Ninety-four percent of senior IT executives surveyed at last week’s Informatica World conference indicate data integration software that adapts intelligently to changing information requirements and environments is now or will soon be an important IT requirement.
The majority of respondents said rapidly increasing data volumes and infrastructure complexity present the greatest integration challenges and achieving a single view of enterprise information (e.g. customers, suppliers, 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. Eighty-seven percent of respondents indicated they use data integration solutions for more than just traditional data warehousing to include business activity monitoring, ERP consolidation, data quality, data replication, data migration and synchronization, and real-time enterprise information hubs.
Eighty-seven percent of participants also said they view use of Web services in data integration a significant trend. The survey also queried respondents on business intelligence (BI) issues. With many companies recognizing the value of a unified BI and data integration platform, 75 percent of participants indicated that effective meta-data tracking across the entire integration and BI cycle is the most important benefit.
The majority of those surveyed also identified ease of use as the single most important BI feature; highlighting the trend away from BI solutions designed for specialists toward a much broader base of business decision makers.