Integration is driven by an organisation’s need to connect the various elements within it, be it people and content, databases and information stores or different applications.

Modern integration technologies have played a fundamental role in freeing organisations from the restrictions imposed by having isolated applications and systems. Offering a powerful competitive tool that encourages innovation and increases efficiency across business processes, integration has become a proven enabler.

Ian Charlesworth, principal analyst at Ovum, says there is a painfully simple message about integration that is often lost in the fog of IT. “The basic premise of any integration initiative is that there is value in connecting things,” he says. “The value of the integrated whole should always be greater than the cost of integrating the parts.”

Since the advent of computer systems, companies have been proliferating a mass of technology, creating a multitude of data, systems, applications and processes to be connected.

According to ex-IT director Clive Taylor, who as director of Sesai Consulting now helps businesses tackle integration challenges, most organisations already have integration opportunities. “It is common to find divisions in a business doing their own thing, and integration at this level can be a catalyst for taking the business to a different place,” he says.

IT integration is nothing new, but the complexity and variety of modern architectures, infrastructures and platforms greatly increases the challenge. Richard Steel, chief information officer at London Borough of Newham, says developments in technology have made integration easier.

“Technically, it is not really that difficult to integrate the IT systems. What is much more difficult is managing the business and creating a willingness to work together, so that the whole business is an integrated entity,” he says.

Over the past few years there has been a change in organisations’ attitude towards integration. Until recently most businesses still approached it solely from a technology viewpoint, producing overly complex tactical solutions that failed to meet the needs of the company.

Business-focused integration involves the whole organisation, not just the IT department, and its emphasis is on flexibility and an integration architecture that supports change.

“It is essential to have a clear map and focus on the outcomes,” says Steel. “Today our focus is on standardisation, and we have a well-resourced infrastructure. One of the biggest obstacles to integration is a piecemeal infrastructure.”

Many companies are turning to service-oriented architecture (SOA) to solve some of their biggest problems, which include integrating internal applications, reaching out to external partners and supporting strategic business transformation.

According to Rob Hailstone, software infrastructure practice director at analyst Butler Group, SOA provides a generic foundation for building new things.

“There is no alternative to SOA, unless companies want to go back to a monolithic view of the world with a deconstructed IT environment,” he says.

“The challenge companies are facing is to pull the IT pieces together, and nothing offers a more realistic solution to that problem than SOA.”

Although it has not been widely adopted in the corporate world, the public sector, telecommunications companies and large financial organisations are starting to take note of SOA.

But according to analyst Forrester Research, planned SOA use is growing faster than actual SOA adoptions, with 14 per cent of European and US companies planning to move to SOA last year, but only two per cent of companies actually having done so.

However, SOA is proving to be a great tool for education, gradually shifting firms’ perception of the role of integration away from that of an IT necessity towards that of a genuine business enabler.

SOA does not come on a disk, nor can it be deployed. Instead, it offers a way of formalising a more flexible approach to the integration of key business components ­ internal applications, external web services or workflows.

To realise the full benefits of SOA, companies must move beyond integration of individual web services. They need to establish a more strategic environment that starts with business process, that is built on a robust architecture and that includes the methodologies and technologies needed to manage and maintain applications.

“SOA allows companies to tolerate a wildly heterogeneous environment and still manage to pull all its information together,” says Hailstone.

For many companies, integration has historically involved separate conversations with three different types of vendors to cover the distinct integration areas of data, applications and process.

Today the story is different. A transition period in the integration market has included acquisitions which have allowed vendors to flesh out their integration portfolios, blurring the edges of the different areas.

Recognising that data integration needs to support application integration, which in turn supports process integration, organisations can now talk to a single vendor. Various enabling technologies have emerged, such as J2EE Connector Architecture and web services together with XML and SOAP standards, and are being accepted by both vendors and users.

Integration suites, or platforms, have changed the nature of integration, providing organisations with flexible software that supports the componentisation of applications and process-level integration and management.

Ashley Doody, chief technology officer at legal publisher Sweet and Maxwell, says better management reporting is being achieved through integration.

“We can measure how long our data feeds take as well as know when they have failed. This allows us to closely track service levels and provide management information,” he says.

“As well as setting service levels, we can also measure against them, which gives us a better degree of reliability and performance.”