Based upon their Magic Quadrant analysis of data integration tools, Gartner rates Informatica Corp. and IBM as the top software vendors in the space.

Gartner uses a Magic Quadrant to rate companies as leaders, challengers, niche players and visionaries based on several criteria including “completeness of vision” and “ability to execute.”  From Gartner’s website:

• Leaders execute well against their current vision and are well positioned for tomorrow.
• Visionaries understand where the market is going or have a vision for changing market rules, but do not yet execute well.
• Niche Players focus successfully on a small segment, or are unfocused and do not out-innovate or outperform others.
• Challengers execute well today or may dominate a large segment, but do not demonstrate an understanding of market direction.

A post by Mark Brunelli, Senior News Editor, at SeniorDataManagement has a more detailed analysis of the Gartner report.  Here’s what Brunelli wrote, detailing some of the thoughts of Ted Friedman, a Gartner vice president and information management analyst and co-author of the report:

“You’re hearing a lot about big data and analytics around big data,” Friedman said. “To do that kind of stuff you’ve got to collect the data that you want to analyze and put it somewhere. [That] in effect is a job for data integration tools.”

It does seems that the main focus right now in this space is on data handling and data management.  A lot of work is being done by companies to create data visualization tools to gain insight from the data, but as the problems get much harder, better analytics approaches will need to be brought to bear.  The real key over the next few years will be on the smart analysis of all this data, turning the data into reliable actionable information.