Blog: William McKnight

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EII: Is it for real?

Enterprise Infomation Integration, or EII, is now the province of a multitude of ETL vendors. EII gives the user immediate access to information in disparate data stores. However, other than some light operational message passing, it hasn't had much commercial acceptance and little impact to the data warehouse has been felt. So, at this stage, some are asking if it's going anywhere.

True, it's still immature technology. However, there are a myriad of reasons for the lack of acceptance that would be there even if the technology were mature. It's a paradigm shift in how we've managed data/information for the last 25 years. We're used to moving data where it will be used. Some believe it's the foundation of the enormous DW/BI industry (as opposed to providing business advantage with data/information in whatever architecture fits). Plus, corporations have undertaken an unprecedented number of major projects involving data recently and needed to take on proven approaches in the process.

I think the vendors are onto something here. Ascential (IBM) is focusing efforts there. Informatica has a relationship with EII provider Composite Software, a likely acquisition target by someone at some future point. Other stand-alones are Attunity, MetaMatrix, who added the former head of global markets for Gartner as CEO last month, and Certive, who added the former vice president of engineering at Hyperion Solutions to head engineering last month.

Watch this space.

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