Data Integration Buyer's Guide

What’s Changed: 2017 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Data Integration Tools

What’s Changed: 2017 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Data Integration Tools

What’s Changed: 2017 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Data Integration Tools

Analyst house Gartner, Inc. is back at it with another major report, having just released their new 2017 Magic Quadrant for Data Integration Tools. Integration tools fill an important role in the enterprise, acting as the data acquisition stalwart for Business Intelligence, analytics and data warehousing. Integration software also sources and delivers application and master data in support of Data Management. The ultimate benefit of Data Integration comes from the consistency that it breeds across operational applications and the enterprise environment.

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Gartner highlights that the emerging concept of a Data Lake is one of the driving forces behind widespread adoption of integration tools. Report authors explain: “The need for integrating nonrelational structures and distributing computing workloads to parallelized processes elevates data integration challenges. At the same time, it also provides opportunities to assist in the application of schemas at data read time, if needed, and to deliver data to business users, processes or applications, or to use data iteratively.”

In this Magic Quadrant, Gartner evaluates the strengths and weaknesses of 15 providers that it considers most significant in the marketplace and provides readers with a graph (the Magic Quadrant) plotting the vendors based on their ability to execute and their completeness of vision. The graph is divided into four quadrants: niche players, challengers, visionaries, and leaders. At Solutions Review, we read the report, available here, and pulled out a few observations.

Mega-vendors Informatica and IBM remain the two top dogs for another year, though the former increased its distance from the pack with a broad presence in the Big Data market. The leaders bracket also includes big names SAP, Talend, Oracle, and SAS. No surprises here, as this space continues to be dominated by large-scale, enterprise-focused companies. The only change in pecking order among these providers is Talend leapfrogging Oracle based on better product execution.

Keeping on theme with the large integration tools providers, Microsoft headlines the market challengers. The world’s largest technology company had their standing improved considerably as a result of strong support for diverse data types, and synergy between data, applications, business roles and artificial intelligence. Attunity and Adeptia round out this quadrant, with both toeing the niche players line, though Attunity did show some improvement in its completeness of vision ranking.

Information Builders tumbled on the vertical scale a bit, but still remains the class of the visionaries column. They offer a diverse integration tools portfolio and scored within the top-25 percent in this report for positive customer experience. Cisco and Denodo remain tightly grouped in the middle-left portion of the bracket. Both providers have made their mark with strong data virtualization capabilities, but Denodo has achieved strong momentum, growth and “mind share” within this sub-market by expanding partnerships with technology and service providers.

Actian saw their standing regress vertically while Syncsort has supplanted them as the most notable provider in the niche players graph. Pentaho makes a triumphant return to this Magic Quadrant between the two. Their customer reference base includes examples of all three deployment models of integration, including very large customers across back-office, Internet of Things and machine/sensor data tools, as well as traditional integration software demands.

Though up to 80 percent of all organizations still make significant use of bulk/batch and traditional integration techniques, message, virtualization and synchronization tools are also being used. Gartner believes that somewhere between 35 and 45 percent of enterprise companies are using two or more approaches. Gartner believes that this will result in a need to blend traditional deployments with modern infrastructure practices in the near future.

Read Gartner’s Magic Quadrant.


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