We’ve been considering a sort of Customer Data Hub to work along with the integration hub in our platform and i came across an excellent article by Chris Mc titled “Customer Data Integration: What the EII, ETL and DQ Don’t want you to know“. In the introduction, he says
“In the last few years, enterprises have added several tools to their IT data integration toolbox to improve the return on their CRM investments. Yet, most of these companies have not achieved a simple goal: to create reliable, unified views of their customers – aggregated across data silos – and deliver these to all customer-facing applications in a timely fashion. Recently, companies have turned to three common technologies to create solutions for customer data integration. These are data movement tools such as Extract-Transform-Load (ETL), data query and aggregation tools such as Enterprise Information Integration (EII) and Data Quality (DQ) tools. However, what the tool vendors aren’t telling you is that these tools are woefully inadequate for developing a reliable Customer Data Integration (CDI) platform. “
Chris then goes on to explain the key considerations involved in building the Customer Data Hub and where EII etc have traditionally fallen short. His discussion struck a chord with me as i have just started to pull together some of the requirements to look at product/bespoke options. For veterans in the field, there may not be any earthshaking revelations here, but its a nice compilation of things to think about.
He didnt explicitly say anywhere who he works for but there are a couple of posts about Siperian and it appears he works for them. However, much to his credit, he does not actually plug the Siperian product anywhere (but if you look through the article carefully, you will find that the proposed architecture for a ‘comprehensive’ CDI Hub matches what Siperian is offering)
The resource library on the Siperian site is also very informative and I’m definitely going to look into their product for our project. If you are considering such a solution in your architecure, take a look at the article. Even if you want to build a bespoke solution, this has some good points.