Integration is a top priority for chief information officers but hype and complexity are stopping companies from investing in specialist integration software, according to new research from Butler Group.

Leading vendors have failed to sell the benefits of a unified integration platform to customers, while web services has been over-hyped as a low-cost integration alternative, it reports.

This has resulted in companies redirecting their tight budgets to less important technology.

Author of EAI and Web Services - Cutting the cost of Enterprise Integration, Ian Charlesworth, told vnunet.com: "EAI solutions are unnecessarily complex. SeeBeyond in particular has done a good job in translating it into business terms. But it still needs to go further."

SeeBeyond's Business Integration Suite came top of the pile, closely followed by Tibco, with 46 and 45 respectively from a possible 60 marks. There were strong showings from Sybase Business Process Integration Suite and Microsoft BizTalk Server 2002, both scoring 43.

Others, such as Iona Orbix, BEA WebLogic Integration and Mercator Integration Broker, were criticised as having to play catch-up through their lack of functionality.

But some vendors have hit back at the low marks their products received.

Simon Pepper, Iona's director of product marketing for EMEA, commented: "We already had plans and developments in place to improve the weaknesses highlighted and have further strengthened our strengths."

Charlesworth acknowledged Iona had a good strategy but said it needed to complete integration between its application server and XMLBus technology.

The Orbix E2A integration platform to address this would appear in early next year, as would new business process management (BPM) capabilities, said Iona.

And Pepper said one of its web services customers, AT&T, had already achieved a time reduction from nine to two months to connect applications, giving it a 10 per cent development cost saving.

Over the next five years the market will change rapidly, with web services and BPM leading to the re-emergence of service-oriented architecture. Charlesworth said this trend would help promote business-to-business trading.