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The ability to tightly integrate applications into streamlined business processes is widely recognised as one of the foundation stones of business agility.

When applications are tightly linked, expensive and error-prone human involvement is reduced, processes can be completed more quickly, and information can be made instantly available to those who need it.

That is the theory. But when it comes to the practice, there are many problems, as Roger Panfil, vice president of iWay Software, a division of business intelligence software company Information Builders, told the Information Age Agile Business 2003 conference in London recently.

Panfil explained that almost all of the most commonly used solutions to the integration problem suffer from major limitations or implementation problems. And most of these can be traced back to one of complexity.

Most organisations have a large, and constantly changing variety of systems and data sources. These might include several packaged applications; some custom legacy applications; some relational and maybe non-relational databases; some web sites; some business analytics systems; some electronic data interchange feeds; systems that integrate via XML, .NET and J2EE standards; and those that integrate through industry transaction formats such as Swift in financial services or the HIPAA standard in healthcare.

The way that most organisations build the links between these various systems, Panfil explained, is simply to do it themselves. In fact, according to Gartner Group figures, as many as four out of five integration projects today are "hand-coded".

This, Panfil argued, is almost always a mistake: "Thinking about doing integration by hand? Think again. Over the long haul, hand-coded integration is the most expensive way to solve the problem."

Why? Because do-it-yourself integration often involves months of work, requires expensive and skilled staff, is usually very inflexible, and there is little or no re-usability of the adaptors or code written.

But Panfil also warned that it is difficult to make integration projects pay using integration brokers. Although this approach has many advantages, especially in terms of management, control and re-use, the software acquisition costs of an integration broker typically begin at $500,000. By the time hardware, training and implementation costs are added, this can easily reach $1 million.

Panfil quoted the Gartner Group: "As a rough rule of thumb, the break-even point for a midsize broker configuration is usually around 40 to 60 interfaces." This, said Panfil, means, "A return on investment is very difficult to attain."

The Meta Group advises users that integration costs can be kept down by managing the scope of a project, by only purchasing what is needed, and by aggressively managing the integrators. However, Panfil argued that this is almost impossible if the approach taken requires the purchase of a complete integration broker solution up front.

The answer put forward by Panfil and his company iWay is to simplify the solution and only solve the most pressing need - direct integration between the applications or services involved, rather than introducing a new layer of complexity.

He argued that EAI (enterprise integration application) has three components: adaptors (format conversion from one application to another); transformation (transforming data based on the use of the content); and routing (workflow and process integration).

Most integration tools, he says, have complex routing built in - delivered in the form of expensive software. But, he said, a lot of this is unnecessary or can be done more directly and easily. "If you do adaptors well, and you do transformation well, you will do integration well."

This, of course, is not necessarily an argument that everyone would agree with. But iWay's adaptors are increasingly being adopted by all kinds of software vendors looking for fast integration - and iWay backs up its case with customer studies that show high returns on investment and quick project times.