Sometime ago, when I was with another software company, I was involved in a large implementation of our software. The deployment required our software to connect with a legacy customer application, so an integration between the two products had to be developed. When the Sales person put together the proposal, he quoted this integration for $0 because “it’s so simple, I could create it myself”.
I’m sure you will be shocked (shocked!) to learn that this integration was not as simple as the Sales person thought. In fact, this work internally cost us over $40K to develop. And no, the sales person did not help with the coding.
This story came to mind as I’ve gotten to know Attunity, Qlik’s most recent acquisition. It’s enabled Qlik to introduce our Data Integration Platform, a combination of Attunity products and Qlik Data Catalyst.
There is a lot more to Data Integration then one might think. For example, IDC says that “data integration software employs a wide range of technologies. These include, but are not limited to, data connectivity; extract, load, and transform (aka ELT); change data capture (CDC), format and semantic mediation, data federation and virtualization, data quality and profiling, master data management, metadata management, and self-service data preparation and integration technologies.”1
Whew! That’s a lot more than simply moving the data from one place to another!
So how does this definition from IDC compare with the capabilities of Qlik’s Data Integration Platform:
So, the next time you hear the term Data Integration, keep in mind that it’s a lot more than just moving the data. And be careful who you ask when estimating the effort.
Interested in learning more about Qlik’s Data Integration Platform? Check out this page.
1 Data Integration and Integrity Software https://www.idc.com/getdoc.jsp?containerId=IDC_P31...