Midsize businesses don't have the IT resources they need, nor do they have the financial slack to invest in expensive and complicated software-based integration tools. Nevertheless they must inte- grate their core applications in order to gain the most value for their business.
Already $1 out of every $3 spent by companies on IT goes toward integration projects. Furthermore, Gartner Group pre- dicts that, in the next few years, application integration projects will increase in both scope and number. This trend is especially challenging for midsize companies.
In this paper, we examine the application integration trends for midsize businesses - companies with less than $3B in revenue. Technology leaders in these companies have a handful of inte- gration approaches to choose from: wrestle with sophisticated enterprise application integration (EAI) tools, write custom code, or use the simple and rapid approach of pre-packaged integrations from IBM WebSphere® Cast Iron®. WebSphere Cast Iron Cloud integration includes the flexibility of three deployment options - a cloud solution, a virtual appliance, or an on-premise appliance.
