Computer Integrated Systems Design - Industry Snapshot

Industry Snapshot

Spurred by e-commerce development and other trends, systems integration revenues grew more than 13 percent each year during the late 1990s. According to the latest data available from the U.S. Census Bureau in early 2003, revenues totaled $87.8 billion in 2000. However, in 2001 and 2002 systems integrators were victims of a weak economy and related reductions in corporate spending that affected virtually every sector of the information technology (IT) industry—especially service providers. Although IDC, a world leader in IT industry analysis, estimated that overall technology spending would improve in 2003 by some 6 percent—following an unprecedented fall (2.3 percent) in 2002. The research firm predicted a somewhat slower recovery for software spending, which affects the integration industry.

Roughly 48 percent of the industry's revenues in 2000 were specifically attributable to integrated systems design services, while the remainder came from things like computer programming and systems management services. E-commerce integration, which involves linking Internet-based data and applications with corporate databases and other non-Internet applications, has been one of the fastest-growing segments of the systems integration industry. Other growth drivers in recent years have included corporate migration to large enterprise application environments like enterprise resource planning (ERP) and supply-chain management (SCM) systems, mergers and acquisitions that require marrying the separate data systems of the merged entity, and the ongoing need to share business data and applications across diverse platforms and software environments.