Data integration transforming business value Data integration (DI) has undergone a remarkable evolution in recent years. Today, DI is a rich set of powerful techniques, including ETL (extract, transform, and load), data quality, master data management, business-to-business data exchange, and more. With the growing use of cloud delivery models, enterprises' information infrastructure will need to keep pace with modernized data integration approaches. Today most of the data resides in disparate silos throughout the enterprise. Data is everywhere- on premise, in the cloud, in multiple disparate systems and in many different formats— accessing data alone is no easy trick. It then has to be cleansed, aggregated, and validated and put into a form that is meaningful to the applications and users who need it. Value of data integration Enterprise data integration empowers your IT organization to access all your fragmented data, create an accurate and consistent view of core information assets, and easily leverage these assets across the enterprise to drive business decisions and operations. IT organizations are using data integration in many different ways to drive business value. They’re implementing real-time reporting and analysis to optimize minute-by-minute operational, as well as strategic, decisions. They’re migrating data into new applications or implementing master data management. Data integration is also used for big data analytics to gain customer insights and competitive advantages. Gartner analysis states that data integration technologies that are well-established for onpremises deployments are evolving with extended capabilities to connect with cloud services and solve targeted data integration problems, such as synchronization of data from specific SaaS applications with on-premises databases. The growing use of cloud services will continue to generate increasing demand for data integration capabilities to work with data in the cloud. It reminds me with a recent project that we did for a leading pharma company where we implemented Salesforce and bi-directional integration between Salesforce and SAP system was done with the help of Midas, an ETLE Tool (Extraction, Transformation, Loading and Enrichment). It delivered a real time order information and product/plant information across various lines of businesses. Cloud Integration Integration technology has made a giant leap into the cloud. Cloud integration services offer faster, better and easier ways to integrate applications and data sources running in both the cloud and in corporate data centers. Most services provide adapters for a host of cloud and onpremises systems, making it easy to synchronize any application by moving, mapping or linking data among the systems.
Research outfit Gartner estimated the value of the cloud integration services market at $190 million in 2012 and forecasted a 30% compounded annual growth rate through 2017, making it one of the fastest growing segments of the platform-as-a-service (PaaS) market. Dozens of emerging and established vendors are jockeying for position in this emergent space, staking out different market segments. No doubt, the number of cloud integration providers will expand as the number of cloud applications increases, accelerating demand for integration services. According to some industry experts, 3,000 cloud applications and more than 6,000 cloud services exist today, with hundreds more coming online every day. The market for cloud integration services is quickly emerging, capitalizing on the explosion of cloud-based applications and services as well as corporate executives’ growing comfort level with running operations in the cloud. Ironically, cloud integration services succeed because they support on-premises applications, creating an integration bridge between the old and new worlds. Once a company moves processing for any major function to the cloud, it is obliged to investigate cloud-based integration services as a means to integrate that application with the rest of their ecosystem. What’s exciting about the cloud integration services market is that vendors are using the cloud as a means to reinvent their products, making them easier to use and acquire? Write to us to share your thoughts or comments at business@bodhtree.com Source: Date Integration, Midas Salesforce Integration, Oracle Sales Cloud Integration