Data Integration Platforms

At an enterprise level, the market for data integration is now less focused
on traditional ETL (extract, transform and load) and more centred on data
integration as a broader concept. A number of vendors have been preaching
that message for some time but it is only recently that this idea had
achieved broad acceptance within the marketplace.

This is not just a question of the major suppliers getting their marketing
messages across but it can also be seen when you look at the spectrum of
offerings available from different vendors. Today, the position is that there
are a number of providers of data integration platforms on the one hand
while, on the other, we are seeing the emergence of specialist products that
focus on just a single aspect of data integration such as data migration,
content ETL, web ETL, replication and synchronisation, data federation, and
data services amongst others. In particular, there is a significant emerging
sub-market for data migration and a Market Update on this subject is being
published alongside this one. We expect that data services will emerge as a
further sub-market in due course but this remains at an early stage.

We are also aware of new vendors planning to enter the market with
innovative, potentially disruptive, approaches to data integration.

In this Update we are focusing on data integration platforms suitable for
deployment on an enterprise-wide basis. We are not, therefore, considering
any of these specialised solutions, nor broader integration solutions that
include ETL capability (unless ETL is a specific focus), nor solutions
focused on a specific target database or use case. transformations as you
then lose data lineage, impact analysis and where-used capabilities. There is
a general trend towards introducing more business friendly capabilities into
data integration offerings.

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