Jean-Jacques Rousseau wrote, man is born free and is everywhere in chains. So too Enterprise app deployments are conceived as self contained yet everywhere are integrated with legacy and complementary apps.

My colleague Ken Vollmer and I are looking at packaged apps integration best practices and how these might change as some apps move to the cloud. We are asking:

What kind of middleware do you use?

How do you help process owners to assemble (composite) processes that have transactional integrity?

What do you do about the conflicting data models of apps from different stables – for example yours and those of a third party or perhaps in –house?

How far can so called “canonical” data models and meta data help to overcome such problems?

If you have experience and an opinion about what constitute the top three best practices in such packaged apps integration, or if you can warn about the three most egregious pitfalls to avoid we would love to talk with you.

I’m looking forward to hearing from you at glawrie@forrester.com