Blog: Mike Ferguson

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The Merging of Structured and Unstructured Data Integration

Informatica's (http://www.informatica.com) announcement today on it's intent to acquire ItemField serves to re-enforce the trend that the two worlds of structured and unstructured data are coming together. While we have been using data integration infrastructure software for structured data for some time, most organisations have only tinkered with the world of using data integration software to integrate ustructured content with structured. Yet the amount of unstructured content that enterprises are struggling to manage continues to rapidly increase. While the use of content management systems to get control over unstructured content has increased significanty over the last few years many companies are struggling to get content into these systems just to manage it. In addition, dynamic integration of unstructured content to render into portals is also in demand.

It is often the case that companies want to associate unstructured content with structured data. An obvious example is in the area of records management whereby invoices, statements and other 'operational documents' need to be tied to customer data or supplier data. Insurance companies need to associate quote documents wih customer or prospect data, banks need to associate account statements with customers etc. etc. All this bodes well for unstructured data integration specialist vendors such as Vamosa and Kapow who have been growing steadily and getting a lot of attention lately from IT professionals working with content management and portals technologies. These vendors may well start to get a lot of attention from structured data integration suitors over the next 12 months. The general trend here is towards enterprise data integration.

Posted by Mike Ferguson on Monday, 27 November 2006 | Permalink