Brand agreed with Los' claim that services, not software, will make up the most significant proportion of the integration cost, because modelling "doesn't do anything, but shows how to do it" and therefore the services markets are "taking up this challenge".

"It's never the structure of the data that's the problem, it's the semantic meaning," Brand said. "Technology vendors don't know what it means, [because] they provide the data models and say fill in the field of customer information."

According to Brand, there is also an assumption of one system going into another system during a merger, "but that's never the case".

"Integration and transformation doesn't happen once as there are many layers of transformation that has to occur [and] you have all these complex data dependencies," he said. "Architecture tools don't make the process of discovering how data is used any easier."