IT execs see growing imperative for integration software that adjusts to changing demands and conditions — Informatica survey
Redwood City, CA — October 31, 2003 — Information technology executives overwhelmingly view adaptive data integration as a key requirement for integration software, and a majority of the IT execs believe that rapidly increasing data volumes and infrastructure complexity present their greatest integration challenges, according to a new survey by solution provider Informatica.
Informatica is a provider of data integration and business intelligence software. In the survey of participants at the provider's user conference last week in San Diego, 94 percent of the responding IT executives said they believe that data integration software that adapts intelligently to changing information requirements and environments is now or will soon be an important IT requirement.
Also, in addition to the challenges of dealing with increasing data volumes and infrastructure complexity, the executives said that achieving a single view of enterprise information (e.g. customer, supplier, products) is their most business-critical issue.
"Today's enterprises are increasingly demanding adaptive infrastructure as an important requirement to keep pace with mounting complexity and rapid business change," said Sanjay Poonen, senior vice president of worldwide marketing for Informatica.
Last week's survey results also highlighted the expanding role data integration software is playing within the enterprise, with 87 percent of respondents indicating they use their data integration solutions for more than just traditional data warehousing. Additional data integration uses can include business activity monitoring, enterprise resource planning (ERP) consolidation, data quality, data replication, data migration and synchronization, and real-time enterprise information hubs.
Elsewhere, 87 percent of participants said they view Web services as a significant data integration trend. Within the data integration environment, for example, plug-and-play support for Web services enables data integration solutions to adapt quickly to a customer's existing and new Web services processes.
The survey also queried respondents on business intelligence (BI) issues. With many companies considering a unified BI and data integration platform, 75 percent of participants indicated that effective metadata tracking across the entire integration and BI cycle is the most important benefit of such a platform.
The majority of those surveyed also identified ease of use as the single most important BI feature, which, Informatica believes, highlights the trend away from BI solutions designed for specialists and toward a much broader base of business decision-makers.
