Data integration efforts are increasing across most major industries as a result of the demand for real-time globally accessible data, says a study commissioned by Progress Software Corporation from Forrester Consulting.
According to findings, IT professionals are severely challenged in keeping pace still mired in manual processes and ad hoc fixes.
The survey of 407 senior IT decision makers at companies with more than $250 million in annual revenues found that manual efforts remain the dominant approach for integration of data silos. 87 percent of respondents rely on newly developed code to integrate data, while 80 percent still manually change schemas as required. According to the findings, while these percentages will slightly decrease over the next two years, manual processes will continue to trump automation.
“It comes as no surprise that integration remains a significant challenge to IT,” says Hub Vandervoort, CTO, Enterprise Infrastructure Division, Progress Software Corporation. “What is a surprise, however, is IT’s approach to trying to solve these challenges through manual and ad hoc processes. These results are a clear call to action for the vendor community to provide minimally invasive and easy-to-use tools while providing support for data federation without the need for extensive schema changes.”