Collecting, organizing and using raw enterprise data is a requirement for any organization today. Company management has to be able to control and gain insight to their corporate data in order to make logical and meaningful business decisions based on the metrics. As a result, data integration is a must.

The need for data integration in today's business environment is growing. Unfortunately, data integration, as implemented in many environments requires large IT teams and dedicated experts to manage this data and set up. These teams include IT developers and business analysts each trying to define the overall data integration process. This mix can create serious road blocks and increases in lost time and revenue.

Companies that use manual methods or in house coding to achieve their data integration suffer through long project times filled with errors, iterations and repeated testing. These methods are not easily managed, do not scale, and do not play well with changes in future IT infrastructure. As a result these companies find themselves constantly rewriting code, requiring entire teams dedicated to integration year round.

Data integration is something that a modern software package can achieve with the management of a technical business analyst. This is defined as a business user who is technically adept, but still not a programmer. This frees up IT to focus on more pressing issues within the company and lets the business team member with the vision for what metrics and data they need to create the actual data integration themselves.

With this type of platform, data integration for data warehousing, Business intelligence, and other initiatives can be completed more quickly and cost effectively.

The right data integration solution ensures that it has built in connectivity to all the systems now and in the future. This includes all major enterprise applications, in house databases and systems, flat files, Cloud and SaaS oriented applications and infrastructures. The data integration solution must also work with and transfer large volumes of data in a short amount of time. Most enterprises have hundreds of thousands of data records that need to be shared between various systems. It is essential that your data integration software is not the bottle neck for moving this data in batch, trickle, or real time methods.

Your data integration solution vendor needs to offer robust and well documented support packages. Data integration is a complex and mission critical layer to the success of your business so it is important to have a domain expert at your disposal for complex projects. Review the vendor's customer references and customer success stories to know if they are the right choice for your organization.

Do your homework. The solution you pick should meet a number of checklists from the software to support, to the vendor's data integration methodologies. Choosing the right vendor will save you a lot of money and work.