Cloud Integration – Bridging The Different Technology Islands

Businesses are making considerable progress with cloud integration.

In a recent survey commissioned by IBM, 78% of respondents said their cloud initiatives were “coordinated or fully integrated”. This is in contrast to 2012, when only 34% of organisations answered the same way.

This was by no means a small survey. Over 1,000 C-Suite executives across 18 industries were asked the question. These findings are a strong indicator of a positive trend in the industry, but the data also poses an important question – what about the remaining 22% of organisations still struggling with cloud integration?

Part of the challenge facing many businesses is how technology is purchased. The industry remains dominated by a number of ‘technology islands’. These can be defined as solution providers who, while working towards improving interoperability, are still strongly focused on building their own ecosystems and strengthening their market position.

As we outlined recently, building bridges between these islands – both on-premise and using the cloud – has become crucial for IT departments. Employees expect a flawless application experience.

This creates a host of integration challenges, especially in large global enterprises operating a broad mix of systems and business services.

From our perspective, we’ve noticed an increase in companies coming to us for advice around these issues. Organisations want to understand how to integrate a broad mix of applications, clouds, networks and vendor solutions. We see this as a positive, both because our engineers love nothing more than simplifying an extremely complex collaboration estate but also because organisations have finally recognised the importance of integration.

We’re running a breakfast roundtable with Polycom (Thursday 22nd September) on this very subject. If you’re interested in learning how to maximise the value of your current collaboration investments, be sure to attend.