I got 99 data stores and integrating them ain't fun

You know the story: corporation grows bigger and bigger through acquisitions, organograms go off the board, IT assets skyrocket, everyone is holding on to theirs trying to secure their roles, complexity multiplies, chaos reigns and the effort to deliver value via IT becomes painstaking. This may help explain why a lead enterprise architect in one of Europe's biggest financial services organizations is looking for solutions in unusual places. Names changed to protect the innocent, but our fireside chat in Semantics conference last week was real and indicative of data integration pains and remedies. WXYZ's course over the years has resulted in tens of different data stores that need to be integrated to offer operational and strategic analytic insights. A number of initiatives with a number of consultancies and vendors have failed to deliver, budgets are shrinking and personnel is diminishing.