Business Intelligence Network - The Vision for BI and Beyond

Integration Trends for 2006

Published: January 23, 2006

As investment in integration technology and products increases, IT organizations will need to continue to evolve their enterprise-wide integration infrastructure to handle user interaction, business process, applications and data.

IT organizations devote a significant percentage of their budgets to addressing integration issues and evolving their enterprise-wide integration infrastructure. Investment in integration technology and products will continue to increase this year. Because of this, I thought it would be interesting to explore where this money is likely to be spent in 2006 in this year's first article.

From an integration perspective there are five areas that should be considered. The first four are associated with the main types of integration technology: user interaction, business process, applications and data. The fifth is concerned with how to bring these four types of integration together into an enterprise integration architecture. Let’s examine the likely trends in each of these areas for 2006.

User Interaction Integration

The direction over the past few years has been toward using a Web interface to support user interaction with corporate applications and data. The business portal is the favored technology for supporting integration at the Web-based user interaction level.   

Portal products and technologies have changed dramatically since their introduction over ten years ago. Early portals were developed using products from independent software vendors that focused specifically on portal solutions. Almost all of these vendors have either gone out of business or been acquired. Content management companies, such as Vignette, primarily own the ones that remain.

Today, the big infrastructure vendors like BEA, IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, SAP and Sun dominate the portal marketplace. Most of the portal interfaces shipped with packaged applications also utilize the technology from the infrastructure vendors.

The focus in 2006 will be on how to create a single business user collaborative workspace by merging Web-based interfaces with the Microsoft Office desktop environment. At the workgroup level, Microsoft’s increasing integration of Office with SharePoint will lead to workgroup environments dominated by the SharePoint portal. The challenge will be in integrating this Microsoft.net workgroup environment with enterprise-level portals, which are based on Java-driven products from the other big infrastructure vendors like IBM and Oracle. Microsoft’s relationship with SAP is also likely to have an impact in this area.  

Business Process Integration and Application Integration

In the past, business process integration and application integration could be viewed as separate technologies, but the dividing line between them has become so fuzzy that they can now be considered a single technology. The merging of business process and application technology has been driven largely by both vendors and IT organizations, who are moving toward a service-oriented architecture (SOA) based primarily on Web services.

The trend toward a SOA and Web services will continue in 2006. This environment will not only be used for integrating operational business processes, but also for business intelligence processes. This year will see significant growth in the use of operational business intelligence. In some projects, operational business intelligence services are likely to be embedded in operational processes for in-line analysis where fast action times are required. Examples include detecting fraud, processing insurance claims, issuing credit cards and loans, tracking potential financial issues, etc.

Data

More and more organizations are now viewing data integration as an enterprise level problem, not just an issue to be solved when building data warehousing and business intelligence applications. A recent TDWI study showed that 18 percent of companies have developed an enterprise level architecture for supporting data integration in their organizations.

As companies move toward an enterprise approach to data integration, they must reuse and share data integration expertise and resources. This can be achieved by creating a data integration competency center. This year will see a greater use of the data competency center concept and on building an enterprise-wide data integration architecture.

As I mentioned earlier, one of the biggest growth areas in business intelligence lies in its use for operational processing. Operational business intelligence typically requires access to more current data than the data provided by a traditional data warehousing system. As a result, interest in creating low-latency data stores for operational reporting analysis is increasing. A recent Business Intelligence Network Research Study on right-time data integration discusses this topic in detail. This report is highly recommended for anyone interested on this subject.

Another important growth area is master data management (MDM), which causes much debate from a terminology perspective. Master data is reference data that defines and supports the key business objects that underpin the main business processes of a company. Examples of this include customers, employees, finances, products, brands, suppliers and partners.

There is more to master data management than data integration. Master data management solutions usually offer collaborative, business intelligence and workflow capabilities. They also help with the solving of semantic data issues across applications. It is the ability to address specific business area issues that provides the major benefits of most master data management solutions. This is why many MDM vendors are now marketing vertical business area master data management offerings. Claudia Imhoff and I are working with the Business Intelligence Network on an master data management research study to be published later this year. So keep an eye on this website. 

Environment

The last area to discuss is how to create a complete business integration environment based on the technologies outlined above. The major issue that most large companies will face is that their enterprise-level systems will be based on Java and software from the big infrastructure players, though most of their workgroup environments will be supported on a Microsoft platform. This will probably be the number one integration issue for companies this year, especially since the Microsoft world is far less open than the enterprise-based Java one. While the Linux and open source enthusiasts will say this problem can be solved by replacing Windows with Linux and OpenOffice, this is not as easy as it sounds, even though some companies are doing this.

The common denominator between the Microsoft.net world and the enterprise Java world is Web services. This is why companies are taking SOA and Web services so seriously. Web services are one of the main ways of connecting the workgroup world to the enterprise. It will be interesting to review the situation again in January 2007. We will be able to see how far organizations have moved in this direction, as well as how effectively the vendors can make this integration easier to do than it is today.