Integration .... Is it the next big thing!!!!

I've been in this industry for around 4 years now out of which i have spent around 1.5 years in a services industry and rest in a product based company.

What i personally found about my experience in product based company is that integration products have bigger value here. The product companies normally have many offerings which exist for there customers.

One such product offering from SAP is Duet which is an integration of SAP business data with Microsoft.

SAP currently has an array of mature product offerings for its customers. Now the next big thing which i see is that after having so many mature product lines what you look forward to is integration of 2 or more existing SAP products or integration of SAP product offerings with some external highly used software.

Microsoft has the office suite which works for at least 80% of desktops in this world

For more information you can check http://www.duet.com
So the question which comes up now is that is integration and collaboration the next big thing in the IT world!!!!
Fortunately or unfortunately answer is yes.....
I look it from a developers angle and i find it challenging.
Challenging because of the fact that these mature products might not have been developed by keeping in mind that they'll need to integrate with products which either didn't exist at that point in time and even if they did exist the integration was not even thought of in dreams because of the fact that collaboration was a impossible thing some 5 years back in history.
And now when we work on integrating such product lines we struggle on a daily basis to do something which is an obvious expectation from a product if we design/ develop now.

I read on some link a few days back that oracle is also coming up with integration to office for their business suite.

Looks like integration products will be next big thing in this world and i hope they are here to stay!!!!

~Abhishek