Arm's Length Integration versus Real Integration

I received an email newsletter from LyrisHQ. They had a posting on their blog site by Sean Ryan, the Senior Vice President of Engineering at Lyris. His blog post was entitled, "Does Arm's Length Integration Frustrate You?".

Sean defines "arm's length integration" as, "completely separate applications that use application programming interface (API) calls to exchange finite data. It's as if the applications are standing at arm's length... The difference between arm's length integration and real integration is that real integration isn't about self-preservation; it's about knocking down walls."

Sean adds, "Real integration is about providing a single ecosystem of marketing tools that still do a great job of performing individual marketing functions, but that also work hand-in-hand with the rest of your key tools. It's about letting you login to one site, not five or 10. It's about summarizing all of your key marketing metrics in one place, so you can easily tell which marketing programs are gold mines and which are land mines."

So far, this has been the best summation of Marketing On-Demand Integration that I have seen. Nice job, Sean Ryan of LyrisHQ.