The Insider's Guide to Business and IT Agility
By Mike Hoskins, Chief Technology Officer, Pervasive Software , 09/18/2005
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Variety and Change: The Challenges of Integration
The pressure to find new and better ways to integrate IT systems across the enterprise increases every day. True interconnection among heterogeneous business systems, data silos, and third-party partners is essential to significantly lowering the cost of ownership of applications. What’s more, successful integration can help organizations understand their markets and customers better; replace or upgrade applications in a non-disruptive manner; provide better business intelligence; interface with partners; and add value to existing applications leveraging vital systems and data.
However, a number of obstacles to successful integration remain in today’s highly diverse and varied IT landscape:
1) Legacy environments:
Many organizations’ legacy systems account for a high percentage of their application functionality and data storage. Forrester Research analysts report some 200 billion lines of COBOL in legacy systems still in use. Meanwhile, maintenance and modifications to installed software increase that number by five billion lines a year. An integration platform that misses key legacy data format connectors solves only a piece of the integration puzzle.
2) Complex client/server computing:
In the 1980s client/server computing drove the decentralization of IT purchasing control. What ensued was the immediate and widespread proliferation of hodge-podge departmental IT systems.
3) Hard-wired applications:
The 1990s saw the emergence of large Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), Customer Relationship Management (CRM), Supply Chain, and other applications accompanied by point-to-point, custom integration mechanisms. Hard-wired integration points remain widespread today. Unfortunately, these IT systems with brittle APIs create performance and maintenance nightmares that plague almost every IT shop.
4) The proliferation of eCommerce:
One of the most explosive trends is the need for connectivity outside the firewall. To remain competitive, enterprises of all sizes must be able to deliver seamless B2B integration with customers and suppliers.
5) The emergence of hosted applications:
Organizations constantly seek to reduce IT infrastructure costs, and an emerging option is using “software as a service.” While this option can offer compelling economics, it also expands and complicates the types of end-points an integration strategy must address.
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June 3, 2009
One of the most compelling trends in the enterprise business technology space over the past year has been the emergence of cloud computing. In ebizQ’s upcoming Qcamp virtual un-conference, leading industry experts and practitioners will explore the role of service-oriented architecture (SOA) and business process management (BPM) in supporting cloud-computing initiatives. Additionally, the new skills that developers and IT managers need for successful cloud development will be discussed.Register
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