The DPP, the media industry’s business network, has today published its new major research project, Making Integration Work, which examines the challenges and opportunities of software integration and data integration.
The series is made up of three reports covering strategic, technical, and organisational aspects of integration: The Integration Opportunity, Delivering Seamless Integration, and Integration Expertise. It was created by speaking to 60 business and technology experts from a wide range of DPP member companies and the following sponsor organisations:
Lead Sponsor: Mulesoft
Expert Sponsors: mediaSaaS, Mux, Ross Video, Signiant, Skylark, and Vubiquity
“It is well understood that there are many benefits offered by the transition from hardware devices connected by cables, to microservices connected by APIs,” says DPP CTO and author of the reports, Rowan de Pomerai. “But the process of constructing workflows from these tools reveals a great deal of complexity, challenge, opportunity, and innovation. Making Integration Work aims to help our readers move beyond the basics of application integration, to enable a new level of flexibility, functionality, and business insight.”
Overall, the reports found that by introducing a strategic integration framework, media companies can create an agile approach to connecting systems and building new applications, which will deliver business composability. The other standout findings are summarised below:
Media can learn from the wider IT industry. The Integration Opportunity, which looks at the benefits of integration, recognises that the journey of decomposing workflows using best of breed applications is not unique. Media can learn from the IT industry’s evolution of enterprise resource planning.
Business logic should be abstracted. The second report, Delivering Seamless Integration, encourages media companies to focus their attention on differentiators such as their unique business logic - which should be separated from the individual applications being integrated.
Integrate with multidisciplinary teams. Integration Expertise investigates who is best placed to deliver successful integration, and suggests bringing media engineers, software developers, and business experts together to form collaborative, cross-functional teams.
"The DPP is playing an important role in facilitating discussions to address media industry challenges, and we are delighted to collaborate with them on the increasingly important topic of integration," says Corinna Fechner, Senior Strategic Account Manager, Mulesoft. "Disruption and change are constant, and integration plays a huge part in setting up a business to adapt or even re-invent itself, to develop new business models and services, or to enhance consumer experiences."
All staff at DPP member companies can access the full reports for free here. You can find out more about joining the DPP member network here.
The Making Integration Work webcast is available on demand here.
The next major in-person DPP event is the Media Supply Festival, which will take place in Dulles, USA on 18 and 19 May 2022. This new type of event will explore the key trends in media technology, and uncover how media companies can truly achieve efficiency, scale, and agility.