How to justify the purchase of a data integration tool

The growing importance of business intelligence and data analytics applications in driving business decision making has made data integration's vital role in the enterprise crystal clear. From gathering data, transforming it into useful information and delivering it to the business users or processes that need it, data integration routines provide the crucial link between a variety of source and target systems. As the first article in this series examined, several types of packaged software have emerged to meet the challenges of data integration. The current generation of data integration tools consists of full-fledged suites that support extract, transform and load (ETL) processes, application integration, cloud-based and real-time integration, data virtualization, data cleansing and data profiling. How can you determine if your organization should invest in a data integration tool?