Companies are still relying on manual processes to
complete the increasing number of data integration
projects.
A survey of over 400 senior IT staff by analyst Forrester, on
behalf of application infrastructure software provider
Progress Software, found that IT staff were
still “mired in manual processes and ad hoc fixes”.
With the demand for real-time globally accessible data
increasing, IT staff are faced with ever more data integration
projects. But the survey found that manual efforts remain the
dominant approach for the integration of data silos.
The survey found that 87% of respondents rely on newly developed
code to integrate data, while 80% still manually change schemas as
required. According to the findings, while these percentages will
slightly decrease over the next two years, manual processes will
continue to trump automation.
Hub Vandervoort, Progress CTO for the enterprise infrastructure
division, said, “These results are a clear call to action for the
vendor community to provide minimally invasive and easy-to-use
tools, while providing support for data federation without the need
for extensive schema changes.”
The research found that 55% of respondents had undertaken four
or more integration efforts over the past two years, and the
majority of respondents did not see this number decreasing in the
near future.
In addition, 48% predicted that the number of integration
efforts will increase during the next two years, while 41% said it
will stay the same.
The survey results identified service-oriented architecture
(SOA) as a growing solution across enterprises to achieve
successful end-to-end data management and integration results.
While 44% of enterprises use SOA today, 59% of respondents
reported that they plan to use SOA for integration efforts over the
next two years.
Although popular, manual approaches have some significant
drawbacks according to the respondents.
Among those who write code for each integration effort, 75%
reported increased maintenance costs due to application complexity
and 71% suffered from increased cycle time to integrate new
applications.
Also, 71% of respondents who rely on schema changes to support
new applications, said that one of their challenges is a slow
response to required application changes.
Two-thirds (66%) reported problems with unforeseen breakage of
other applications dependent on the same data.
More details about the results are available here:
http://www.progress.com/dataxtend/web/global/integration2soa-survey/index.ssp.
Next generation data integration
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