Advising on the commercial impact of technology and
    market changes in telecoms, software and IT services

Integration

Integration is a broad area which needs to be covered as a whole. Attempts to divorce application integration from process integration or data integration from application integration merely create unnecessary confusion and potential overlap. Integration therefore needs to be seen as a series of complimentary technologies, incorporating:

• Data integration - data integration is the bedrock that supports all other aspects of integration.
• Application integration - modern application integration bears little resemblance to the early manual techniques used to wire together disparate systems.
• Process integration - process integration is important as it takes a business process view of the world.
• Integration architectures - increasingly, organisations are moving away from an IT-centric view of integration to a corporate-level integration strategy. This, in part, is being driven by the interest surrounding SOA (Service Oriented Architecture).

The crux to achieving and sustaining competitive advantage is being able to change in the market to grasp new opportunities or respond to emerging threats. Effective use of integration software supports this kind of change - clearly the reverse is also true. Poor integration technology holds businesses back, casting the IT infrastructure in concrete boots. Not surprisingly, integration, in its many guises, remains the most critical area of technology investment for a large majority of organisations.

However, the sheer variety and complexity of modern architectures and infrastructures has amplified the once basic integration challenge by many orders of magnitude. The good news is that proprietary point-to-point integration approaches have been rightfully supplanted by more flexible, standards-based architectures that allow technology assets (whether in the form of applications, repositories, or content) to be directly aligned with the demands of the business.

This level of alignment and abstraction allows data, application, and process integration to be considered from the same basic viewpoint. Vendors have naturally responded by extending their product sets in order to support these three integration pillars.

Areas of coverage

Process integration - BPM, BAM, workflow, event management.	Application integration - Web services, ESB, application connectivity
Data integration - ETL, EII, data quality.	Integration architectures - SOA, composite applications.
Integration strategy

Help with your key decision making

Advice for user organisations:

Understanding the benefit of different types of integration product is one thing: Knowing which solutions work best in certain situations is an entirely different matter. We meet this precise problem head on, giving subscribers clear analysis and guidance on the relative merits of different products and solutions, together with though-leading commentary on the way the market is evolving.

Advice for software vendors:

We help vendors understand their competitive position in what has become an extremely fast-changing market. This research balances the desires and objectives of software vendors with the often stark reality of what organisations are looking to achieve, acting as a valuable and vital independent voice.

Your next move...

To find out more about Software@Ovum or to enquire about how our flexible tailored options can meet your needs, please telephone, fax or email your Ovum Account Manager.