For years, data integration, application integration and SOA proponents have been waging war against silos. With good reason. Silos result in duplication, create a lot of extra work when attempting to reformulate business processes, and shut off vital information from the rest of the organization.
But there’s still a time and place for silos, and sometimes it’s better to live with silos than fight with them.
“Data is going to be where it is, in an enterprise,” IBM’s vice president for big data, Anjul Bhambhri, pointed out in a recent interview with ReadWriteWeb’s Scott Fulton. “There may be department-level decisions that were made, department-level applications that are running on top of it. Nobody’s going to like some guy coming in saying ‘let me bring this all together.’”
Such repositories and applications were built “because they were the best choices at the time for that class of applications,” Bhambhri adds. “They can’t all be thrown away.”
Data federation and information integration is the way to go, she says. “Data is going to reside where it is.”
