This blog is the second edition of the Integrator’s Dilemma blog series that was kicked off with Reason #1 for the Integrator’s Dilemma, the Cloud. Today, we are discussing the second reason why enterprise IT faces the Integrator’s Dilemma.
Digital media has become a primary source of information consumption these days. In reflection of that, the digital marketing vendor landscape has just exploded! Gartner Analyst, Andrew Frank, has this very cool infographic that lays out a digital marketing transit map to demonstrate how complex the technology web has become. Social media has become a large component for digital content promotion and distribution. Content consumers are consuming as well as redistributing it along with their opinions on it. Tremendous amounts of insights are hidden in these social channels. And, the velocity at which the content is created and shared is growing exponentially.
Harvesting these insights with integration technologies is becoming a high priority for the CIO. Unfortunately for traditional integration technologies, social data is unstructured data and the majority of enterprise IT data stores are relational databases. For example, a structured table made up of a rows and columns is not flexible enough to handle free-form text and images that make up data created on social channels such as Facebook and LinkedIn. Traditional integration technologies were either purpose-built for moving large data sets in scheduled batches (ETL) or moving small volumes of data in real-time (EAI). Neither technology is suitable for this new world of unstructured information. This explosion of social data is posing the integrator?s dilemma to enterprise IT where their existing EAI and ETL tools are no longer capable of handling the volume, velocity, and unstructuredness of the data.
To learn more on how to address this dilemma, I encourage you to download and read this whitepaper. You can also review my views on how Big Data is impacting the Integrator’s Dilemma in my WIRED.com blog post.
