Mergers, acquisitions and antiquated management infrastructures spawned organizational and procedural redundancies that evolved into today's IT integration challenge. To put this into perspective, let's outline the formidable task that's facing IT organizations. Web-based applications require common data views and a seamless transaction flow, which legacy environments don't support. IT must find a way to address the inherent fragmentation, redundancies and inconsistencies found within legacy data and system architectures to support e-business projects. The data and systems that are needed to fully execute this type of transaction span multiple databases, systems, users and environments.
Similar challenges exist in online banking, telecommunications, manufacturing and other industries.
Integration vendors offer tools to address some of these requirements. This is a useful approach, but it has limitations. Inconsistencies in data formats make it difficult to know which data meets certain criteria. And software tools can't determine user-defined data variances. Integration tools can also connect application systems with Web-enabled front ends.