At the end of last year, Forrester Research released a paper entitled, "Integration Landscape 2005". The 26-page some report (subscriber only) concludes with the following:

NO integration PLATFORM WILL DOMINATE, BUT SPECIALTIES WILL DECLINE
Due to the wide range of varying business and technical requirements, none of these categories of integration platforms will dominate the market, though some will be better positioned to fulfill integration requirements in some scenarios than in others. However, during the next two years, most of today's application integration specialties will cease to be viable as independent product categories, driving specialists to further consolidation, or to enter adjacent areas of specialization. The consolidation in data integration markets will take longer --- three years to four years.

When one considers the decline in financial performance of the integration vendors (see popup chart for CAGR through 2003 from Forrester - View image), plus the addition of items such as:

• acquisition of SeeBeyond (market pioneer and integration leader) by Sun Microsystems
• annecdotal information (by customers) on the execution of source code escrow for some of the integration vendors (public companies) in the past two years
• increased M&A activity in the overall software sector

... well I'm all for the smaller companies and innovators, but the integration market as a general sector may not be so ripe anymore. Will be interesting to see if there are other striking plays like the SeeBeyond acquisition. TIBCO comes to mind for me, but who knows.

Steve Shu