No one likes data integration. It’s painstaking, hard to automate, and hard to measure in terms of business ROI. Yet it’s required for making systems work together, whether as a result of an acquisition, as part of a migration to new tools, or in an effort to consolidate existing assets. The first question is always, what database are we going to use as our customer source? Rather than keep asking -- and answering -- that question, companies are now beginning to devise a common data architecture and a platform for managing it, and all its applications as part of the migration to a service-oriented architecture.
