System Integration

In short: The specialisation dealing with planning, building and operating IT infrastructure — bringing together networks, servers and systems, rather than developing software.

In more detail: The second of the two central IHK IT-specialist specialisations (alongside application development). Responsibilities range from network planning through server administration to helpdesk and IT security — the focus is on operating and coordinating existing systems, not writing new applications.

In Depth

Day-to-day fields of work

An IT specialist for system integration plans, installs and maintains IT systems at companies or their customers: setting up and configuring servers, wiring and setting up networks (routers, switches, VLANs), rolling out and managing client machines, granting and maintaining permissions, setting up backups and restoring them in an emergency. Typical day-to-day tasks: connecting a new office to the company network, adjusting a firewall rule, replacing a failed server, rolling out a software update to hundreds of computers at once, or handling helpdesk tickets about login problems.

Areas of specialisation

Within system integration, there are typical areas of deeper specialisation: network administration (focus on routing, switching, firewalls), server/cloud administration (running physical or virtual servers, increasingly also cloud platforms like AWS/Azure), IT security (securing infrastructure against attacks), and client management (managing an organisation’s end devices, often via central management systems like Active Directory or Microsoft Intune).

Distinction from application development

The contrast with application development is a matter of perspective, not importance: application developers build the software that runs on the systems that systems integrators provide and keep running — without working infrastructure, even the best software doesn’t run, and without good software, there’s little for the infrastructure to even need to run. Both specialisations are equally demanding, but differ considerably in day-to-day work: application developers spend more time in the code editor, systems integrators more time in configuration interfaces, terminal sessions to servers, and direct customer contact during on-site work.

Convergence through infrastructure as code

In practice, the two specialisations increasingly overlap — modern infrastructure is itself managed “as code” (infrastructure as code, e.g. with Terraform or Ansible), which leads systems integrators to also write scripts and configuration files and maintain them in version control like Git, instead of just manually clicking through web interfaces. This development is increasingly blurring the historically clear separation between “developer writes code” and “systems integrator clicks configuration”.

See also: Application Development