What is Data Integration?

Data integration is the process of providing a single, unified view of information by combining data that resides in different sources. The process of data integration involves a set of practices, tools, and architectural procedures.

Data integration has become a business imperative as organizations see competitive advantage in data quality, data governance, data modeling, and the challenges of isolated or siloed data. The extract, transform, load (ETL) process is a commonly used data integration model.

SAP offers a suite of data integration tools. These tools are available on premise or in the cloud and cover a variety of different use cases. Data integration tools provided by SAP include SAP Data Services, SAP Cloud Platform Integration for data services, SAP HANA smart data integration, SAP Cloud Platform smart data integration, SAP Landscape Transformation Replication Server, and SAP Data Hub.

Vendors like Qlik, Quickbase, Stonebranch, Boomi, and TIBCO provide data integration capabilities for SAP customers.

What is Data Integration?

Data integration is the process of providing a single, unified view of information by combining data that resides in different sources. The process of data integration involves a set of practices, tools, and architectural procedures.

Data integration has become a business imperative as organizations see competitive advantage in data quality, data governance, data modeling, and the challenges of isolated or siloed data. The extract, transform, load (ETL) process is a commonly used data integration model.

SAP offers a suite of data integration tools. These tools are available on premise or in the cloud and cover a variety of different use cases. Data integration tools provided by SAP include SAP Data Services, SAP Cloud Platform Integration for data services, SAP HANA smart data integration, SAP Cloud Platform smart data integration, SAP Landscape Transformation Replication Server, and SAP Data Hub.

Vendors like Qlik, Quickbase, Stonebranch, Boomi, and TIBCO provide data integration capabilities for SAP customers.

Benefits of Data Integration

In addition to consolidating information, data integration can also ensure that the data is clean, accurate, and enhanced for business use. It is also an important component to any effective data management strategy, and can help companies optimize analytics, ensure consistency between operational applications, share data outside of the organization, coordinate data services, and support data migration and consolidation.

Key Data Integration Considerations for SAPinsiders

• Include end users in decisions about data integration. TIBCO’s Senior Solution Engineer Iain Harfield explains that while the primary decision makers for integration strategies are often those in charge of lines of business with enterprise architects driving the implementation strategy, end users also play a pivotal role in building our an integration strategy. “…not including them in the process can put an organization at risk of providing solutions that fall short of addressing business challenges,” Harfield says.
• Blend SAP ERP data with non-SAP source data. SAPinsider’s 2021 integration research revealed that 90% of respondents need to integrate non-SAP data with their SAP data. In an SAPinsider thought leadership article, Qlik’s Vice President of SAP Business Matthew Hayes discusses the endless ways a business can benefit from integrating SAP ERP data with non-SAP source data. “The irony is that SAP data becomes more valuable if you expand it with related data from other sources,” Hayes says.
• Deploy data lakes and data warehouses in the cloud. SAPinsider’s Data Management and Data Warehousing in Cloud Benchmark Report found that deploying data in a hybrid model was a popular choice for analytics, ERP, and supply chain data. To mitigate the challenge a hybrid model can pose from an integration standpoint, SAPinsider recommends that integration be achieved, in part, by moving data into a centralized cloud data lake or data warehouse.