Sean McGrath talks about consolidating the data from different applications for the purpose of business reporting. He says that the wrong way to do it is usually to redevelop the functions of both applications into one. He says the right way to do it is usually to grab reports from both system and combine them. There are two issues that must be solved during this process. The first is one of simultaneous agreement. The second is a common language of discourse. I'll address the second point first.
Without a common terminology the information of the two systems can't be combined. If one system thinks of your business as the monitoring of network equipment by asset id while another thinks of your business as the monitoring of network equipment by IP address the results aren't going to mesh together well. You need a reasonably sophisticated tool to combine the data, especially when there isn't a 1:1 mapping between asset id and IP address.
Without simultaneous agreement you may be combining reports that are about different things. If a new customer signs on and has been entered only into one system the combined report may be a nonsense. Even if they are enetered at the same time there is necessarily some difference beteween the time queries are issued to each system. The greater the latency between the report consolidation application and the original systems the less likely it is that the data you get back will still be correct when it is recieved. The greater the difference in latencies between the systems you are consolidating the greater the likelyhood that those reports will be referring to different data. This problem is discussed in some detail in Rohit Khare's 2003 dissertation from the point of view of a single datum. I suspect the results regarding simultaneous agreement for different data will be even more complicated.
If the report is historical in nature or for some other reason isn't sensitive to instantaneous change and if the systems you are consolidating do speak a common language, I suggest that Sean is right. Writing a report consolidator application is probably going to be easier than redeveloping the applications themselves. If you lie in the middle somewhere you'll have some thinking to do.
Benjamin