Data integration is a successful combination of the business and technical processes, used to derive meaningful and valuable information. The solution helps to enable the analytics tools for producing actionable and effective business intelligence.
The integration begins with the ingestion process, which includes steps such as ETL mapping, cleansing, and transformation. It provides a single and unified view of the customer. The solution has become increasingly important as for most of the businesses; data is their valuable asset.
One of the examples of data integration is the cart abandonment email. When a customer abandons a cart, the data gets stored. At the later stage, the web analytics data linked to the email can help in triggering relevant email campaigns as per the web behavior of the customer.
The main areas of data integration are:
1) Data migration
2) Data warehousing
3) Master data management
4) Enterprise application
Some of the biggest challenges of data integration are:
1) Infrastructure problems
2) A large volume of the associated data
3) Understanding the behavior of the source and the target systems
4) Performance of the solution
5) Integrating tools from different domains for bringing collaboration among the team members
6) Logical mapping of the heterogeneous data
What are the benefits of data integration?
• Better collaboration: Whether one needs to improve collaboration internally or externally, one can do so by just integrating the data.
• Increased competitiveness: Having the data integration strategy in the first place can help to plan the actions needed to improve the accessibility of the data both internally and externally.
• Data quality: Data integrity acts as one of the important elements of data integration. It assures the quality of the data throughout the complete lifecycle.
• Insights bringing improvements: Once all the data is at one place, you can utilize the information acquired from the solution for better performance.
• Easy and fast connections: When you integrate the data sources internally, all the employees would have the information needed to improvise the process.
• Better decision-making: Most of the sales representative rely on the data which are often not accurate. Data integration helps in better decision making as the representatives can have access to the latest data, leading to high-quality and fast decisions.
The data integration software market will reach US$ 20,044.9 million by 2026, with a CAGR of 12.5%.
Some of the top players in this market are:
1) SAP SE
2) Oracle Corporation
3) IBM corporation
4) Cisco System, Inc.
5) HVR software
6) Microsoft Corporation