Fernando Labastida’s Integration Blog

It’s been too long since I’ve posted to this blog; end of year craziness is my excuse. And why, you ask, am I posting on Christmas eve? You’re probably thinking: what a bad family man, he’s working when he should be spending time with his family in harmonious communion. Well, I’ll have you know I was up real early this morning baking and I’m taking my rest time to write a little relaxing blog entry!

On to the top IT priorities for 2008. According to CIO Insight magazine, the number 1 and number 3 top priorities in terms of technology that will improve a company’s business strategy are business intelligence and data and application integration, at 44% and 29% respectively. Since business intelligence requires data integration tools to build the data warehouses that BI tools sit on top of, then two of the top five priorities regarding technology for business improvement for 2008 will require application integration tools.

According to SearchCIO.com, the top two priorities are enterprise software and business intelligence (again), respectively. Enterprise software implementations achieve minimal value if not integrated seamlessly with other enterprise application. For example, in order to provide a 360 degree view of the customer and to encourage usage of new Saas or on-demand CRM applications, these have to be integrated with order entry and accounting apps, again, requiring a data and application integration tools.

Ok, I’ll stop tooting the data integration horn and get back to baking and preparing brisket. And no, there’s not enough food for everybody!