Open source data integration on the rise

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More enterprises are considering open source technologies as part of ongoing efforts to lower their data integration costs, a global survey released today has suggested.

Over 1,000 respondents from mainly the US and Europe revealed they were using a combination of commercial applications, open source systems and database utilities for data integration.

Nearly a third (31 per cent) said they used open source and commercial systems together. And a trend emerged towards the use of licence-free software - not just for one-time projects, but also in ongoing mission-critical processes, to replace or complement expensive CPU-dependent systems.

But when questioned about the advantages of open source data integration software over commercial products, licensing did not come out top in its list of perceived benefits.

Respondents felt most strongly about ease of use (cited by 59 per cent) and performance (54 per cent). Licensing costs came fourth with only 42 per cent, behind the advantage of offering no vendor lock-in (42.5 per cent).

The survey also found that 40 per cent of respondents used open source tools to manage their batch operational data integration tasks, compared to 23 per cent for real-time projects.

Data loading (42 per cent) and data migration (26.5 per cent) were the second and third most popular types of open source-based project. And data synchronisation was also popular, deployed by 19 per cent of open source data integration users.

“Key players have made major strides toward improving the usability and user-friendliness of open source technologies, which used to be a weak spot for these applications,” said Yves de Montcheuil, vice president of marketing at open source data integration vendor Talend.

At the same time, 60.5 per cent of respondents wanted a scheduling tool to consolidate and centralise their technical processes, while 58 per cent of users said they needed a dashboard to centrally monitor processes as they execute.

A shared repository was also considered essential by 55 per cent to enable data sharing on large-scale projects. And 38 per cent of users wanted an administration tool to centrally manage those projects and user teams.

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