An approach to Integration that looks at the needs of the entire enterprise.

IN TODAY’S MARKET THERE ARE A MYRIAD OF new products, technologies and innovations to make business more productive, to empower remote workers and to better align the activities of various departments with the overall business goals of the enterprise. Whether it is a new wireless device, Web application or even an in-house solution designed to address a need unique to an organization, IT managers know the tools they require and understand the value new technologies can yield.

However, as organizations rightfully demand better value from their IT investments, IT managers often hesitate to roll-out more productive technologies until they are can confidently answer one question: how are you going to make them work with what you already have? Indeed, this question is not restricted to new technologies. In many cases companies already have IT assets, devices and applications that underserve the enterprise as developers work furiously to build them a proper home in the existing IT infrastructure.

The Integration Nightmare
Applications and devices that cannot communicate across a broader infrastructure continue to be a chief obstacle companies face as they, like most of us, look for ways to do more with less. The most frequent approach is for individual departments to make do with some sort of patchwork solution that connects various IT assets within that department. Yet this approach usually ends up with the larger enterprises resembling a sprawling, spotty checkerboard of isolated IT silos that operate independently with costly redundancy. Data valuable to the entire enterprise stays locked in one business unit, unused and underutilized, erecting a barrier to business expansion. The key to unleashing the productive power of these technologies throughout the enterprise can be rolled-up into a deceptively simple word: integration.

Part of the challenge here is that there are a perplexing number of definitions for integration, with an equally perplexing number of products attached to each definition. This leaves IT managers to find the right integration point solution for each integration problem, creating a mirror of the problem they seek to solve. For IT teams working on the problem, this approach leads to one of the most ironic, and counter-productive tasks in IT: how do we integrate all the integration solutions?