Managing them is a real challenge, especially with the mix of legacy and modern solutions that most companies are juggling. IDC’s SAP Global State of Integration Survey (December 2024) shows half of companies use three or four tools, which erodes business value and sparks compatibility issues. The complexity also breeds brittleness across process automation, forcing manual fixes and hindering agility, innovation, and AI adoption. Modern tools offer extensibility to transform automation, yet many companies struggle to quantify and articulate the cause and challenges of continuing to support a disparate toolset.

Why are we using so many tools?

No IT leader sets out to create a tangled web of integration solutions. The root cause is usually the relentless pace of business and technology change, coupled with a need to “go faster.” Legacy tools that once did the job just can’t keep up with today’s hybrid workloads and modern connectivity needs. Nearly half of organizations have replaced their primary integration tools in the past three to five years, with compatibility as a top selection criterion. Yet even as new tools come in, the old ones tend to stick around, adding to the technical debt and the complexity of the integration architecture.

IDC has observed a common pattern: A new business initiative drives the adoption of a modern integration tool, with every intention to retire the old systems once the new approach is proven. But priorities shift, and the migration of legacy integrations gets postponed or dropped altogether. This leads to businesses supporting a growing inventory of tools, each with its own quirks, limitations, niche skills, and internal champions. Sprawl is just as much a change management problem as it is a business priority problem.

Supporting multiple integration tools is a business risk because it can lead to costly errors and lost opportunities. Legacy tools weren’t designed for distributed applications, agentic orchestration, or the data volumes that AI-driven processes demand. They slow innovation, increase security risks, and make it harder to govern dataflows.

There’s also the problem of day-to-day pain: Troubleshooting becomes more complicated, training and resource allocation get tougher, and compliance risks multiply as integration architectures become more fragmented.

Why consolidation matters

Consolidating integration tools is the way forward. Modern platforms are built on open architectures with a more complete feature set in one place, making it easier to connect diverse applications and data sources. They support more integration patterns holistically, from API management to event-driven architectures, leveraging the same skills and integration components.

Businesses have a lot to gain from consolidation:

• Stronger interoperability: Modern tools reduce manual workarounds and enable seamless connectivity.
• Better AI outcomes: Unified integration platforms make it easier for AI systems to access the data they need safely and efficiently.
• Enhanced observability: With fewer tools, diagnosing and resolving issues is faster and more accurate.
• Improved security and governance: Centralized management of dataflows supports compliance and reduces exposure to threats.
• Higher ROI: Consolidation can lower licensing and infrastructure costs while unlocking new business value.

The momentum for change is real. IDC’s SAP Global State of Integration Survey found that 95% of companies are likely to add a new integration solution in the next year. But if they don’t have a plan to deprecate legacy tools, they’ll just add to the complexity and risk. The top business case factors for adopting a new integration platform include the desire to use a single solution for data, process, and application integration; increase developer velocity; and reduce business process cycle times.

Of course, consolidation isn’t without its challenges. Technical hurdles, the need to skill up resources, and concerns about vendor lock-in are all real.

What IT leaders should do next

To break the cycle of tool sprawl, companies should make integration migration a core deliverable of any new initiative, such as replacing a legacy application that uses legacy tools to integrate data. For example, structure the project and its deliverables so that the steering committee understands that it cannot be completed as live until the old tool has been deprecated, even if the project is done in phases. Report delays in migrating connections made with legacy tools as risks to the project business outcome and the ROI – because that's what they are.

IT leaders must quantify the total cost of maintaining multiple tools, including productivity losses and increased risk, and build a strong business case for consolidation. Migrating off legacy integration tools isn’t just a technical upgrade — it’s a strategic move that can unlock agility, support AI adoption, and drive better business outcomes.

For more information, download the IDC paper, How Many Integration Tools Is Too Many? Doing the Hard Work to Consolidate (June 2025), sponsored by SAP.