When we think of data integration, we rarely think about something like Document Conversion. By this I mean, taking a Microsoft Word document file format (.docx) and converting it into a PDF file format. This is a different type of “Migration” or “Conversion” that integration vendors usually will leave to other more simple, or free [...]

Admit it. Data integration is hard. The evidence is overwhelming. Every company I’ve talked to about their data has data integration problems. It’s not just the IT people that moan about it either, it’s IT users too (lots of them) and the company executives. The world’s data is in a mess almost everywhere. A whole [...]

But having lots of different mark-up standards and thousands of different API standards was also a bad idea for so many reasons. And that’s why XML was invented. In fact, I’d argue that, since the dawn of computing, the only really big innovation in data at the nuts and bolts level, has been XML; the [...]

Of course we need standards, but in many instances they are counter productive and should thus be considered in the context of the value of integration. While this is a tricky and somewhat politically incorrect topic, perhaps it’s something to discuss before taking on your next integration project. I often run into issues where those [...]