The vast majority of organisations still rely on in-house resources for enterprise application integration (EAI), according to analyst group AMR Research. A mere 16% of the organisations surveyed use products from EAI vendors to carry out integration.
Those that do use integration products derive substantial benefits compared to in-house coding. "For projects integrating six or more applications, go with an
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integration product to reduce existing integration costs and support changing business rules," advises AMR analyst Eric Austvold.
Overall, the scale of integration projects remains small. Austvold estimates that 44% of companies integrate an average of just three applications. Furthermore, organisations integrating six or fewer applications account for 86% of those surveyed, despite AMR's estimate that many have more than 20 applications. Among these projects, more applications are integrated with core enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems than with any other application.
AMR concludes that – because of the slow progress of integration projects – the notion of the 'real-time enterprise' is still a long way away. Even for those organisations on track to reach this goal, says AMR, the calculated return on investment is only around 10%, and average payback estimates are in the 22-month range.
