Informatica Enterprise Data Management

I was asked a question recently that got me thinking – “Why would companies want to spend money on middleware during a down market?” My knee-jerk reaction was to recite all the reasons that companies might want to invest in integration technologies in order to get more life out of every IT budget dollar – but then I considered a deeper question.The initial list of reasons for investing in middleware include:

1) Extend the life of existing legacy systems. Rather than spending big bucks on replacing aging business applications, integration systems allow IT shops to add incremental functionality to existing applications at much lower costs. Granted this is not a permanent solution, but it’s a good strategy to spend a little money to delay the day when you need to spend a lot to a period when budgets are not as tight.

2) Consolidate staff into an Integration Competency Center. This can have a dual benefit of saving money through economies of scale and gaining control over the integration hairball which has a tendency to add unnecessary complexity to the end-to-end information flows. The hairball is insidious since it impacts not only development costs and time-to-market, but it can have a significant cost impact on resolving production incidents and on disaster recovery capabilities.

3) Reduce operating costs by rationalizing the application or database portfolio. There is considerable money to be saved in most large IT shops that have grown organically (or through mergers) over the years by systematically eliminating redundant systems and migrating the data to the target systems. Here again a strategy of consolidating systems and simplifying the integration infrastructure makes sense when there is not much money to spend.

These are all valid reasons why businesses continue to invest limited budgets in integration capabilities. But there is a second “hidden” question behind the one that was asked. The question implies that middleware technology is hard to justify and so the presumption is that during a period when there is less discretionary money available, then naturally companies will spend less on integration. And if integration is hard to justify, then that must mean it is perceived as low value by the business leaders who control the purse strings.

So the deeper question that should be answered is “why is integration perceived as low value by business executives?” The answer is that we (IT Professionals) have done a poor job in linking infrastructure investments to business requirements. Integration costs are often an afterthought in many application investments decisions despite the fact that everyone knows that no application systems, even big ERP systems, stand alone. Yet integration is perceived as a “technical necessity” rather than a “business requirement”.

The truth is that the business has organized its functions around vertical stovepipes and separate business lines for very compelling reasons. Yet the separate functional groups need to share information around products, customers, suppliers, financials, etc. What we in the IT community have not done a great job on is to derive integration requirements directly from a functional model of the business and the information exchanges that are necessary for efficient end-to-end business operation.

IT practitioners know that integration is not a “nice to have” – it is essential. But we need to establish top-down architectural models of the business in a way that business leaders can see the need for information exchanges across the organization. If we do so, the question about “why companies should spend money on middleware during a down economy” becomes a non question. The question instead simply becomes “what are the highest priority investments that should be made given a smaller investment budget”. An investment in middleware then is no different than any other investment in IT. It is simply a matter of understanding the value of a given business transformation and translating those planned changes into requirements which drive a collection of functional components and integration elements to achieve the desired outcome.