I’ve seen it up close three times in as many years …

…an IT leader goes out on a limb to get funding for a shit-hot new enterprise integration platform.

turns out, they were sold a bill of goods – it is a multiple of the expected cost, painful to stand up and nowhere near as agile as the sales weasel promised

…their justification for the purchase fades away. In an effort to rationalize the purchase, every IT and business project is forced to consider this new platform, solutions start to come out of IT instead of out of the business

…the business owners and sponsors of projects of are sold the same bill of goods, suffer the same disappointment …

I was just looking over reviews of Integration tools by Gartner ans Forrester … pretty scary.

Two faults with the Gartner report:

The exclusion of open source contenders Pentaho and Jasper – Gartner does qualify that they only analyze tools from companies with minimum revenue or minimum number of production customers – While Pentaho may not yet have 300 subscribers to the commercial version (I have worked for two companies that do or .67% of the threshold), I’d bet just about anything that there were way over 300 customers supported by the community in 2007 when the Gartner report came out.

The other flaw with the Pentaho report is in their naming of the report – they review monolithic ENTERPRISE data integration tools with ENTERPRISE criteria but title their report Magic Quandrant for Data Integration Tools, 2007.

The Forrester Wave™ Evaluation of the Enterprise ETL Market is more appropriately named but kinda scary … I don’t know much about Forrester, but recognizing OWB as an option is a joke and Pervasive is given some credit – while pretty powerful, Pervasive is just a mash of some small scale tools – last time I used it, it requires multiple different scripting languages depending on the part of the suite you were in!