by Angela Guess
Loraine Lawson recently wrote that ETL, though it rarely makes headlines, is still a central component of data integration. She explains, “There aren’t a lot of vendors boasting of their ETL tools these days. Extract, transform and load seems so … well, basic, in this age of Big Data, cloud and virtualization. But whoa there, Silver. If you look a little closer, you’ll see that ETL is actually the workhorse driving most of today’s ‘hot’ integration solutions, according to this year’s Forrester Wave: Enterprise ETL, Q1, by Principal Analyst Noel Yuhanna.”
Yuhanna wrote, “Product marketers working for ETL vendors have worked feverishly to lose the ‘ETL’ from their product names, marketing collateral, and websites, instead positioning their solutions as comprehensive data integration platforms. And while the ‘data integration platform’ moniker is accurate for most of the vendors that have since added complementary capabilities like data profiling, data quality, metadata management, CDC, and data federation to complement their ETL core, the fact remains that many of their customers are only looking for an ETL solution.”
