A lot of my recent research – about SaaS/PaaS, Agile tools, requirements tools, and innovating with your channel – share a common conclusion: successful technology vendors see integration as more than just a necessary evil. Here's why.

Business problems drive technology adoption 
You can see this principle in action in the requirements tools market, which in the last decade has grown larger and more complex. Teams use these tools to address more than one type of requirements-related challenge, so it's easy to see why the tools themselves are now as diverse as as Micro Focus (née Borland) Calibre, Atlassian JIRA, Ravenflow RAVEN, and VersionOne's Ideas Management module. If your problem is, "People don't like using our product," you might look at a visualization tool like iRise to shorten the feedback loop, leading to better design decisions. If, instead, your problem is, "We don't have a good business justification for what we build," you might look at IBM Rational DOORS to evaluate the pros and cons of alternative scenarios for what goes into the next release.

As we've discussed before, Agile adoption swelled in the last one or two years, diving into the mainstream of how businesses build and deliver value to customers. (You can definitely say that Agile is mainstream if there's more than a one-third chance that, in your next job in a development team, you'll be following Agile practices.) At a time when the public perception of companies has taken a brutal beating, that outcome is a genuine compliment to many businesses.

When the economic storm clouds gathered, companies might have battened down the hatches, sticking to the most tried-and-true ways of doing business. The recession might have been the strongest argument against disruptive changes, once the economic margin of error became a lot smaller. A business process as critical as product development might have been the last thing anyone wanted to tinker with.

Therefore, Agile presented just the kind of disruptive change that organizations might have avoided. It doesn't work unless organizations embrace new values and procedures. These changes ripple throughout the organization, especially in the technology industry, where the technology is the business, not just a business accelerator. Every team must figure out how to chart its own Agile course, usually leading to an idiosyncratic mix of Agile and non-Agile methods. None of these changes will be easy.