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From David Linthicum's Channel: I just got off the phone with a friend of mine who is looking to connect their existing enterprise accounting system to an ERP service provider, an SaaS. They are using a consulting organization who told my friend that he had a avery simple integration issuea and that they could aprogram the connections for about $50 K.a Thus, ahe did not need an integration product.a Arrrrrg!Okay, Iam very sensitive about this because I wrote a book about this about 10 years ago, and still people miss the larger points, and are indeed making the same mistakes today. Itas almost like the 1980s are making a comeback, so much so Iam looking for the mullet haircuts. The fact is the rise of SaaS means that integration is a new issue with many smaller and more naive enterprises, and many are making poor decisions about integration.

Here we go again:

Say you need to connect your existing ERP systems up to your SaaS CRM system; both have well defined interfaces, either proprietary or Web services, for instance. While you can certainly pay a couple of guys for a couple of weeks to program the interaction with the interfaces, and the movement of the information from one system to another, and it may indeed work (at first), youall find the approach is fundamentally flawed. Why?

The core issue is that the volatility of the integration can not be addressed in a single domain, but they do it with code, at the point. Thus, as semantics change, interfaces change, systems are added and deleted, than itas a reprogramming and testing job each an every time. Integration should be a configuration exercise, not a programming exercise, especially when considered in the context of a SOA.

The end result when you try to program to success is an ongoing maintenance programming exercise that ends up costing many times the cost of the first programming effort, thus why consulting firms like to sell integration programming. Moreover, lacking core integration tools such as transformation, routing, adapters, flow control, transactions, etc., means that your programming solution wonat be a complete solution, and thus not effective in the long term. In fact, could cost you more than money, such as customers that leave after you drop their orders 3 or 4 times due to bad integration.

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