There has been a lot of talk about delivering integration in the form of appliances. I recently came across a blog posting by Loraine Lawson of ITBusinessEdge (August 19th) titled A Tale of Two Data-Integration Technologies that touches on this topic: You're missing out on a great link! Login to see it.

Integration appliances are supposed to remove complexity for users, but there is no hard evidence to support this proposition.   More likely, delivering software bundled with hardware (aka appliances) is a distraction.   In reality, integration success depends on the quality of the software in terms of connectivity, the ability to handle high data volumes and to make changes quickly without specially trained staff.

In the end, there may be a place for appliances, particularly where they incorporate non-standard but very high performance hardware. However, in a world of powerful, cheap standard hardware, virtualization and the mix of SaaS and on-premise applications, integration appliances probably add complexity to the mix.