Organisations worldwide experienced a staggering average data volume growth of 40% in 2010, according to a new research report ‘Future Integration Needs: Embracing Complex Data’ from the Aberdeen Group.
The research made available by data integration software provider Informatica shows how organisations can get the most from their data integration assets in the face of rapidly growing data volumes and increasing data complexity.
Seventy four per cent of organisations are integrating XML from external sources, while 66% of organisations are integrating XML from internal sources.
Over the next one year, enterprises plan to introduce more complex unstructured data sources – including office productivity documents, email, web content and social media data – than any other data type.
Integration of external data continues to be a labor- and cost-intensive task, with organisations integrating external sources spending 25% of their total integration budget in this area.
Organisations that have effectively integrated complex data are able to use up to 50% larger data sets for business intelligence and analytics; integrate twice as successfully external unstructured data into business processes; and deliver critical information in the required time window 2.5 times more often via automated data refresh.
They are also able to slash the incidence of errors in their data almost in half compared to organisations relying on manual intervention and spend an average of 43% less on integration software (based on 2010 spend).
Aberdeen concludes that, as growth in data volumes and complexity accelerates, organisations should fully automate transformation of complex data and focus on quality assured data exchange.
Organisations should consolidate data transformation and exchange capabilities in a single platform to support data warehousing, real time integration and big data scenarios to achieve economy of scale and ensure that the entire integration cycle is automated.
Informatica B2B Data Exchange and Cloud Data Integration senior vice president and general manager Juan Carlos Soto said Aberdeen’s latest research underscores how companies benefit from integrating complex data, especially as the Big Data trend continues accelerating.
"Using Informatica B2B Data Transformation and B2B Data Exchange to deliver and onboard even the most complex data, customers have reported reducing their partner on-boarding time by 80%, lowering their maintenance costs by 90%, and increasing their first year revenue by over 8%," Soto said.
