An organization’s information assets are as valuable as its customers, employees, and partners. Rapid changes in business environment including need for closer integration with business partners, mergers and acquisitions, and competitive forces have made it critical for business to have reliable and timely data available for decision making. In addition to these, other key data integration challenges encountered by companies include:
Need for greater control by business
It is no longer practical to have IT as the sole custodian for enterprise data. Business users need—indeed demand—greater access to data and better tools for accessing and analyzing this data. Older methods and programs for managing data integration are obsolete and must be replaced with tools that empower business domain experts in managing their data assets. Enterprises, therefore, need solutions that straddle the business and IT worlds and enable seamless collaboration between them.
Growing Business Demands
As demands on business increase to make better and faster decisions, businesses demand better, faster, and up-to-the-minute data. This often means shrinking or eliminating batch window, need better data quality, and superior visibility into the overall integration processes.
Data Quality Issues
Quality of data often determines quality of decisions. With data coming from a variety of sources, need for greater insight into data quality and the ability to quickly resolve data quality issues is of critical importance. Any integration process must consider data quality as an integral part of a holistic approach.
High cost of Data Integration Platforms
Data integration tools that are capable of meeting these growing needs charge a king’s ransom that is hard to justify for all but large enterprise scale projects. At the lower end of the spectrum are tools that are not quite ready for prime time due to scalability, functionality, or usability issues.
We'll be updating these pages (including documentation ) fairly regularly until
the official release, so check back here often. Also, check the
forum for announcements and answers to questions that
arise about the product.
For instructions on how to download Centerprise Data Integrator 5 , click
here.