Top Data Integration Tools In 2020: Here’s Who Made Gartner’s Magic Quadrant

These 20 developers of data integration tools include industry giants IBM and SAP, established data integration companies like Informatica and Talend, and more recent entrants such as Matillion and HVR. Here’s a look at how they are positioned in the fast-changing data integration arena.

Making A Connection

Data integration is a critical component of a number of IT operations and initiatives. It’s not surprising, therefore, that global sales of data integration tools are expected to grow at a compound annual growth rate of 13.5 percent and reach $10.8 billion by 2025, according to ResearchandMarkets.com

For solution providers, data integration tools are key to any number of IT services in data management, business analytics, application integration, cloud migration and digital transformation.

A number of vendors, including companies like Matillion and Fivetran, focus specifically on data integration products. A number of business intelligence software companies like Qlik and Information Builders provide data integration tools as part of their product lineups. And major vendors like IBM, Oracle and SAP recognize the importance of data integration in supporting IT operations and initiatives.

Who are the leading players in the data integration space? Gartner’s 2020 Magic Quadrant for Data Integration Tools report takes a look at 20 vendors in the data integration arena, identifying the leaders, challengers, visionaries and niche players. The report offers insight into which companies solution providers should consider partnering with—and why.

Market Mega Trends

Data integration tools are used to ingest, transform, combine and provision data throughout an enterprise, between partners, suppliers and customers, and even incorporate third-party data—all to meet the data consumption requirements of applications, business analytics and business processes, according to Gartner.

Data integration tools are used for a broad range of use cases such as data integration for optimized business analytics, master data management support, maintaining data consistency between operational applications, inter-enterprise data sharing, data services orchestration, and data migration and consolidation support.

One example: Gartner predicts that by 2025 more than 80 percent of businesses and organizations will use more than one cloud service provider for data and analytics use cases, “making it critical for them to prioritize an independent and CSP-neutral integration technology to avoid vendor lock-in.”

In preparing the report, Gartner noted a couple of trends within the data integration tool market. It found that market leaders are losing ground to smaller vendors and that data integration consolidation is “in full swing”—both in the tools themselves and among vendors in the market.

Cloud data integration and migration are key drivers for data integration tool implementation and usage, according to the Gartner report. Business teams are demanding more self-service data preparation capabilities while engineering teams need sophisticated data preparation for improving productivity. And Gartner is seeing the rise of “data fabrics”—architecture patterns “that inform and automate the design, integration and deployment of data objects regardless of deployment platforms or architectural approaches.”

Data Integration Magic Quadrant Methodology

Gartner includes within the data integration software category any tools that support data integration requirements—going beyond the traditional data ETL (extract, transform, load) definition—to include tools for data ingestion, data transformation, data processing, data pipelining, data replication, data synchronization, data virtualization, stream data integration, data services, data fabrics, data engineering and more.

Vendor positioning in the Magic Quadrant is determined by two axes: vendors’ ability to execute and their completeness of vision. Based on the analysis results vendors were identified as Leaders, Challengers, Visionaries or Niche Players.

Evaluation criteria for a vendor’s ability to execute cover a company’s products and services, sales and marketing execution, pricing, market responsiveness and track record, customer experience, operations and overall viability. Evaluation criteria for a vendor’s completeness of vision include market understanding and strategy, sales strategy, product strategy, business model, innovation, vertical/industry strategy and geographic strategy.

Leader: Informatica

Informatica, a pioneer in the data integration space, was the clear winner in this year’s Data Integration Magic Quadrant, positioned in the Leaders quadrant furthest along both the “ability to execute” and “completeness of vision” axes. The Redwood City, Calif.-based company offers the Intelligent Data Platform including Informatica Intelligent Cloud Services, Data Integration Hub, Data Engineering Integration, Enterprise Data Preparation, Enterprise Data Catalog, PowerCenter, PowerExchange and more. The company’s customer base for the products is more than 10,000 organizations.

Strengths: Informatica has made significant investments in various data fabric-enabling technologies and has responded to the market’s demands for convergence in data management capabilities that go beyond integration to include data quality, information stewardship and metadata management, according to Gartner. The company also scored for the ability of its technology to scale in support of complex data integration scenarios: More than one-third of reference customers are using Informatica to integrate more than 100 data sources and targets.

Cautions: Gartner said Informatica suffers from a lack of clarity and awareness among its customers on some key technologies and capabilities. Customers are not fully aware of the data virtualization support in such products as Data Integration Hub and Enterprise Data Catalog tools, according to Gartner, and customers are confused about or unaware of the vendor’s streaming data integration support despite its Edge Data Streaming and Data Engineering Streaming services.

Leader: IBM

IBM was just below Informatica on the “ability to execute” axis and just behind on the “completeness of vision” axis. The company’s product lineup in data integration includes IBM Data Replication, IBM Cloud Pak for Integration, IBM Cloud Pak for Data, IBM Data Virtualization Manager for z/OS, IBM InfoSphere DataStage on Cloud and IBM InfoSphere Information Server on Cloud. The company’s customer base for the products is more than 11,000 organizations.

Strengths: Reference customers praised IBM’s support for its data integration tools and the performance of the products, Gartner said. They cited the diverse data integration delivery styles and architectures of IBM’s products, including the range of connectors and ability to deliver on hybrid integration scenarios.

Cautions: Gartner cited customer confusion about IBM’s recent move to repackage data integration tools into the IBM Information Server for IBM Cloud Pak for Data. Some customers said IBM’s product architecture makes upgrades a challenge. IBM also received some of the lowest survey scores for self-service capabilities and ability to deliver data integration as cloud services.

Leader: SAP

The software application giant is also a major player in the data integration space with its SAP Data Services, SAP Data Intelligence, SAP Cloud Platform Integration Suite and integration capabilities built into the SAP HANA platform. The company’s customer base for the products is more than 70,000 organizations.

Strengths: Gartner said that SAP’s “comprehensive data integration solutions” help customers develop their own end-to-end integration strategies using the Integration Solution Advisory Methodology. SAP Data Intelligence offers a way to build data orchestration capabilities for various personas. And Gartner said SAP has more than 3,000 partners—distributors, OEMs, and implementation and service partners—that provide extensive integration service and support.

Cautions: New software implementations and upgrades of products like SAP Data Intelligence require a high level of expertise and support. SAP’s products have limited integration with non-SAP products, according to reference customers, and navigating SAP’s pricing, licensing and contracting process can be a challenge.

Leader: Oracle

Database, application and cloud software vendor Oracle is also in the Leaders quadrant with its Oracle GoldenGate, Oracle Data Integration Suite, Oracle Big Data SQL, Oracle Integration Cloud, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) Data Integration and OCI Data Flow software. The company’s customer base for the products is 12,000 organizations.

Strengths: Oracle has a strong product portfolio for supporting data fabric designs, according to Gartner, and the company is focused on data management capability convergence by delivering data integration, data quality and data cataloging through a single platform. Reference customers gave Oracle high marks for its “enterprise-grade” products with high scalability and performance.

Cautions: Oracle received the lowest mean score among all vendors from reference customers for “pricing method” and “overall pricing.” Customers reported using Oracle data integration software only for traditional use cases and not for modern use cases such as IoT data integration and data services orchestration. And Gartner said the ability to deploy Oracle data integration services on other cloud service providers is limited.

Leader: Talend

Talend’s data integration technology lineup includes Talend Data Fabric, Talend Cloud, Talend Data Catalog, Talend Data Management, Talend Big Data, Talend Data Services and Talend Open Studio, along with the Talend Data Preparation and Data Stewardship add-on components. The company has an estimated 4,500 licensed customers using its products.

Strengths: Talend is focused on database-agnostic and multi-cloud hybrid data integration, according to Gartner: Reference customers cited strong support for multiple cloud service providers. The vendor also offers strong capabilities for data engineering support with the Talend Pipeline Designer and provides a comprehensive portfolio in support of best-of-breed data management requirements.

Cautions: Talend faces challenges with its support for DataOps and with the orchestration and operation of complex data pipelines, Gartner said. Customers rely heavily on online documentation and the Talend community for support and they indicated Talend needs improvement there. And customers scored Talend low for its data virtualization capabilities.

Leader: Denodo

Denodo, a Challenger in the Data Integration Magic Quadrant in earlier years, is listed in the Leaders quadrant this year. The company’s Denodo Platform has a base of more than 800 customers concentrated in the financial services, manufacturing and health-care sectors.

Strengths: The core components of Denodo’s platform: a unified semantic catalog, dynamic query engine and runtime metadata-based machine learning algorithms, provide the needed capabilities to automate data fabric design. The company has “extensive” go-to-market partners with some 250 systems integrators such as Accenture, Cognizant and Deloitte.

Cautions: Reference customers indicated some effort is needed in managing the product’s underlying infrastructure and applying product updates and that implementations within complex distributed architectures require additional processes for distributed query performance.

Leader: SAS

SAS, a longtime heavyweight in business analytics, is also a Magic Quadrant Leader in data integration with its SAS Data Management, SAS Data Integration Studio, SAS Federation Server, SAS/Access, SAS Data Loader for Hadoop, SAS Data Preparation and SAS Event Stream Processing products. The company’s customer base for the products is approximately 15,000 organizations.

Strengths: Gartner said SAS’ products provide “enhanced support for diverse user personas” in keeping with the current trend toward “data democratization.” Embedded machine-learning capabilities improve the software’s augmentation and orchestration. And reference customers said the vendor’s “strong ecosystem of partners and peers” provide implementation and support services beyond the company’s own technical and after-sales support.

Cautions: SAS’ data integration tools are focused on supporting the company’s own technology stack, such as SAS applications for risk, fraud and retail, Gartner concluded, although SAS is taking steps to address this with ODPi Egeria for bi-directional metadata exchange. There is a lingering market perception that SAS has an “analytics-only” focus. And the company lacks a holistic data management platform approach, Gartner said.

Challenger: Microsoft

Microsoft is the highest-ranked vendor in the Challengers quadrant in the Gartner report with its SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS) tool for on-premises data integration tasks and its Azure Data Factory (ADF) that offers Azure-based data integration capabilities.

Strengths: Reference customers cited the usability, speed of implementation and competitive total cost of ownership of Microsoft’s data integration software. The Microsoft Azure Synapse data and analytics system leverages Azure’s data integration functionality—a benefit for businesses migrating to the cloud. And the vendor is “investing significantly” in the metadata capabilities of its data integration products, Gartner concluded.

Cautions: Microsoft received the second-lowest customer scores for supporting multi-cloud data integration, given the company’s Azure focus. Customers experienced challenges implementing complex data pipelines with ADF. ADF and SSIS focus on data replication and ETL, with limited support for data virtualization and streaming. And customers reported challenges with scaling ETL workloads with millions of rows of data.

Challenger: Qlik (Attunity)

Business analytics software company Qlik acquired Attunity, a developer of data integration and management software, in May 2019. That provided the company with its Qlik Replicate, Qlik Compose, Qlik Catalog and Qlik Enterprise Manager products.

Strengths: Gartner said Qlik’s software is proven in data replication scenarios and customers cited its ease of use, including installation and configuration. Qlik has successfully integrated the Attunity product line with the rest of its portfolio, including Qlik Data Catalyst (now Qlik Catalog) and Qlik Sense. Gartner also said Qlik has “partner momentum,” such as OEM support from cloud service providers including AWS and Microsoft Azure.

Cautions: Use of Qlik’s software tends to be limited to change data capture and data replication tasks, according to Gartner. Reference customers said its connector support for multi-cloud systems is uneven and some said customer support requests—especially around new product deployments and upgrades—needs improvement.

Challenger: Tibco Software

Tibco has moved up from “Niche Player” in earlier Gartner Data Integration Magic Quadrant reports—and the most recent report was published before news of Tibco’s deal to acquire Information Builders and its data integration, preparation, governance and quality management tools. Tibco has more than 5,000 customer organizations using its main data integration offerings today including Tibco Data Virtualization, Tibco Cloud Integration, Tibco Cloud Events, Tibco Messaging, Tibco Streaming and Tibco Foresight.

Strengths: Tibco is strong in real-time and edge data integration use cases. The company’s “Connect Intelligence” strategy strikes the right balance between collecting and connecting data, according to reference customers, and for its mature data virtualization capabilities. Strategic acquisitions (prior to Information Builders) have strengthened its competitive hand in data management including ETL, data synchronization, meta data management and data governance.

Cautions: The Gartner report said Tibco offers limited data preparation capabilities—a gap likely to be filled by the Information Builders acquisition. Reference customers said Tibco’s pricing model is expensive and complicated. And the company has to address complexity issues when integrating products across its technology portfolio, Gartner said.

Challenger: Precisely (formerly Syncsort)

Precisely, listed as a Niche Player in earlier Data Integration Magic Quadrant reports, makes the Challengers quadrant this year. The company’s Precisely Connect (including Connect ETL and Connect CDC), Precisely Ironstream, Syncsort MFX and Spectrum tools are used by more than 2,300 organizations, especially in the financial services, insurance and health-care sectors.

Strengths: Precisely is focused on data management infrastructure modernization: Moving off mainframes is a common use case, according to Gartner. Reference customers praised the company’s strong technical and after-sales support. And the company’s acquisitions of Trillium Software and Pitney Bowes Software & Data have expanded its data management coverage.

Cautions: Precisely received the lowest score among the evaluated vendors for using metadata for data management tasks. Despite a rebranding effort, confusion remains around the specific capabilities of its four product categories. And Precisely must better integrate its products into a single integration Platform as a Service for more flexible deployment options for customers, according to Gartner.

Visionaries: SnapLogic

Appearing in the Visionaries quadrant, SnapLogic markets the SnapLogic Intelligent Integration Platform as its core data integration offering with a customer base of some 930 organizations in various industries including technology, financial services, health care, transportation and retail.

Strengths: SnapLogic has successfully focused on cloud-based integration use cases, according to Gartner, with the Intelligent Integration Platform supporting hybrid deployments for data and application integration, data engineering and integration automation requirements, the Gartner report said. The company also received high grades for its strong customer relationships.

Cautions: SnapLogic faces challenges in providing better technical and diagnostic support, according to Gartner, and the company’s credentials are built more on cloud and hybrid cloud service integration scenarios rather than supporting broader data management solutions. The company also has limited market mind share.

Visionaries: Information Builders

Last month Information Builders, one of the pioneers of the business intelligence software industry, struck a deal to be acquired by Tibco. While best known for its WebFocus business analytics software, the company’s technology portfolio also includes the Omni-Gen data integration platform, iWay Service Manager, iWay DataMigrator and iWay Universal Adaptor Suite.

Strengths: Information Builders scored well for its focus on business offerings, providing capabilities in diverse data integration styles and implementations. The company’s products also augment data quality and data engineering through their embedded data preparation capability. And customers applaud its high-quality customer engagement and view the company as a strategic partner, according to the Gartner report.

Cautions: Information Builders has limited market traction for adoption of its data integration products and changes in the company’s top executive ranks in the last year created some customer uncertainty. Some customers see its products as complex with a longer learning curve and its data integration products as less appealing to people in business-oriented roles.

Niche Player: Hitachi Vantara

Hitachi Vantara’s Lumada Data Services portfolio of analytics and data management software includes Pentaho Data Integration (PDI) and the Lumada Data Catalog (from its acquisition of Waterline Data earlier this year). The company, which is positioned the furthest along the “completeness of vision” axis among the Niche Players, has a customer base of more than 880 organizations.

Strengths: Hitachi Vantara’s product portfolio is recognized for its bulk/batch data movement capabilities that complement its broader data management offerings and for its data integration abilities across core back-office systems, cloud data and edge/IoT data, the Gartner report said. The company’s data integration strategy is seen as being in sync with today’s DataOps requirements.

Cautions: Hitachi Vantara lacks market traction and visibility among prospective customers and some users report difficulties with version upgrades, according to Gartner. Reference customers also expressed concern about the quality of implementation support services.

Niche Player: Safe Software

Safe Software debuts in the Data Integration Magic Quadrant as a Niche Player, highest along the “ability to execute axis” in that quadrant. The company’s FME (the Feature Manipulation Platform) data integration system, including FME Desktop and FME Server, is used by more than 6,500 organizations.

Strengths: The company’s software is most noted for its spatial data integration capabilities and use for geospatial data ingestion, integration and sharing. Reference customers praised the company for ease of installation and setup, development, ongoing support and user training. Customers also liked the self-service data preparation capabilities of the company’s products.

Cautions: Safe Software’s products have limited traction beyond their core use cases in spatial data and the software is seen as having limited metadata management and active metadata support, according to Gartner. And the FME platform has limited support for combining different data delivery styles.

Niche Player: Adeptia

Adeptia provides its Adeptia Connect data integration software that’s used by more than 1,500 customers in diverse industries, the majority in the financial services, insurance and manufacturing industries.

Strengths: Adeptia’s single, tightly integrated product is focused on providing inter-enterprise data integration and sharing. The software provides improved usability through better data preparation and augmented integration, according to Gartner, and customers gave the company high marks for its presales services.

Cautions: Adeptia’s products have limited breadth of coverage in terms of interoperability with related MDM technologies, the Gartner report said. While the company is growing, it has limited market mind share. And customers said the company needs to improve its implementation guidance and support.

Niche Player: HVR

HVR appears in the Data Integration Tools Magic Quadrant report for the first time as a Niche Player. The company provides its namesake data integration software to support log-based change data capture. The software has about 1,000 deployments among 324 customers, mostly in manufacturing, retail and financial services.

Strengths: HVR has market momentum with a loyal customer base and high customer retention rates, according to Gartner. Customers scored the company above average for its service operations. On the technology side the company’s products are frequently used for data replication across commonly used endpoints for cloud migrations.

Cautions: Spending for HVR is IT-driven and the company’s software doesn’t address the needs of business users, according to the Gartner report. The software lacks support for complex ETL workloads and there is “extremely limited support” for data and analytics governance.

Niche Player: Matillion

Matillion is debuting in the Data Integration Magic Quadrant report as a Niche Player. The company’s two products—Matillion ETL and Matillion Data Loader—are focused on cloud-first data integration. The company has a customer base of more than 800 and it has been especially prominent in working within the Snowflake Data Platform environment.

Strengths: Customers gave high marks to Matillion’s cloud data integration functionality, such as its migratable business logic, dynamic ETL and multi-cloud data movement capabilities. The company offers tooling for specific roles such as data engineers, analysts and “citizen integrators.” Gartner also cited the company’s flexible pricing model, which supports cloud scalability, as a plus.

Cautions: Matillion offers limited support for diverse data integration styles and capabilities, according to the Gartner report, and does not support on-premises target systems. And while reference customers said regular product upgrades are improving critical functionality, Gartner said there’s room to improve a number of product features such as scheduling, parallel working, data streaming, logging and process status communications.

Niche Player: Fivetran

Fivetran also debuts in the Data Integration Magic Quadrant report in the Niche Player quadrant. The company’s software provides cloud-first integration capabilities with some 1,200 software, consumer, commercial and professional service companies using the product.

Strengths: The company’s cloud-first ETL tool is built for integrating on-premises and Software-as-a-Service data stores with cloud database management systems. The product offers a low cost of ownership. And the vendor benefits from a number of go-to-market partnerships with the leading cloud service providers, cloud software suppliers like Snowflake and Databricks, and systems integrators including Slalom and Accenture.

Cautions: Fivetrans’ software has functionality gaps including limited data integration styles (data virtualization is unsupported, for example), limited source and target connectivity, and enterprise-grade data governance and data quality capabilities, the Gartner report said. There is no support for on-premises data integration workloads. And the company is battling limited market awareness, Gartner said.

Niche Player: Actian

Actian, which markets a range of data management, integration and analytics products, offers the DataConnect product as its primary data integration tool. The company has a customer base of more than 8,000, many of them enterprise business-to-business and OEM partners.

Strengths: Actian’s lightweight and small footprint data integration software has a loyal customer base, according to Gartner, because it is easy to use and can handle complex workloads. The software produces operational statistics that make it easier to optimize data operations. The company’s pricing and deployment options are flexible.

Cautions: Actian’s software is focused on traditional data integration experts and lacks role-based delivery. The installed base uses the software primarily for bulk/batch data integration tasks. And the company is evolving DataConnect to closely align with its new Avalanche cloud-based data warehouse (which runs on DataConnect), a move that Gartner cautioned could pull development and marketing resources away from DataConnect.