Greta James, research director of application integration with Gartner in Australia, said for 20 years companies have been trying to pull together data stored in different databases.
James said that in most medium to large organisations information was stored on a variety of databases and in various formats. James likened it to putting together a jigsaw, with problems arising when a business needs to draw out and bring together this data.
She uses the examples of the healthcare and financial services sectors, where companies need to identify the same person in different databases. Problems can arise identifying the person when, for example, the name is spelt differently in different databases.
Company mergers can also cause headaches, when the new entity needs to marry together the hardware, software and applications from the prior businesses.
According to James, some companies had established super indexes, which allow users to find information by pointing to the same person in different systems. Merged companies may also undertake projects to consolidate disparate systems, although she warned that these have the potential to take a lot of time and money.
IBM has been talking up the move by businesses towards integration at its DeveloperWorks Live conference in San Francisco, with Steve Mills, senior VP and group executive at IBM Software, predicting that the use of business process integration will grow dramatically within the next five years.
IBM has announced an initiative code-named Xperanto, which the company's engineer and director of information integration, Nelson Matos, described as being all about addressing the customer pain point.
Matos said that although in the past integration had been an IT problem, it's increasingly becoming a business issue for organisations as they go through the pain of putting a solution together.
He sees one of the major issues in this area as information integration--the ability to integrate any form of data. "Customers have invested [in the IT infrastructure]--they can't throw away that investment and replace it with something else," Matos said.
Vivienne Fisher travelled to DeveloperWorks Live in San Francisco as a guest of IBM.
