Strategies Behind Technology Integration

by Stephen J. Andriole

Are you starting to feel like enterprise application and data integration tools, techniques, and platforms are all heading toward the same capabilities? Well, if you do, you're right -- they are. In the first in a series of Executive Updates based on a Cutter Consortium survey on technology integration strategies (see Vol. 6, No. 7), we talked about the multibillion-dollar "glue" business -- enterprise application integration and migration -- that's aiming to get disparate applications and databases to work with each other. Many of the vendors in this area are "agnostic": they work with as many vendors' products as they can. They're a bit like Krazy Glue; they help various materials manufactured by multiple companies adhere to one another. In the middle of all this are the major back-office vendors (like SAP), front-office vendors (like Siebel), and virtual-office vendors (like Plumtree) that are also trying to make their applications more flexible and extensible through integration, intelligence, and analytics. But, if truth be told, they're also trying to protect their proprietary competitive advantages as they tilt toward integration.