The 14 top data integration companies

Gartner Group assesses the strengths of top vendors in the market.


The 14 Top Data Integration Companies

Gartner Group has just released its 2016 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Data Integration Tools. Here’s a look at the top 14 companies, and what each has to offer.



The Leaders

“Leaders in the data integration tool market are front-runners in the convergence of single-purpose tools into an offering that supports a full range of data delivery styles,” Gartner says. “Additionally, they have recognized the growing affinity between data and application integration, and are haltingly approaching location-agnostic deployments (that are not limited only to cloud or on-premises, but can be deployed beyond specific location). They are strong in establishing data integration infrastructure as an enterprise standard and as a critical component of modern information infrastructure. They support both traditional and new data integration patterns to capitalize on market demand. Leaders have significant mind share in the market, and resources skilled in their tools are readily available.”



Informatica rapidly adapts to functionality demands

Based in Redwood City, California, Informatica offers the following data integration products: Informatica Platform (including PowerCenter, PowerExchange, Data Services, Data Replication, Advanced Data Transformation, Ultra Messaging, B2B Data Transformation and Data Integration Hub), Vibe Data Stream, Informatica Cloud Integration, IronCloud Platform, Big Data Management, Intelligent Data Lake, Intelligent Streaming, Enterprise Information Catalog and Informatica Data Preparation, Data Integration Hub and Informatica Data Preparation). “Informatica rapidly adapts to market functionality demands,” Gartner says.

“Informatica's product development and roadmap address diverse capabilities including batch ETL, real-time integration (message -oriented data movement , web services, stream processing and change data capture), publish/subscribe-data sharing, and data virtualization. An emphasis on supporting digital / IoT data integration, iPaaS, self-service data preparation, big data, data governance and data security opportunities capitalizes on demand trends.”



IBM offers breadth of functionality and diversity of usage

Based in Armonk, New York, IBM offers the following data integration products: IBM InfoSphere Information Server Enterprise Edition (including InfoSphere Information Server for Data Integration, and InfoSphere Information Governance Catalog), InfoSphere Federation Server, InfoSphere Data Replication, InfoSphere Information Server Enterprise Hypervisor Edition, WebSphere Cast Iron Live, BigInsights BigIntegrate and DataWorks.

“IBM's customer base for this product set is estimated at more than 11,000 organizations,” Gartner notes. “IBM offers breadth of functionality and diversity of usage. Customer usage includes bulk/batch data movement, CDC and propagation, data replication, data virtualization and message-oriented movement. IBM further expanded its capabilities with simplified SaaS-based self-service data preparation and data integration for analytics (using data virtualization, DataWorks and Data Click) and native integration into Hadoop environments.”



SAP popular for customers needing mix

Based in Walldorf, Germany, SAP offers the following data integration products: SAP Data Services, SAP Replication Server, SAP Landscape Transformation Replication Server, SAP SQL Anywhere, SAP Process Orchestration, SAP Hana Platform, SAP Hana Cloud Integration, SAP Event Stream Processor and SAP PowerDesigner. “SAP features broad usage and functionality,” Gartner says. “SAP's broad portfolio continues to attract customers seeking a mix of granularity, latency, and physical and virtualized data delivery, alongside options to integrate with information governance and MDM offerings across the SAP ecosystem. Enhanced processing — to operate with distributed big data, cloud platforms and multistructured data, including text, social and spatial content types — extends SAP's relevance for digital business.”



Oracle wins customer through pricing models

Based in Redwood Shores, California, Oracle offers the following data integration products: Oracle Data Integrator (ODI), Oracle GoldenGate and Oracle Data Service Integrator. “Oracle's customer base for this product set can only be estimated — at more than 10,000 organizations for all these products worldwide — because Oracle does not break out revenue or customer count by products,” Gartner says.

“In 2015, Oracle released GoldenGate for Big Data; included push-down to Spark (via pyspark.sql) in ODI for Big Data; and introduced self-service integration capability in Data Prep (including support for structured data sources). Also in 2015, natural-language processing combined with graph — to support machine learning capabilities — was added to Big Data Preparation. In parallel, GoldenGate added support for multiple data sources and platforms.”



Talend offers cost and model flexibility

Based in Redwood City, California, Talend offers Talend Open Studio, Talend Data Fabric, Talend Data Management Platform, Talend Big Data Platform, Talend Data Services, Talend Integration Cloud and Talend Data Preparation. “Talend's paying customer base for this product portfolio is estimated at more than 1,300 organizations,” according to Gartner. “Talend filed for an IPO in July 2016 and their public filing is available at SEC.gov . Talend offers cost model and flexibility. Reference customers appreciate Talend's unique, linear and scalable licensing model — composed of the data integration platform fee and additional developer licenses fee — which allows customers to start with small, core data integration projects and then grow their portfolio for more advanced data integration projects (such as integration with Hadoop data stores).”



SAS known for exceptional customer service

Based in Cary, North Carolina, SAS offers the following data integration products: SAS Data Management, Federation Server, SAS/ACCESS, SAS Data Loader for Hadoop and SAS Event Stream Processing. “SAS's customer base for this product set is estimated to be 14,000 organizations,” Gartner notes. “SAS has a broad and integrated portfolio.

During 2015, SAS enhanced its Hadoop integration (improvements for Hawq, Hive, HiveQL, Impala, AWS Redshift, plus SAS Data Loader for Hadoop, and more) as well as additional functionality in its integration processes — with data quality processing. The breadth and completeness of SAS's core functions and the integration of components position it well to compete with the larger and more established vendors in this market. Reference customers report that their relationship with SAS, both before purchasing and after implementation, is exceptional. This contributes to longer-term, recurring engagements.”



The Visionaries

“Visionaries demonstrate a strong understanding of emerging technology and business trends or focus on a specific market need that is far outside of common practices while being aligned with capabilities that are anticipated to grow in demand,” according to Gartner. “They sometimes lack market awareness or credibility beyond their customer base or a single application domain.

Visionaries may also fail to provide a comprehensive set of product capabilities. They may be new entrants lacking the installed base and global presence of larger vendors, although they could also be large, established players in related markets that have only recently placed an emphasis on data integration tools.



Denodo targets data virtualization market

Based in Palo Alto, California, Denodo offers the Denodo Platform. “Denodo's customer base for its data integration product is estimated at 300 midsize to large companies,” Gartner explains. “With an established customer base, the Denodo Platform provides data virtualization, for joining multi-structured data sources from DBMSs, websites, documents and a variety of enterprise, cloud and big data repositories. In 2015, Denodo introduced new dynamic query optimization features to support cost-based optimization specifically for big data and cloud environments, including a Resource Manager for policy-based workload management for resources, predicate optimization techniques including full and partial aggregation pushdown below joins, partitioned unions for logical data warehouse and data lakes requirements, and performance optimization. Denodo also delivers a self-service data preparation capability with data, entity-level, relationship and search-style browsing capabilities.”



Cisco evolving toward distributed data and device networks

Based in San Jose, California, Cisco offers the Cisco Information Server and Cisco Integration Platform. “Cisco's customer base for this product set is estimated to number more than 380 organizations,” Gartner says.

“Cisco is evolving toward distributed data and device networks. Cisco's expanded vision includes plans to integrate data location on distributed networks, including third-party devices (and addresses) — with plans to enable data integration that include specific routing of content based on metadata about the connected use case and devices that will include aspects of distributed optimization. Cisco continues to support the logical data warehouse (LDW), integrated streaming data and IoT environments, and leverages the Cisco Tidal Enterprise Scheduler integration workflows.”



Information Builders offers tightly integrated solution

Based in New York, Information Builders offers the following data integration products: iWay Integration Suite (composed of iWay Service Manager and iWay DataMigrator) and iWay Universal Adapter Suite. “Information Builders' customer base for this product set is estimated to be more than 840 organizations at over 2,000 sites,” according to Gartner.

“Information Builders delivered on some of its vision for a more tightly integrated solution platform throughout 2015 and early 2016. A model editor that is now integrated with processing workflow configuration, plus improvements to auditing, alerts and operational monitoring, were all completed. A data steward workbench that utilizes profiling to identify issues is integrated with the data quality solution and a workflow manager that tracks proposed changes to data and models with multi-user annotation capability. The vendor's capabilities in adapters and connectivity, comprehensive data transformation and encapsulating data into real-time message flows continue to be regarded as key strengths in deployments.”



The Challengers

“Challengers are well-positioned in light of the key existing practices in the data integration tool market, such as the need to support multiple styles of data delivery,” Gartner explains. “However, they may be limited to specific technical environments or application domains. In addition, their vision may be hampered by a lack of coordinated strategy across the various products in their data integration tool portfolio.

Challengers generally have substantial customer bases, and an established presence, credibility and viability, although implementations may be of a single-project nature, or reflect multiple projects of a single type (for example, predominantly ETL-oriented use cases). Importantly, more than 80% of all end-user organizations in the world still seek batch/bulk processing (even to and within the cloud) — this means that a highly efficient, but batch-oriented vendor can exhibit high execution capabilities without ever crossing to the "right half" of the Magic Quadrant.”



Microsoft’s strengths lie in ease of use, speed, and integration

Based in Redmond, Washington, Microsoft offers data integration capabilities via SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS), which is included in the SQL Server DBMS license. “Customers cite low overall TCO, speed of implementation, ease of use, and the ability to integrate with other Microsoft SQL Server capabilities as the main reasons for choosing SSIS over the alternatives,” Gartner says. “The expected focus on data delivery to the Cortana Intelligence Suite seeks to establish synergy between data integration, cloud and cognitive computing capability. “onnectivity to diverse data types and added support for Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS) enables SSIS to prepare data and extract results for Hadoop. Azure Data Factory provides the same capabilities, but also provides monitoring and management of data processing ("data pipelines"). Azure Data Catalog provides a metadata catalog for enabling easy registration and discovery of datasets to facilitate self-service data preparation.”



Attunity boasts strong market presence

Based in Burlington, Massachusetts, Attunity offers Attunity Replicate, Attunity Compose and Attunity Visibility. Attunity's customer base for this product set is estimated to number approximately 2,000 organizations globally. Among the company’s strengths are market presence/track record, Gartner notes. “With more than two decades of experience, Attunity has strong traction in delivering data replication and synchronization technology applied to heterogeneous data types, with a historical strength in addressing mainframe data.

"Attunity is broadening global partnerships with implementation service providers, technology vendors and cloud infrastructure providers. Attunity offers expanded applicability. Through capabilities for replicating data to and from the cloud, and accelerating data warehouse deployments, big data (Hadoop) and workload optimization support, Attunity enables a broader scope of integration styles and capitalizes on digital business opportunities. Added support for Apache Kafka enables real-time intertwining of data movement and event streams.”



Adeptia helps customers achieve faster time to value

Based in Chicago, Adeptia offers the Adeptia Integration Suite (AIS) and Adeptia Connect. Adeptia's customer base for this product set is estimated at 583 organizations. “The integrated tool suite covers the basics of batch, message and synchronization,” Gartner says.

“Adeptia supports the core requirements of bulk/batch data delivery and granular data capture and propagation. The combination of its data integration capability, application integration, enterprise service bus (ESB), B2B integration and trading partner management within a single product suite is appreciated by its reference customers for a faster time to value. It reduces the complexity for buyers through its orchestration engine and workflow support, which includes automated handling of errors and exceptions for complex process automation use cases. Adeptia considers simplification of end-to-end B2B data integration as its priority in this market.”



The Niche Players

“Niche Players have gaps in both their Completeness of Vision and Ability to Execute,” Gartner explains. “They often lack key aspects of product functionality and/or exhibit a narrow focus on their own architectures and installed bases. Niche Players may have good functional breadth but a limited presence and mind share in this market.

"With a small customer base and limited resources, they are not recognized as proven providers of comprehensive data integration tools for enterprise-class deployments. Many Niche Players have very strong offerings for a specific range of data integration problems (for example, a particular set of technical environments or application domains) and deliver substantial value for their customers in the associated segment.”



Syncsort known for robust and high performance functionality

Based in Woodcliff Lake, New Jersey, Syncsort offers DMX, DMX-h and Ironstream. Syncsort's customer base for this product set is estimated at 1,500 organizations. “Among the company strengths are robust and high-performance functionality, Gartner notes. “Strong performance for ETL and extraction loading and transformation (ELT) processing, lower TCO compared with the market leaders, and time to value are all cited as key attractions for references selecting Syncsort. An expanding focus for deploying workloads on big data platforms (including Hadoop and Spark) — together with enhanced metadata and lineage support — positions Syncsort's relevance in digital business. Capitalizing on a distributed data ecosystem. Syncsort's customers appreciate the toolset's scalability and throughput in working with the Hadoop ecosystem, populating data lakes, ingesting streaming data, and offloading ETL or ELT workloads from data warehouses and mainframes to Hadoop.”



Actian’s focus is on core capability and performance

Based in Redwood City, California, Actian offers data integration capabilities via Actian DataConnect and Actian DataCloud. Actian's customer base for data integration tools is estimated to be approximately 7,000 organizations. Actian’s strong focus is on core capability and performance. “Actian offers real-time, messaging-style solutions and bulk/batch-oriented data delivery,” Gartner notes.

“Customers like the diverse connectivity for data sources and the support for industry-standard message formats for interenterprise data sharing. Actian has enhanced its cloud capabilities with the evolution of its integration platform as a service (iPaaS) offering on Actian DataCloud, providing an extension to its analytic offerings and a focus on cloud integration that will include engineered services to further simplify customer onboarding and extend support for business roles.”



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