Integration is a key issue for IT professionals, as companies increasingly incorporate software and services from multiple vendors. An Oracle-sponsored ITtoolbox survey of more than 400 global IT workers conducted during October 2003 revealed that companies are actively pursuing integration to improve existing systems.
| Top Strategic Reasons for Pursuing Integration | |
|---|---|
| Improve information access | 66.6% |
| Increase accuracy and consistency of data | 55.4% |
| Leverage existing resources and systems | 48.5% |
| Reduce IT costs | 47.4% |
| Improve employee productivity | 44.6% |
| Enable online collaboration with business partners | 43.1% |
| Not currently pursuing integration | 6.1% |
| Other | 4.6% |
| Source: ITtoolbox | |
Half of the respondents indicated that their IT integration budget for 2004 would increase over 2003’s figures, while 28 percent expected it to stay the same. Only 8 percent felt a decrease was imminent.
The most popular integration effort that IT professionals expect to undertake is application-to-application, closely followed by data integration. Web services [define] is not only the third most popular integration effort, but also the B2B [define] protocol that the majority chose to support.
| Planned Integration Efforts | ||
|---|---|---|
| Application-to-application | 57.7% | |
| Data integration | 54.1% | |
| Web services | 44.1% | |
| Business process management | 42.9% | |
| Portal integration | 31.9% | |
| Don’t know | 4.6% | |
| None | 2.6% | |
| Other | 2.6% | |
| Source: ITtoolbox | ||
More than half (55 percent) of survey participants indicated that they were currently using Web services technology, with roughly one-third finding the integration tool to have the greatest flexibility, and more than 28 percent anticipating the solution to become the future industry standard. More than one-quarter (26.3 percent) of respondents found Web services to improve efficiency, and 18.6 percent expected the tool to reduce costs.
| Biggest Challenges to Widespread Acceptance of Web Services | ||
|---|---|---|
| Security concerns | 42.0% | |
| Unclear standards | 21.3% | |
| Immeasurable return-on-investment | 13.6% | |
| Unexpected implementation costs | 13.3% | |
| Licensing restrictions | 5.1% | |
| Other | 4.8% | |
| Source: ITtoolbox | ||