Large IT departments are increasingly required to integrate custom-built solutions (e.g. customer management system) with commercial Customer Relationship Management (CRM) and Business Intelligence (BI) solutions. Point-to-point integration, or one-to-one integration, is a quick-and-dirty integration method to solve this problem.

Typically, IT does the point-to-point integration in-house by creating highly customized data import/export scripts for each application. Simplified homegrown integration solutions are also possible. These rudimentary point-to-point solutions provide GUIs for end users to perform the integration themselves by manually copying or re-keying data between the applications.

Unfortunately, this approach is only suitable for small IT shops without enterprise-level applications. Although the approach...