Round-Up: 2015’s Top Integration Trend, In One Word

Six Big Business Intelligence Mistakes

What types of integration work should you focus on in 2015? In a word: modernization, recommends Ovum.

Integration is key to most of today’s big tech trends, including the Internet of Things, mobile, cloud adoption and digital business. Those trends will continue to be key drivers for middleware in 2015, according to Ovum Senior Analyst for Infrastructure Solutions, Saurabh Sharma.

That’s a lot of integration work, so enterprises will be keen to adopt agile approaches to integration, he argues. To do that, they’ll first need to update their infrastructure.

“With the ever-increasing need to ‘do more with less,’ enterprises will be keen to adopt agile approaches to integration,” Sharma states. “Therefore, a significant share of the budget for integration projects will be spent on infrastructure modernization, including the adoption of new mobile and internet of things (IoT) middleware, B2B integration solutions, and cloud-based integration platforms.”

There’s been a slow, but steady, shift toward this in the past five or so years, as organizations realized the fragility of point-to-point coding required quite a bit of spending and rework. They’ve slowly been moving to data management platforms that manage that work with connectors and allow you to reuse code.

Oddly, organizations still tended to focus on point-solutions in the cloud. As more infrastructure and data moves to the cloud, they’re experiencing similar pain points and relearning old lessons.

Ovum predicts enterprises will deal with that by adopting either more agile integration techniques or switching to cloud-based integration services. But to do so, they’ll need to modernize.

That modernization won’t be restricted to internal enterprise data. The demand for agility, collaboration and better data-flow governance will lead to companies upgrading their B2B integration tools, Ovum notes. According to the press release, “B2B integration will gain importance with the ever-increasing need for rapid onboarding of trading partners and customers, effective management of partner communities, and better customer engagement.”

To address these needs, companies will invest in cloud-based B2B integration services and comprehensive managed file transfer (MFT) solutions, the research firm predicts.

All of these new investments will push the middleware software market up 9 percent to a $16.3 billion industry, Information Management reports.

Data Integration Helps Explain Recurring Asthma Attacks

Doctors know environmental factors play a role in asthma attacks, but for the most part, they have to rely on assumptions when a patient suffers recurring attacks.

Data helped change that at the Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center, where doctors integrated internal records on recurring patients with housing and census data to establish a “sound correlation” between environment and recurring asthma admissions, writes David Linthicum in a recent Informatica blog post.

“This came about when researchers began thinking out of the box, when it comes to dealing with traditional and non-traditional medical data,” Linthicum writes. “These are data sets unlikely to find their way to each other, but together they have a meaning that is much more valuable than if they just stayed in their respective silos.”

Linthicum points to a similar project in New York that used data to create a “medical village.”

Healthcare Informatics published further details on the Cincinnati project.

Loraine Lawson is a veteran technology reporter and blogger. She currently writes the Integration blog for IT Business Edge, which covers all aspects of integration technology, including data governance and best practices. She has also covered IT/Business Alignment and IT Security for IT Business Edge. Before becoming a freelance writer, Lawson worked at TechRepublic as a site editor and writer, covering mobile, IT management, IT security and other technology trends. Previously, she was a webmaster at the Kentucky Transportation Cabinet and a newspaper journalist. Follow Lawson at Google+ and on Twitter.