It's All About Integration

According to VARBusiness' annual survey of application integrators, nearly half say the size of the projects they are working on with customers have increased during the past year. A mere 6 percent say such projects were smaller, while the rest say they remained the same.

The uptick in software development is an especially important bellwether because applications are what drive IT spending across the board"from systems and network infrastructure to the deployment of new technologies. There are many reasons for the surge in application-development projects (the recent slowdown in software spending notwithstanding). For one, many projects that were put on hold when the downturn hit a few years ago are now back in play. That includes enterprise-portal projects, supply-chain automation efforts, various e-commerce endeavors and the integration of disparate business systems. An improving economy and the need by enterprises to be less reactive, if not proactive, to changing business conditions are the key reasons companies are increasing their application-development spending. Also, companies are looking to improve their overall approach to governance, not just for the sake of compliance with new regulations, such as the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, but to put in place better risk-management practices across the board. These factors combined are translating into a need to have better-quality data in near-real or real-time.

Just ask a cellular provider how important risk management has become. When the FCC-mandated portability rules went into effect late last year"allowing individuals changing cellular providers to keep their phone numbers"carriers were required to securely access and share information. This information could be relayed in as many as 22 data silos, such as billing, order-entry and credit-verification systems, explains Sam Jankovich, president of Atlanta-based application integrator Enterpulse.

"These all become services, and they can be leveraged across multiple business units," Jankovich says.

Yet much of the data, such as a customer's name, address and social-security number, can be shared. Jankovich says he has worked with four of the seven major cellular providers and notes that the ability to let customers establish service quickly will determine the winners from the losers.

Indeed, the need for quality and timely information is a key driver of investments in application-integration initiatives and the implementation of database and business-intelligence software and portals. A healthy majority of solution providers say application integration is a key component of the IT solutions they are deploying for customers. According to our application-development survey, 60 percent say their projects involved integrating disparate applications and systems during the past 12 months. For solution providers with $10 million in revenue or more, some 69 percent have integrated applications together, and the same percentage has implemented database solutions. Likewise, while those figures will fall off nominally in the coming 12 months, they will remain the key component of the overall application-development engagement.

In comparison, a sharply lower percentage of development houses say they were involved in projects such as enterprisewide portal development, business intelligence, CRM and even e-commerce. The reason for that is simple: Application integration is a required element of any of those or other types of projects today. By their very nature, companies building enterprise portals are looking to aggregate systems from multiple silos.

"The enterprise-application integration stuff is a huge component of every deal we get involved with, whether there's a portal or not," Jankovich says.

Beyond Integration

Some customers are moving beyond enterprise-application integration to more standards-based services-oriented architectures (SOAs). SOAs are a key building block that CIOs are looking to build across their enterprises. Simply put, an SOA is an enterprise or interenterprise architecture that uses shared objects linked across middleware with common standards-based connectors and messaging busses to link various repositories and client-side applications.

"It's one of this year's top priorities for every big enterprise customer we walk into," Jankovich says.

Skeptics say SOAs are still too pie-in-the-sky to be the basis of all application development, but rather a panacea that businesses will try to achieve over time.

"There's a lot of buzz about it, and I think it will make its way into mainstream practice, but not quickly," says Andrew Brust, president of New York-based Progressive Systems Consulting. "It is still more fodder for architects to discuss than it is for actual implementation. It will take a few years to percolate."

What is percolating in Brust's world is Indigo, the next version of Windows Server, which will make it easier for solution providers to deploy SOAs. According to a research note by Gartner, Indigo will play a major role within most enterprises.

Due to go into beta later this year, though not expected to be delivered before 2006, Indigo will combine support for Web services with intelligent routing and key middleware capabilities, such as publish and subscribe, as well as guaranteed delivery of data. Like other message-based middleware, Indigo will have a distributed architecture that supports multiple protocols and data formats, such as XML. What will make Indigo noteworthy is that it will be baked into Windows.

"Once Indigo is out, we will have a blueprint that no matter how you write a connected application, there's going to be a push toward doing it in a services-oriented fashion and loosely coupled," Brust says.

IBM is building its own SOA in a release of its WebSphere MQ_Integrator tool, due out by year's end. Still, customers are thinking of SOA as an end point, not a current application-integration strategy, argues Mike Loria, IBM's worldwide director of product and channel marketing.

Whether SOAs will materialize as the underlying application infrastructure at enterprises remains to be seen, but customers should be looking to them more to ease connectivity rather than avoid vendor lock-in, according to a recently released Gartner report. SOAs and Web services are not intended to ease migration from one vendor's application platform to another, but rather allow for modularity, which allows developers to incrementally program and modify applications while reducing lock-in to specific business processes, application packages and business partners, according to Gartner.

Even if your customers are not looking for an SOA, integrating different systems is clearly the order of the day. To wit, even those partners that say enterprise portals or e-business applications account for the bulk of their business note that the integration component is key.

For example, Perficient, an e-business solution provider, says portal work has increased markedly during the past 12 months. But in order to deliver portals, the very nature of the beast requires integrating data from disparate systems.

"Most of our customers are well-educated on what a portal can do," says Joseph Klewicki, managing director of Perficient. "And they're saying we need this kind of technology. Yet, they also recognize we need to have some type of enterprise-application integration to drive what the portal can deliver."

Case in point: Perficient is delivering a portal solution for a financial-services firm that wants to eliminate the need for outside mortgage brokers to log in to different systems to apply for a mortgage. By logging into one portal, the broker gets personalized pages to suit his requirements. That is critical in the highly competitive mortgage business. Perficient builds many of its portals with IBM's WebSphere Business Integrator and ISV partner Bowstreet's Portal Factory, which eases portal development in WebSphere.

Yet, while only 29 percent of those surveyed say they have engaged in enterprisewide portal development, that statistic is skewed by small integrators with less than $1 million in revenue. Of those, only 20 percent are providing enterprise portals. By comparison, 43 percent of the largest integrators are delivering portal solutions.

At Enterpulse, portal work ranks second only to security in terms of spending on projects, Jankovich says. Security is a prerequisite to bringing applications and data together, he adds.

Perficient's Klewicki says everything from firewalls to authentication and identity-management solutions are key components of application-integration and portal engagements"particularly those that are used as extranets or intended to offer secure access to business partners, suppliers and customers.

Another way to stay on top of the competition is to participate in beta programs.

"We get to be exposed to a lot of the new technologies and new techniques faster than some of the other organizations might," Klewicki says. "It also makes us more relevant to the particular partner."