Business Merger and Acquisition Software Integration Plan: It happens all the time. A large healthcare provider acquires a new hospital and is faced with the daunting task of integrating the hospital subsystems with its corporate systems. Or, a mature technology company realizes it needs to integrate a legacy system to unlock its hidden data or functionality. These are but a couple of examples of the challenges posed by systems integration. Learn about the challenges and issues of business mergers and acquisitions including legacy system integration and software integration.

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It happens all the time. A large healthcare provider acquires a new hospital and is faced with the daunting task of integrating the hospital subsystems with its corporate systems. Or, a mature technology company realizes it needs to integrate a legacy system to unlock its hidden data or functionality. These are but a couple of examples of the challenges posed by systems integration.

In fact, lost in all the talk about the promise of Web services built on a service-oriented architecture (SOA) is the reality that few companies have well-behaved, homogeneous IT environments. And before companies can realize the benefits and efficiencies that come with reusable Web services, they first need to integrate the systems they have inherited or acquired.

Sun is no stranger to the integration challenge, having acquired two companies — StorageTek and SeeBeyond — over the past six months. Despite the fact that Sun has already built and deployed an SOA, we are faced with the challenge of linking into the systems at StorageTek and SeeBeyond in order to integrate their applications, databases, and services into our IT environment.

Luckily, SeeBeyond made its mark building a middleware and operating system-independent product that enables integration. In fact, SeeBeyond's product suite now forms the basis for the Sun Java Integration Suite. The Java Integration Suite is designed to solve the problems associated with systems integration. It provides a tool set for integration, management tools for monitoring integrated environments, and reporting tools that can demonstrate the business value of IT transactions.