The data integration tools market comprises stand-alone software products that allow organizations to combine data from multiple sources, including performing tasks related to data access, transformation, enrichment and delivery. Data integration tools enable use cases such as data engineering, operational data integration, delivering modern data architectures, and enabling less-technical data integration. Data integration tools are procured by data and analytics (D&A) leaders and their teams for use by data engineers or less-technical users, such as business analysts or data scientists. These products are consumed as SaaS or deployed on-premises, in public or private cloud, or in hybrid configurations.
Gartner defines integration platform as a service (iPaaS) as a vendor-managed cloud service that enables end users to implement integrations between a variety of applications, services and data sources, both internal and external to their organization. iPaaS enables end users of the platform to integrate a variety of internal and external applications, services and data sources for at least one of the three main uses of integration technology: Data consistency: The ability to monitor for or be notified by applications, services and data sources about changes, and to propagate those changes to the appropriate applications and data destinations (for example, “synchronize customer data” or “ingest into data lake”). Multistep process: The ability to implement multistep processes between applications, services and data sources (for example, to “onboard employee” or “process insurance claim”). Composite service: The ability to create composite services exposed as APIs or events and composed from existing applications, services and data sources (for example, to create a “credit check” service or to create a “generate fraud score” service). These integration processes, data pipelines, workflows, automations and composite services are most commonly created via intuitive low-code or no-code developer environments, though some vendors provide more-complex developer tooling.