. I will cover some of the key data challenges in this regard in my next post. In the meanwhile, tell me what are some of the challenges that you or your company faced during the process of cloud adoption.

The post Who Moved my CRM? appeared first on Reality Check.