Integration: Does It Mean a Better Way of Life for Software Users and Industry?

If you talk with software company execs, they see their mission nowadays as one of assembling a broader range of end user functionality without having users worry about mixing and matching different software functions. How are they doing it, you may ask - well, surprisingly, by partnering up and sharing information with each other.

Many of these relationships have allowed application developers to build products and combine parts of their products with those of other companies. The net result of all this is that the user gets only one geometric database instead of two - eliminating the need for translation software. In addition, better integration also can mean expanding software functionality - combining CAD with analysis or management systems. This is the common thread that has been binding the software industry for the last several years.

"The user deals with one interface instead of two and only one set of menus and icons, which can make a difference for a company when speed is of the essence," says Jon Hirschtick, CEO of SolidWorks (Concord, MA) - a 3-D mechanical design solution company. "The geometric database and user interface are two very important functions because too often the buyer may think that combining functions means getting it all from one vendor, but that's not really true. Some of the single vendor software solutions can come from multiple vendors. You buy one package from one company, but it turns out that they have combined their packages with other companies. These are the two big areas that I see growing."

Software Integration and the Manufacturing World

Fast-forward to about several years ago when the movement toward a more collaborative environment began. More and more businesses are finding that they want to go back to the "one system that can manage everything for me" type -tying in all of the functions of one organization into a consistent environment.

"One good thing about having these functions all in one place is that it's a little more clear cut in that you know where the engineer's job is, where the designers job is and where the manufacturer's job is," says Brad Redmond, senior product manager for SDRC, Inc. (Ann Arbor, MI) - a software solutions company. "Once you start talking about today's collaboration and moving toward one environment, you are talking about the ability to expand the requirements from one group to the next. Doing 10 different functions to get one solution is a thing of the past. People would like to do evaluation and analysis in the same environment. There is not one company out there that is not talking about the collaborative process."

Putting It All Together

Well, if they are starting from scratch, they should select a common operating software platform, which means getting the greatest choice of function that supports inter-office and outside integration. The software criteria that a company must look for is maximum functionality consistent with ease of interface and, if applicable, with their existing software components. But working with software that was never meant to be integrated can be a double-edged sword and makes a company's integration mission much harder. There may be a case for companies simply ditching some of their least standard software, but this depends upon its importance and the time and cost required to replace it. Companies may even find that all their applications really need is to be accessed and controlled from a web-browser, and through that route achieve a degree of user-"integration" by imposing an interface. But this can all get very complex.

"It's not that we were ever really faced with a situation where we couldn't model something, but we always felt there had to be a better way," says David Najaroski, product designer at Modaliti, Inc. (Park City, UT) - a product development company. "Function integration has allowed us to integrate design and engineering with unprecedented ease. The company has taken full advantage of these tools by fully incorporating them. This means that we can go back and tweak, play forward and tweak again. No more complete remodeling or laborious iterations on aesthetic surfaces with wire frame networks because at the end of the day, integration allows us to get our jobs done faster."

After solving the problem of getting their internal functions integrated into one environment, product developers can then begin their search for industry partners and information sharing. There are now several technical innovations supporting this type of endeavor between companies:

• The Internet, which provides the transport.
• The web browser, which provides a standardized client interface.
• Standards such as XML, which provides a standardized meta language for information transfer.

The business-to-business and business-to-consumer push toward partnering up and sharing information is the result of today's need for corporate agility. The only way of responding to the ever-shortening product life cycles fueled by new technologies (DVD, mobile phones, digital TV and broadband, in addition to software) is to form business partnerships and create inter-workable solutions. Industry scribes say that they suspect eventually just one environment will exist in software, for the same reasons that the world is moving toward English as a universal language for business. It's not that English is best, it's that any one language is better than using several of them at the same time - interpreters are just too slow, too expensive and too ambiguous.

"The message is clear," says Ralph Seeley, VP of software research at Cambashi Limited (Cambridge, UK) - an information technology company. "Software integration is the way of the future."