Key Players in Enterprise Integration

The following article originally appeared in DZone's Enterprise Zone.

The most important players in enterprise integration are clearly IBM and Oracle.

We spoke to 20 executives in 16 companies to get their perspective on the future of enterprise integration and where the greatest opportunities lie.

We spoke to:

Adam Fingerman, Chief Experience Officer, ArcTouch | Jon Gelsey, CEO, Auth0 | Nishant Patel, CTO, and Matthew Baier, COO, Built.io | Tyson Whitten, API Management Product Marketing, CA Technologies | Andrew Warfield, CTO and Co-Founder, Coho Data | Zeev Avidan, V.P. Product Management, OpenLegacy | Mike Han, V.P. Operations, Liferay | Uri Sarid, CTO, Conor Curlett, Principal Architect, MuleSoft | Gabe Stanek, Director of Field Engineering, Neo Technology | Florent Solt, CTO, Netvibes | Sean Bowen, CEO, Push Technology | Jon Bock, Vice President Products, Snowflake Computing | James Jinnette, Director of Information Technology, unidentified CRO | Suchit Bachalli, President, Unilog |Asanka Abeysinghe, V.P. Solutions Architecture, WSO2 |  Phil Manfredi, Aaron Sandeen and Kiran Chinnagangannagari, Co-Founders, Zuggand

The most important players in enterprise integration are clearly IBM and Oracle, as these two firms were mentioned more than twice as frequently as any other company. Both are recognized for their robust messaging middleware. MuleSoft was also mentioned as a major contributor to the open source middleware space along with WSO2. Tibco was the only other company mentioned more than once. Other companies mentioned were Metadata, SAP, Microsoft, Snaplogic, HP, Dell, AWS, EMC, and NetApp. Other than IBM and Oracle, enterprise integration providers are very fragmented and the market is very competitive. 

Here's how our respondents answered the question, "Who are the most important players in enterprise integration?":

• Software = IBM, Oracle, Tibco. Open Source = WSO2, MuleSoft.

• Oracle and Metadata are the two largest we use.

• IBM, SAP, Oracle are the large integration companies. Different companies provide specific solutions.

• Commercially IBM, Microsoft and Oracle. Open source resources include WSO2 and MuleSoft. It depends on the resources, projects, goals, funding. WSO2 is now in the Gartner Magic Quadrant with the commercial players.

• There are multiple tiers: systems integrators, incumbents. In the last year a lot of new companies have arisen to reinvent enterprise integration. MuleSoft and SnapLogic are two of the bigger players.

• IBM, Oracle, and third party backend data services

• API integration layers. Players on the enterprise data integration side that cleanse and normalize the data (e.g. Informative and Talend). ETL vendors have morphed into data integration. Frameworks like Spring, open source and Node. What is the framework upon which you build your application?

• There is no one major player because there are so many. IBM, HP or Dell are usually part of the mix but it’s with many other systems.

• AWS, EMC, NetApp.

• Tibco, Oracle, IBM, MuleSoft. The messaging bubble. The service business is already there.

• Think about service-oriented, message-based providers.

• IBM is a major partner. They own 78% of the message-oriented middleware market. MQ is fantastic for internal but not the internet. Oracle is in procession for IoT. Millions of connections run through OpenWorld.

• IT owns ERP and all of the moving pieces. However, you must involve product managers, marketing and c-level executives. Many strategic decisions need to be made (e.g. do you show the price and availability of a product before someone logs-in?).

• MuleSoft coexists with the old-guard - IBM and Tibco. A lot of smaller players in API management - they solve a temporary problem and then go away. Great need for API implementation to improve connectivity.

Is this consistent with who you see as the most important players in enterprise integration?