Data integration is the process of consolidating and managing customer information from all available sources, including contact details, customer valuation data, and information gathered through interactions such as direct marketing. Properly conducted, Data Integration ensures that all relevant departments in the company have constant access to the most current and complete view of customer information available. As such, Data Intergrationis an essential element of customer relationship management (CRM).

Data management is one of the most complex and expensive challenges facing the agile enterprise. Frustrated with the difficulty and inaccuracy of manually assembling inconsistent, redundant, and outdated data, many organizations are seeking a new generation of data management solutions to seamlessly convert hundreds of data sources into powerful data assets that can be shared across the enterprise.

To guide their data management efforts, many enterprises adopt Master Data Management (MDM), a lifecycle strategy for creating, organizing, and managing comprehensive data assets across the enterprise. MDM solutions provide a master system of record for a particular business entity and then publish this master view to a variety of consumer applications. MDM applications can be built around virtually any data entity—customers, partners, products, vendors, employees, and so on—wherever a master data view is needed. In fact, many MDM applications have distinct names to describe their solution area. For example, Product Information Management (PIM) is used to describe product-focused MDM applications and Customer Data integration (CDI) is used to describe customer-focused MDM applications. Since MDM solutions span a variety of business and technical functions, creating a successful MDM application requires a multi-disciplinary approach to data management that includes data integration, data modeling, data publishing, and data synchronization.

Of all these components, data integration continues to be the most critical and expensive aspect of an MDM solution. Master views are created by integrating data from a variety of internal data sources such as enterprise resource planning (ERP), customer relationship management (CRM), business intelligence (BI), and legacy systems, as well as external data from partners, suppliers, or syndicators. These integration processes typically present a variety of data integration challenges that can result in high development costs and extended project timelines. To work through these challenges in a cost-effective manner, IT requires a flexible data integration architecture that offers a broad set of technologies and tools to create customized integration solutions.

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