For decades, enterprises reacted to shifting business pressures with stopgap technology solutions. To rein in rising infrastructure costs, they adopted cloud services that could scale on demand. When customers shifted their lives onto smartphones, companies rolled out mobile apps to keep pace. And when businesses began needing real-time visibility into factories and stockrooms, they layered on IoT systems to supply those insights.

Each new plug-in or platform promised better, more efficient operations. And individually, many delivered. But as more and more solutions stacked up, IT teams had to string together a tangled web to connect them—less an IT ecosystem and more of a make-do collection of ad-hoc workarounds.

That reality has led to bottlenecks and maintenance burdens, and the impact is showing up in performance. Today, fewer than half of CIOs (48%) say their current digital initiatives are meeting or exceeding business outcome targets. Another 2025 survey found that operations leaders point to integration complexity and data quality issues as top culprits for why investments haven’t delivered as expected.

Achim Kraiss, chief product officer of SAP Integration Suite, elaborates on the wide-ranging problems inherent in patchwork IT: “A fragmented landscape makes it difficult to see and control end-to-end business processes,” he explains. “Monitoring, troubleshooting, and governance all suffer. Costs go up because of all the complex mappings and multi-application connectivity you have to maintain.”

These challenges take on new significance as enterprises look to adopt AI. As AI becomes embedded in everyday workflows, systems are suddenly expected to move far larger volumes of data, at higher speeds, and with tighter coordination than yesterday’s architectures were built
to sustain.

As companies now prepare for an AI-powered future, whether that is generative AI, machine learning, or agentic AI, many are realizing that the way data moves through their business matters just as much as the insights it generates. As a result, organizations are moving away from scattered integration tools and toward consolidated, end-to-end platforms that restore order and streamline how systems interact.

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