Three Reasons to Rethink Integration in 2014

Real business drivers exist for rethinking how you handle integration in 2014.

You may think that sounds odd, but regular readers know you can either view integration as a one-off step for other projects — and pay a high cost for it — or you can take a more strategic view that focuses on being more efficient about enterprise integration.

In other words, you can keep making the same mistakes you’ve made for the past two decades, or you can finally get smart about integration. But, hey, don’t change for me — change for the business.

The business may not come right out and say it, but it wants you to change for three very good reasons:

1. Integration is too complex. Big Data, cloud, on-premise to cloud, hybrid cloud, mobile and so on are adding new complexities to data integration, according to Ovum.
2. Integration costs too much. People are still hand-coding, even for the cloud. And it may look cheaper — if you don’t count your staff’s  salary as costs — but in the long run, it creates maintenance headaches that can eat up time and money.
3. Your approach to integration is too slow. Business users are way ahead of you on this cloud thing, and the cloud is fast. Business users expect IT to be just as fast with the integration work, Gartner VP and Research Fellow Massimo Pezzini told Information Age.

As Ovum so officiously explained in its Integration 2014 Trends-to-Watch report:

“The ever-increasing complexity of integration along with persistent budget and time constraints is forcing IT to rethink integration strategy.”

For CIOs and other IT leaders, that means building a modern integration infrastructure that can efficiently and quickly handle a range of integration needs, including cloud.

“In 2014, the combination of social, mobility, and cloud will continue to drive changes in the way organizations conduct business while providing opportunity for early movers to achieve business growth in emerging areas and via new channels,” Saurabh Sharma, senior Ovum analyst in the IT’s Solution team, writes. “IT needs to develop and implement a holistic integration strategy evaluating the current state of integration infrastructure against current and imminent business needs to fill gaps in integration capabilities with suitable alternatives such as iPaaS.”

Next, I’ll look at which technology trends Ovum contends will emerge to deal with these integration challenges, and when you should use them.