Data Integration (DI) is expensive and hard – that’s how business views it today. But does it need tobe? This paper takes a look back and examines the promise of the current data integration tools and assesses how well that promise has been fulfilled. Against this background the gaps, opportunities and challenges are identified. The focus then shifts to the key requirements for the future, the ...

No one can deny that the conduct of business today is remarkably different - faster, more competitive and more diverse than it was a decade ago. Whether this can be attributed to market forces and innovation or, rather, to the advance of technology, is an open question. It does seem, however, that technology has played the leading role and business has had to adapt to keep up.

As business requirements continue to accelerate, the ability of existing data integration technologies to solve those requirements lags appreciably behind. In an effort to address this issue, vendors have been frantically retooling their platforms and/or buying "complementary technologies" to help them stay afloat. Unfortunately, these incremental improvements and bolt-on solutions have not bee...

A new entrant to the data integration space is expressor software. Although there is no shortage of integration technology out there, in practice, large scale integration projects involve a large amount of manual scripts which deal with what transformation to apply to a certain column in a source system before sending it on to a target system. This approach often results in business rules being...