On 25 November Gartner published a new version of its Magic Quadrant for Data Integration Tools, 2009. Here are the things that caught my attention, and my thoughts on it. Don’t take it all to seriously and be sure to check the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Dummies as well 
Gartners vision is that leaders in the data integration tools market also are front runners in the convergence of single-purpose tools into an offering that supports a range of data delivery styles. Whenlooking at the vendors in the leaders quadrant the following can be noticed:
- Informatica has a (historical?) lack of focus on virtualization and data federation when comparing to some of its competitors
- Oracle focusses mainly on 2 different tools for data integration, OWB and ODI. And although they are both part of the Oracle Data Integrator Enterprise Edition (ODIEE), additional data integration tools of OrSAPacle, such as ODSI (which adds federation capabilities) and the data quality OEM of Trillium are not part of this package.
- With data integrator, Data Federator and metadata Management tools from Business Objects and the data integration capabilities of the Sextractors for BW and Netweaver PI it will take SAP a lot of integration and rationalization efforts to realize a consitent and integrated data integration platform.
- IBM‘s infosphere product is probably the most extensive data integration platform. However, it also is perceived as being very complex. Yes, completeness comes at a cost.
Another thing that caught my attention is that Microsoft is still lagging behind in this area. Although the introduction of SSIS was a leap forward compared to its previous SQL Server DTS ETL tooling. SSIS is mainly focussed at batch and bulk oriented data delivery. Other data integration styles such as data federation and data replication are not well adressed. Moreover, metadatamangement capabilities still seem to be very weak. They are not there (yet).
