Aberdeen Group report cites rate at 80 percent due to adoption by Fortune 1000 firms
Boston — July 23, 2003 — The enterprise information integration (EII) market is on the brink of strong growth and implementation by a wide variety of Fortune 1000 companies, as major suppliers such as IBM enter the market, according to a report by Aberdeen Group, a market analysis and positioning services firm.
EII infrastructure aggregates data and coordinates transactions across back-end data sources. At its most powerful, EII allows all back-end information to be seen as if it came from one comprehensive, global database. Its benefits range from improving the real-time characteristics of business intelligence to easing mergers and speeding development of enterprise portals and e-business integration applications.
"Despite confusion in the marketplace over the difference between EII and enterprise application integration (EAI) — which are, in fact, complementary products — our research shows that many major IT shops are plowing ahead with EII implementations, both on a per-project basis and as part of an overall strategy," said report author Wayne Kernochan. "Our research also shows that individual customers have not yet begun to plumb the potential uses of EII, which is one of the best Swiss army knife-type multiple-use tools ever to come along."
According to Aberdeen, the rapid growth in the EII market will be paralleled by an increasing role for EII in such areas as business process integration and legacy modernization. In fact, EII is becoming a key factor in markets totaling $6.4 billion (EAI, legacy modernization and content management). And EII will be the keystone of a new IT capability called strategic information management, which will allow users to better leverage proprietary information for competitive advantage.
The report also noted that the increasing market success of EII will force major suppliers such as Sun and Oracle to upgrade their EII offerings or see business go to IBM and BEA by default. The advent of major suppliers in the EII market will also improve services and lead to "EII-based services" such as "information audits." And IT buyers from medium-sized businesses should begin to see significant benefits from EII over the next two years.