Integration: The Integrators Perspective

“You spend a ton of time handholding in meetings, and you allocate the time to do it,” Kruglak asserts. “On one recent project, we had no less than 20 meetings with different groups.”

When requirements and personnel change, more meetings are required, he says. “It’s a moving target,” he insists. Customers consider the cost of a project, but also their relationship with the systems integrator.

“So they trust your judgment,” Kruglak explains. “If you pick good customers that are open to discussion, you’ll learn some things in the process, and you may decide to change based on the win-win relationship you have with your customer.”

Genesis’ Kruglak thinks those companies that say they have open architecture really do not.

“That’s nonsense; their architecture itself is closed,” he maintains. “There is nothing wrong with that – somebody’s got to own and support it. If ‘open’ is defined as interfacing with other things, I think that’s how it is now. If you pay them enough money, they’ll interface with anything. That’s how they function.”