Application integration is today considered to be among the highest priorities for many companies as they seek to reduce complexity, make people more productive, integrate their systems faster, and render them easier to manage. Henry Adams, country manager for InterSystems South Africa, says the time is ripe for a new level of solution that delivers the capabilities required for rapid implementation of enterprise integration initiatives.
Market demand for enterprise application integration (EAI) software is evident. In a report based on 2001 data, META Group projects the 2004 market EAI software to be $9 billion, reflecting a compound annual growth rate of 78% since 1999. Projections for EAI-related services in this market are even higher for 2004, according to Gartner, which estimates them at $20 billion.
In the same report, IBM is cited as the market leader, with a share of just 18%, showing how fragmented the market is.
This new breed of integration platform will make it possible for companies to implement business solutions that leverage the functionality of their existing applications, orchestrate new business processes and integrate data across the enterprise.
Driving the growing demand for integration are business needs that are widespread and complex. High on the list are requirements to:
* Leverage existing assets
In every industry sector, the Web has led customers to expect organisations to have a consolidated view of accounts, transactions and any other related information - regardless of where that information is located. Market survival and success mean that organisations must provide improved data and application availability to internal users and external customers. Extensive enterprise application deployments have not replaced existing legacy applications. Rather, they typically complement or extend those already in place. There is a critical demand to leverage the investment in existing applications by integrating them with new systems designed to enable changing, innovative business strategies.
Enter composite application development, which combines the functionality of existing applications with new business process logic and user interfaces, a valuable alternative to the development of "brand new" applications.
In addition, service-oriented architectures (SOAs) are providing the power required to integrate the most complex systems quickly and efficiently, and to overcome the barriers associated with integration projects today. SOAs enable legacy data and functionality to be accessed and reused.
* Improve efficiency and streamline internal processes
For decades, organisations have been building islands of information designed to serve specific departments, divisions and groups. The result is large numbers of distinct, critical applications containing information and functionality unavailable to other organisational entities. To compete effectively, increase productivity, cut costs, shorten time to market and improve customer service, executives at the highest levels are demanding the ability to access these operational systems across the entire organisation.
* Ensure competitive success
Markets are changing more rapidly than ever. To stay competitive and build market share, it is essential for companies to find new ways to be more responsive to changing market trends and new customer requirements. They need to find ways to optimise up-to-date information to remove delays in managing and executing their critical business processes and strategies. Gartner has also identified business activity monitoring (BAM) as a major source of IT spending in the next year, with companies focused on managing their business in real-time for competitive advantage. BAM is the convergence of operational business intelligence and real-time application integration aimed at reducing delays in managing and executing a company`s critical business processes.
The application integration market
Despite the fact that technology companies have been working to meet the fast growing demand for integration, vendor competition in that market can still be characterised as wide open. Technology magazine InfoWorld, for example, describes the market as highly fragmented, with first-generation leaders faltering. More than 50% of respondents to a reader survey, InfoWorld reports, could not specifically name any integration software vendor.
Failure of any vendor to take over the market thus far is a clear indication that rapid evolution of needs and technologies is still a primary market characteristic. Examination of the approaches to integration offered thus far goes a long way towards explaining why this is so.
Vendors now addressing the integration market typically fall into three categories:
* Best-of-breed component vendors that address just one requirement - adapters or business process management, for example - but fail to provide a single, comprehensive solution.
* Integration suite vendors that provide a strong integration approach and have their roots in messaging, but which lack key components such as a tightly integrated application server, unified development environment and high-performance database. As a result, these vendors must create ever-growing assemblies of formerly independent technologies, introducing excessive complexity, redundancy and the potential for huge service fees.
* Application platform suite vendors that typically include a tightly integrated application server, but lack components such as a high-performance object database, transactional message warehouse and end-to-end management as well as functionality such as easier system diagnostics, rapid development and optimised resource utilisation. Again, their solution is to add independent technologies to fill the gap, resulting in complexity, redundancy and excessive cost issues.
It is clear that the requirement now, is for a new solution category - a comprehensive integration platform with an all-encompassing architecture that has the power to integrate even the most complex systems rapidly and efficiently, overcoming the barriers and high service costs associated with integration projects today.
This will not only enable exceptionally fast integration and rapid development of composite applications, but will also allow companies to build new strategic business systems that leverage the functionality of existing applications, orchestrate new business processes, and integrate data across the organisation.
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