A new survey conducted by Forrester Consulting for Progress Software Corp. confirms what many IT professionals and managers in the trenches already suspected -- there's a lot of integration work going on out there, and much of it is still manual.
The survey found that 55% of respondents reported that they had undertaken four or more integration efforts over the past two years, and 48% predicted that the number of integration efforts will increase during the next two years.
However, the survey of 407 senior IT decision makers at companies with more than $250 million in annual revenues found that manual efforts -- sheer brute force -- remains the dominant approach for integration of data silos. For example, 87% of respondents rely on newly developed code to integrate data, while 80% still manually change schemas as required. According to the findings, while these percentages will slightly decrease over the next two years, manual processes will continue to trump automation.
The pain points. Among those who write code for each integration effort, 75%t reported increased maintenance costs due to application complexity and 71% suffered from increased cycle time to integrate new applications. Another 71% of respondents who rely on schema changes to support new applications said that one of their challenges is slow response to required application changes. Two-thirds (66%) reported problems with unforeseen breakage of other applications dependent on the same data.
Can SOA come soon enough for these beleaguered integration specialists? About 44% of enterprises use SOA today, the survey finds. A total of 59% say they plan to use SOA for integration efforts over the next two years.
From the looks of things in the survey, it's not too soon.
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