Gartner Ranks Data Integration Vendors

Data integration tools are becoming increasingly more important to support high-profile, corporate initiatives such as master data management, business intelligence and the building of service-oriented architectures. To help organizations choose the right tools, tech researcher Gartner has recently released its Magic Quadrant that rates vendors in the space.

Within the "leaders" quadrant, Gartner has listed Informatica, IBM and SAP-owned Business Objects. These vendors come from the more traditional data integration tools heritage, which stems from software for extraction, transformation and loading (ETL). The execution capabilities of these companies arises from their strength in supporting integration of tabular, also called structured, data.

"The vendors in the leaders' quadrant have that traditional background, plus the incorporation of data integration for newly emergent (unstructured) data types, as well as the ability to support all major styles of data delivery," Gartner says in the report.

The remaining vendors represent the potential for "disruptive practices" in data integration, the researcher says. In the "visionaries" quadrant, Gartner includes SAS, Pervasive Software, iWay Software, Sun Microsystems and Tibco Software. Sybase is listed in Gartner's "niche players" quadrant, but the analyst firm says the company is pursuing capabilities that are taking the vendor toward the "visionaries" category.

Of the visionaries, Sun and Tibco in particular are focused on SOA tools. SAS, iWay, Pervasive and Sybase are unique from the leaders in market execution, including channels, integration tightly linked with quality and analytics, and/or blending search with integration, Gartner says.

"The leaders also possess features/functionality in these areas, but the visionaries differentiate on these characteristics, among others," the researcher says. "The challenge for the visionaries will be to expand on execution and that, in part, is dependent on their vision focus matching the emerging needs of the market related to services-style delivery, metadata and data quality."

In the remaining categories, Gartner lists Microsoft and Oracle as "challengers," and Syncsort, ETI, Pitney Bowes Software and Open Text as "niche players."

Gartner estimates that data integration tools represented a $1.44 billion market as of the end of last year. The researcher expects the market to grow at a compound annual rate of more than 17%.

The market comprises vendors that offer software products for constructing and implementing data access and delivery infrastructure for a variety of data integration scenarios, Gartner says. Those scenarios include data acquisition for BI and data warehousing, creation of integrated master data stores, data migrations and conversions, synchronization of data between operational applications, creation of federated views of data from multiple data stores, delivery of data services in an SOA context, and unification of structured and unstructured data.