Gartner defines data integration as the discipline comprising the architectural patterns, methodologies and tools that allow organizations to achieve consistent access and delivery of data across a wide spectrum of data sources and data types to meet the data consumption requirements of business applications and end users. Data integration tools enable organizations to access, integrate, transform, process and move data that spans various endpoints and across any infrastructure to support their data integration use cases. The market for data integration tools includes vendors that offer a stand-alone software product (or products) to enable the construction and implementation of data access and data delivery infrastructure for a variety of data integration use cases.
The market for ESP platforms consists of software subsystems that perform real-time computation on streaming event data. They execute calculations on unbounded input data continuously as it arrives, enabling immediate responses to current situations and/or storing results in files, object stores or other databases for later use. Examples of input data include clickstreams; copies of business transactions or database updates; social media posts; market data feeds; images; and sensor data from physical assets, such as mobile devices, machines and vehicles.