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I’m co-facilitating a session on software integration at the Web of Change conference this week with Michael Silberman of Echo Ditto. I’ve been thinking about where integration is right now. I mean, integration was possible as soon as the second application was written.

Building custom integrations has been a business model for decades. So what’s new and interesting? A couple things come to mind:

1. It’s easier
2. It can happen at a distance
3. We can now use UI components like we used to use software libraries

First, it’s definitely easier. As software has matured over the last 50 years, the levels of abstraction have built up to dizzying heights. Abstraction means the levers to move software are much more graspable, and more powerful.

Second, it used to be that applications had to be on the same machine, then in the same data center, and now they just have to be on the Internet for us to be able to integrate them. Since everything is on the Internet, place no longer matters. Distance, as measured by bandwidth, can still matter, as Gareth pointed out yesterday.

Third, while we can still pick best of breed applications and integrate them together (i.e. CRM with accounting) we can now choose best of breed UI components and use them when and where we want. Notice how any place you find a listing of street addresses you now find an embedded google map. Google maps is the best of breed UI widget for displaying geographic data in your app. These components can be plugged into our apps where we see fit with very little work or expertise needed. More and more of these widgets are coming into existence, and I think we’ll find that our best of breed apps become amalgams of core functionality and welded in widgets, where you can’t easily tell which parts are from the core app and which are from the widget.

I’m working on an integration with a killer widget that I think will change the way we look at CRM data. Seriously, it’s really cool. I’m integrating a widget with a full-fledged application, and a novice would have no idea it wasn’t core functionality.

So will our job descriptions start to look like Igor’s in Young Frankenstien? Will we be scouring the morgues, looking for good body parts to graft to our monsters? Probably. And they’ll probably come after us bearing torches…

This entry was posted on Sunday, September 17th, 2006 at 8:36 pm and is filed under CRM, Technology. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.