Let’s be real: we’ve all said it. “It’s a quick integration.” “We just need to connect it to the ERP.” “We’ll ship it fast and move on.”

And you’re not saying that because you don’t know better. You’re saying it because the business needs it now. Because deadlines are real. Because your backlog is full. Because not every integration can become a full engineering project.

The problem is that “quick integrations” rarely stay quick.

They stick around. They become dependencies. They get touched by more systems, more teams, more processes. And one day, you look up and realize something uncomfortable: that small integration you built to save time is now the thing consuming it.

The real issue isn’t the integration, it’s the platform underneath.

In most companies, the failure isn’t about engineering talent. It’s structural. Because that “quick integration” usually lives inside an integration landscape that already has years of history baked in. Old mappings. Invisible business rules. Unspoken dependencies. Partial documentation. Flows no one wants to touch because “it breaks everything.”

And if your environment still relies on legacy platforms like SAP PI/PO, the timeline is not flexible. SAP PI/PO maintenance is scheduled to end in December 2027, forcing organizations to plan a transition in advance.

That matters because you’re not just maintaining fragile integrations. You’re maintaining them on top of a platform with a clear expiration window.

Why “quick” becomes fragile (and fragile becomes expensive)

This isn’t dramatic. It’s predictable. Today, you connect two systems. Tomorrow, it’s three.

At some point, the integration stops being “just moving data.” It starts carrying business logic that should never have been buried inside an old flow. The mapping becomes mission-critical. The error handling becomes a patchwork. The integration becomes so sensitive that every change feels like a BIG risk.

From there, small updates cost too much because the system is already brittle. And the more legacy the platform, the harder it becomes to build the fundamentals that make integration sustainable: automated testing, end-to-end visibility, reliable deployment practices, and governance.

The cost nobody budgets for

Here’s the cost that rarely shows up in the project plan: Hours disappear into troubleshooting. Workarounds become normal. Manual steps creep in “temporarily” and stay forever. Incidents repeat. Small changes turn into multi-week efforts because the risk is too high.

There’s also a security angle that’s easy to ignore until it becomes painful. Legacy systems with accumulated technical debt often create blind spots, meaning areas that are harder to audit, harder to test, and more exposed as maintenance and updates become less dependable.

How to fix it

The solution is to do the right things where it matters.

First, treat integrations like products, not tickets. If an integration touches revenue, customers, orders, billing, or compliance, it needs ownership, monitoring, controlled change management, and real testing.

Second, stop building without a map. Before modernization or migration, you need a clear view of your actual integration landscape: what exists, what’s critical, what’s fragile, and what depends on what.

Third, migrate by impact, not alphabetically. Don’t attempt a big-bang rewrite. Start with what’s easiest to migrate and most valuable to stabilize. Build momentum with real quick wins, not shortcuts that create new debt.

Fourth, automate quality. If you can’t test, you can’t scale. The difference between modernization and endless rework is having automated validation, repeatable deployments, and integration CI/CD from the start.

That’s what turns integration back into an asset. And it’s what makes your architecture more scalable, more reliable, and more future-ready.

The worst move is waiting for the failure. Because when it fails, you don’t control the timeline, the budget, or the strategy.

And with 2027 forcing decisions across legacy integration stacks like SAP PI/PO, the smarter move is to modernize on your terms, not during a crisis.

‍