Data integration

Data integration is the process of consolidating, managing, and moving information from different data sources, including databases, data files, and applications including ERP, CRM, legacy, and data warehouses. Data integration provides a proven, cost-effective way to share data among multiple systems. In most data integration scenarios, data is moved on a regular schedule that ranges from real time to nightly or hourly intervals. Data integration is usually used in conjunction with data services that ensure data integrity, such as data de-duplication and data cleansing.

Data integration is the most popular and well understood integration scenario today. Data integration includes ETL (Extraction, Transformation and Loading) tools, replication engines, and migration engines. Many data integration tools support complex business scenarios and provide connectors to all major enterprise applications, data warehouses, and web services. Data integration is recommended for organizations that need to connect their back-office data with front-office applications such as Salesforce.