Not too long ago, I was speaking with a CIO of a major enterprise who described how his company had 20 different ERP systems across various business units that not only needed better integration internally, but also a better way to interact with business partners. At the time, customers and suppliers doing business with his company needed to establish up to 20 different purchasing relationships, versus seeing the company as “one”.

Approaches such as EAI, Web services, data warehousing, and enterprise information integration go a long way in helping to address challenges of this magnitude, but for too many companies, bringing in new systems as a result of a merger, adding a new customer to a supply chain management system, or better integrating document exchange with partners means one more integration project. That not only means a lot of hours, days, weeks, and months of work for IT and data management staff, but also additional work and delays for business partners as well.

It doesn’t have to be this way.

Tools and services are now available that enable integration or connectivity on a repeatable basis. In a recent ebizQ Webcast, Karen Hsu, director of product marketing at Informatica, and Ronen Schwartz, vice president, professional services at Informatica, presented strategies and tools that help get data to and from hubs without reinventing the wheel every time a new customer or new system is integrated.

What has happened is many companies find they are ensnared in a tangle of “spaghettiware,” says Hsu. “We see customers having problems addressing increased volume and increased complexity of data. Data coming in from internal and external partners arrives in the form of unstructured data such as Word, PDF, email, and industry standard formats. In supporting this increased volume, and increased complexity of data, many companies have built systems and built point-to-point interfaces between these systems – not only internally, but also externally with partners and customers.”

Schwartz identified service oriented architecture – supporting “transformation as a service” – as an enabler that not only can bring new applications on board into the enterprise a lot faster, but also provide a standard interaction layer for new customers or business partners. By building a service interface, “new business requirements could be provided upon request without the need for a major reshape of the infrastructure,” he explained. Most leading integration vendors, including Tibco, webMethods, IBM and SAP – in conjunction with Informatica – provide tools to leverage transformation as a service, he said.

Business agility is severely limited if bringing in new customers and partners – or changing an internal process – means launching big integration projects over and over again. In an era where business needs to move at the speed of the Internet, organizations tied down with spaghettiware will see themselves falling behind. Hsu and Schwartz point to tools and platforms that enable greater agility.

Adding business partners to a network should be simple and seamless – today’s business climate demands nothing less.