If You Can’t Beat ’Em, Integrate ’Em

In the new SOA world, enterprise vendors suddenly are eager to make sure their application suites can play well with others.

In the ’90s, your integration strategy was simple: Buy as many preintegrated applications from a single vendor as possible. That worked for you, and it worked extremely well for the vendor; integrated application suites fetched a high price and required long-term maintenance and support contracts that promised a steady, predictable stream of revenue from customers.

Even better, CIOs’ fear of integration pain gave vendors a built-in sales advantage whenever a company wanted to add a new application to its stack. It was easier for the CIO to pick a preintegrated application from the dominant vendor than to take a risk on a best-of-breed newcomer—even if its application had better functionality—because expensive integration disasters had become the much-publicized bane of the industry. Better to have disappointed users, CIOs reasoned, than headlines in The Wall Street Journal.

But the rise of service-oriented architecture has produced a shift in integration strategy. SOA makes the radical assertion that the enterprise application infrastructure is irrelevant. Technology is constructed according to services specified by the business, not by processes contained within an enterprise application vendor’s software box. In this scenario, packaged software is a piece of the service, just another component in a larger business process—such as an insurance claims process that links a jumble of functions and data inside ERP, CRM and old mainframe legacy systems. The application’s vendor doesn’t matter anymore; the linkages between the applications is the important thing.

As a result, the vendors’ integration strategies have become more important than the features of their software. (Both dominant enterprise software vendors, Oracle and SAP, have begun offering integration middleware to go along with their software suites, although both are sticking with the big, integrated software suite vision.)

In the brave new world of SOA, the big software vendors have decided to take a page from Microsoft’s playbook and duplicate the Windows strategy. With the Windows operating system running on 95 percent of PCs, software developers are eager to create software that works with Windows because it means they can reach the most customers and make the most money. As a result, the thousands of applications available for Windows today ensure its dominance in the operating system market tomorrow. Similarly, the big enterprise software vendors are trying to ensure their futures in an SOA world by assembling ecosystems around their core applications.