Organisations must integrate their business systems rather than
escalating their software spending, according to analysts at this
week's Software AG executive forum in Spain.
They were echoing the keynote speech of Software AG's chief
executive, Erwin Königs, who said: "A year ago all the talk was
about innovation, today it's more focused on productivity.
Integration means what can I do today that will help me quickly.
This is the major shift were seeing from our customers."
Massimo Pezzini, research director at Gartner, said: "Last year was
the golden year for middleware, with sales of around 1.3bn euros
(£800m). But over the next five years the most important task for
the IT manager will be to integrate these systems."
Pezzini estimated that some 20% of large enterprises now have teams
dedicated to integration projects. He added that he thought this
would grow to almost 50% by 2005.
Unless companies take integration seriously, Pezzini told the
forum, the cost savings promised by middleware were unlikely to
happen. "The number one priority is not buying more software," he
said. "We have made mistakes for 30 years by not recognising the
need to integrate what we already have."
He cited the example of a major airline that had 25 sets of
customer data held in separate databases. The airline is now
integrating the databases to reduce management overheads.
According to Gartner estimates, 90% of system management budgets
are consumed by simply making data accurate across disparate
systems.
Gary Barnett, principal consultant at analyst group Ovum agreed
with Pezzini. "Businesses are still caught in the trap of buying
point solutions in the hope that they will get business advantage,"
he said. "But the result is that they are storing up yet more
integration hassles, ultimately making their systems harder to
adopt."
Both analysts called for IT departments to have a strategic view of
their systems and to consider creating an integration competency
centre to manage projects. However, they both warned that
organisations had to rationalise their business processes before
integration - and ultimately cost-savings - could occur.
"Few companies have ever tried to catalogue the operations of all
the individual IT systems," said Barnett. "That is a big project
but once it's done, simple integration projects that don't require
long lead times can be instigated from resources already present
within the organisation."