For instance, IBM's willingness to partner with a wide variety of integration vendors has helped make MQSeries ubiquitous as a messaging platform for realtime integration. Partnering is quick, but many integration vendors prefer to build their own functionality so they control its content and release schedule. For instance, many data integration vendors are aggressively developing support for XML, which eventually will be the basis for packaged B2B integration solutions. Mergers and acquisitions broaden EAI product offerings to include more types of integration technologies. DataMirror Corp. and Constellar Corp. are a classic case of complementary vendors merging.
Integration Trends Toward packaged integration solutions.
Much of the success of integration products can be attributed to the fact that it's easier for IT to buy an integration product and configure it to work with existing systems than it is to build an in-house integration system from scratch. Midtier caches for data integration. Hence, an ODS is a midtier data cache that adds value to data by integrating it and by providing high-performance access. ETL tools offer several advantages over general data integration tools, such as complex transformations, aggregate building, flexible work flow, and sophisticated business rules. Most ETL tools are designed around a hub architecture that enables the consolidation of data from multiple sources in a way that application integration technologies cannot.