Why Enterprise Integration Journeys are Failing

As a business leader, you’re responsible for the health and success of the company. Accountable to the board, investors, customers, and employees, you must ensure the organization responds with agility to changes in the market.

However, faced with legacy infrastructure, system and data integration issues, insufficient resources, and the frantic pace of innovation, steering the business with precision and immediacy has never been so challenging.

According to Gartner, enterprise integration platforms as a service (iPaaS solutions) are helping organizations support an expanding range of business use cases. Not just to integrate data and applications, but to connect ecosystems, APIs, and events. No longer a nice-to-have, enterprise iPaaS technology is a critical component in the modernization of the enterprise. 

So, where does your organization stand on enterprise integration? We reached out to over a thousand technology leaders and specialists in America to gauge progress and overall adoption. While almost everyone agrees that enterprise integration is important, only a fraction of respondents have achieved it. Here’s what we learned.

Your peers are dragging their feet

There’s no denying that enterprise integration is a comprehensive undertaking for any organization. Many business leaders have concerns about the investment of time, resources, and the money required to fund these initiatives. Justification of the investment is also difficult given the number of existing (and urgent) priorities on an already over-extended IT backlog.

Budget ranks as the top iPaaS implementation concern among business leaders. This makes sense given it’s estimated that 41% of CIOs consider business transformation processes such as integration and automation, to be their most significant IT investment. 

Drilling into what your peers worry about, the survey uncovered five top concerns: 

These concerns are valid, especially if the project is meant to follow a more traditional integration model. For example, 50% of business leaders will rely on internal resources to carry out the work. This decision is easily supported if the implementation involves an iPaaS solution that offloads repetitive, lower value work from internal teams. 

However, if your strategy relies upon an in-house solution with customized coding and other time-consuming requirements, your team will be quickly overwhelmed. The project will spiral out of control, running over time and budget.

With so many potential downsides, business leaders reach a state of decision paralysis, procrastinating and ultimately slowing or even blocking advancement of the company’s digital roadmap.

The minority, aka the 7%

We were not surprised that the majority of business leaders score enterprise integration as a top priority. But we were definitely taken aback that so few: 7%, had successfully implemented it.

The 7% certainly aren’t letting the grass grow under their feet. These business leaders are quickly mobilizing on a long list of business-critical initiatives that are now within reach. Top of the list is artificial intelligence (AI) and automation enablement.

These capabilities deliver significant value to the enterprise. For example, AI supports the delivery of real-time data and predictive analytics to help inform important business decisions. Automation diverts repetitive, time-consuming actions from the workforce, especially helpful during a global skills shortage, allowing humans to focus on higher value activities.

Here are the top initiatives the 7% will carry out with an enterprise integration strategy enabled:

The majority, aka the 93%

Those still pondering next steps, the 93%, grapple with the same challenges they’ve always faced including system and data integration issues. 

For example, many companies without an active enterprise integration strategy must continually rebuild existing integrations to keep the business running. Based on the business leaders we surveyed, 98% must rebuild these connections multiple times over the course of a year. Since these integrations are needed for existing key business applications, the work must go on. And on.

According to the 93%, bad integrations take a lasting toll on the company: 

With these deficits, the growth potential for the business (over the short and longer terms) is severely limited. 

Key Takeaways for Your iPaaS Strategy

The information we collected from the survey uncovered some key takeaways, including how you can implement a successful, cost-effective enterprise integration strategy.

With iPaaS technology, organizations easily leverage in-house resources to complete the project within what many would consider to be an aggressive timeline. By enabling your team with contemporary tools and technology, the adoption curve between vendor selection and production shrinks to days or even weeks, versus months.

Join the 7%! With an iPaaS platform, your business will benefit from some impressive gains:

Cap all of this with fresh and accurate real-time data from across the enterprise and it’s hard to understand why some organizations are willing to remain in the 93%.