93% of companies face systems integration challenges. Learn the most common causes and how your SMB can avoid this bottleneck.
Every growing company accumulates systems: one for finance, another for sales, another for inventory, and a spreadsheet for whatever "doesn't have a system yet." Each tool solves its own problem well — and fails precisely where it should be talking to the others.
This is not a rare problem. It is practically the rule.
The MuleSoft figure: why integration is still IT's biggest bottleneck
According to MuleSoft research, 93% of organisations report ongoing challenges integrating their systems (source: MuleSoft, via Blog Engineering, January 2026). That number is telling: it shows the problem is not a lack of available technology — it is the structural difficulty of getting different systems, often from different vendors and different generations, to operate as one.
For an SMB, this bottleneck shows up in very concrete ways: reports that have to be "rebuilt" by hand, duplicate or conflicting data across departments, and delayed decisions because no one has a single, reliable view of the business.
Legacy systems vs. cloud: the conflict holding most companies back
Part of the problem comes from the coexistence of legacy systems — often designed to operate in isolation — and new cloud platforms, which assume constant connectivity via API. The market already recognises this conflict as one of the main architecture challenges for 2026, alongside the need to rethink infrastructure for new AI workloads (source: Gartner, via Axians, February 2026).
This does not mean the answer is to replace every legacy system at once — that is rarely feasible for an SMB. It means recognising that integration has to be treated as part of the architecture, not as a "fix" applied after the problem has already surfaced.
Symptoms of poor integration and how to spot them before they get worse
Some symptoms are easy to recognise: the same information (customer, product, order) is recorded differently in more than one system; someone on the team spends significant time every month exporting and "cleaning up" spreadsheets to consolidate data; and management decisions depend on someone remembering to cross-reference information by hand, instead of on a reliable, automated report.
When these symptoms appear, the cost is not just operational — it is the same hidden cost of deciding with incomplete or outdated data.
API- and event-driven architectures: the way out that is becoming the standard
The path the market has been consolidating is microservices, event-driven and API-based integration architectures, instead of one-off, manual integrations between pairs of systems (source: Gartner and WSO2, via Blog Engineering and Computer Weekly Brasil, 2026). In practice, this means each system exposes its data in a standardised way, and new systems can connect without requiring a custom integration from scratch every time.
For an SMB, this does not require replicating a large corporation's architecture — it requires adopting the principle: whenever possible, choose tools that offer integration through an open API, instead of closed systems that only "talk" through manual spreadsheet exports.
A simple roadmap to integrate systems without rewriting everything from scratch
A realistic path for an SMB follows three steps:- Map which systems currently store the same information in different ways — this is where the risk is highest and the quickest gains are.
- Prioritise integration between the two or three systems most critical to day-to-day operations (usually sales, finance and inventory), instead of trying to integrate everything at once.
- Standardise how new systems come in: from now on, every new tool you adopt should also be evaluated on its ability to integrate, not just on its standalone functionality.
Sources: Gartner, WSO2, MuleSoft.
