14 leading data integration app vendors

14 leading data integration app vendors

Gartner has released its Magic Quadrant for Top Companies for Data Integration Tools, looking at the leaders, visionaries, challengers and niche players. Here’s a look at who made each category, and why.

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 writes. “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. These vendors recognize and design to deploy for emerging and new market demands, (to a large degree) often providing new functional capabilities in their products ahead of demand, and by identifying new types of business problem to which data integration tools can bring significant value.“

Informatica appeals to both data management and nontechnical pros

Based in Redwood City, Calif., 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's customer base for this product set is estimated at more than 7,000 organizations,” writes Gartner. “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.”

IBM wins on Its breadth of functionality

Based in Armonk, N.Y., 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 to be more than 11,000 organizations,” according to Gartner. “IBM features 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. Reference customers routinely cite as key strengths the breadth of functionality of and integration via open extensible metadata exchange and scalability.”

SAP attracts customers with mix of options

“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's customer base for this product set is estimated at more than 23,000 organizations,” Gartner says. “SAP features broad usage and functionality. 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 multi-structured data, including text, social and spatial content types—extends SAP's relevance for digital business.”

Oracle has well-established synergy with other products

Based in Redwood Shores, Calif., 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 explains. “Strengths include the feature function evolution in 2015. 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 has a well integrated portfolio for data integration

Based in Redwood City, Calif., 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,” Gartner notes. “Strengths include 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 Is known for customer relationships and product reliability

Based in Cary, N.C., 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,” says Gartner. “Its strengths include its 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.”

Visionaries

“Visionaries demonstrate a strong understanding of emerging technology and business trends or focus on a special 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.”

Information Builders excels at making big data normal

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,” Gartner writes. “Strengths are with integrating the integration. 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 identifies issues is integrated with the data quality solution and a workflow manager that tracks proposed changes to data and models with multiuser annotation capability.”

Cisco boasts agility and rapid time to value

Based in San Jose, Calif., 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,” notes Gartner. “Strengths include 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 special 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.”

Denodo features broad connectivity support

Based in Palo Alto, Calif., Denodo offers the Denodo Platform. “Denodo's customer base for its data integration product is estimated at 300 midsize to large companies,” Gartner notes.” 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. Its strengths include added functionality. In 2015, Denodo introduced new dynamic query optimization features to support cost-based optimization especially 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.”

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,” according to Gartner. “However, they may be limited to special 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 reject multiple projects of a single type (for example, predominantly ETL-oriented use cases). Importantly, more than 80 percent 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 Has extensive market presence and skills

Based in Redmond, Wash., Microsoft offers data integration capabilities via SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS), which is included in the SQL Server DBMS license. “Vast worldwide deployments of Microsoft SQL Server involve usage of SSIS for data integration, although Microsoft does not report a special customer count for SSIS,” Gartner explains. “Its strengths are relevant capabilities and TCO. 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. The expected focus on data delivery to the Cortana Intelligence Suite seeks to establish synergy between data integration, cloud and cognitive computing capability.”

Attunity Is known for its favorable cost and value

Based in Burlington, Mass., 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,” Gartner says. “Its strengths include market presence/track record. 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.”

Adeptia features attractive pricing and flexibility

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. Strengths include the integrated tool suite, which covers the basics of batch, message and synchronization. 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 says. “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 special 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.”

Actian Is complimentary to diverse products

Based in Redwood City, Calif., 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,” according to Gartner. “Its strengths include its strong focus on core capability and performance. Actian offers real-time, messaging-style solutions and bulk/batch-oriented data delivery. Customers like the diverse connectivity for data sources and the support for industry-standard message formats for inter-enterprise data sharing. Capitalizing on cloud and analytics, 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.”

Syncsort Is robust and high-performing

Based in Woodcliff Lake, N.J., Syncsort offers DMX, DMX-h and Ironstream. Syncsort's customer base for this product set is estimated at 1,500 organizations. “Its strengths include robust and high-performance functionality,” Gartner says. “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.”