Gartner has come out with a discussion of the state of the art in integration between applications. This is an important thing to do if you are cooperating with partners, or if you are trying to merge new applications, particularly cloud-based ones nowadays, with existing ones. It outlines some of the pitfalls and offers a picture of where the various system integrators fall.
Magic Quadrant for On-Premises Application Integration Suites.
Notice that SAP is in the second quadrant, near the cross point— just about in the middle in terms of completeness of vision and ability to execute. all their major competitors are in the first quadrant, the upper right, meaning they have a more complete vision and greater ability to execute.
Supply chain integration is very important to many companies, and software vendors for years have been on notice to integrate offerings across company boundaries. It’s surprising to me how much work this still is, after all the attention the problems have gotten. Admittedly the problems are very hard, and often require customization. One really has to be careful in evaluating the degree of integration you can get with these products. The Gartner paradigm touches most of the key points for now.
Supply Chain and Logistics 