Who and What is a SI (System Integrator)

[Harsh Gupta]

Hello,

i am just curious to know what is the job of a system integrator (SI)? i know there is no programming involved, but what are they supposed to do?

are they considered better than S/W Developer?

are the chances of getting better remuneration, promotions involved with this as compared to S/W Dev.?

Thank you.

[Hack]

What Is A Systems Integrator?

[Harsh Gupta]

thank you Hack, while searching on this, i noted that, but basically these are my main questions:

are they considered better than S/W Developer?

are the chances of getting better remuneration, promotions involved as compared to S/W Dev.?

and i am sorry that i posted a wrong question.

[Hack]

are they considered better than S/W Developer?

This is a purely subjective question the answer to which would totally depend on to whom you are talking at the moment. I'm a developer...my answer would be no. Talk to someone in corporate management, however, and their answer would probably be yes.

are the chances of getting better remuneration, promotions involved as compared to S/W Dev.?

I would image that would depend on the company you may be interested in and their needs.

In general, my quess would be yes, because they are more responsible for reasearching and coordinating rather than concentrating on a single task.

[ntg]

Since I joined my current company most of my work has been SI (specifically banking IT related projects). However, doing SI work doesn't strictly exclude you from actually creating parts of the system you're putting together. As an example I can point to IBM and, most notably, Microsoft.

The case of MS is quite unique - when MS is called upon to create a bank's internet site system, most of the technologies they're going to incorporate are their own (Windows, SQL, SMS, IIS, HIS, Biztalk). Still, the MS team that brings it all together so that everything works nicely with everything else does purely SI work.

To put in my two cents as one that comes from a development background currently involved mainly in SI projects, I would say that the term "better" can be interpreted in many number of different ways. Most of the time, guys that do SI work need to have a good understanding of a broad spectrum of dissimilar products & technologies (both in s/w and h/w), good communication skills and even project management skills. I still think though that there is no substitute for the vertical knowledge of a skilled developer when you need one and I do emphasize on the word "skilled". Generally speaking people that are involved in systems integration are payed better than developers, (although there are few exceptions) - this is always the case when you have people that do architectural work (SI) and people that do specific work (developers).