When Does Enterprise ETL Make Sense?

When Does Enterprise ETL Make Sense?: "For customers in richly heterogeneous environments, especially those who are consolidating information from dozens (or even hundreds) of different data sources or applications into an operational data store or data warehouse, an ETL tool from an Ascential, Informatica, or another enterprise ETL vendor makes a great deal of sense. Data integration pure-plays such as Ascential and Informatica, especially, provide canned support for all major relational databases, along with pre-built adapters for many different enterprise application suites (such as Oracle, SAP, and Siebel), and connectivity to a variety of different non-relational or semi-structured repositories.

Why, then, aren�t enterprise ETL tools used in some organizations? The biggest issue, analysts say, is price: All of this connectivity, coupled with (in the case of Ascential and Informatica) parallel-processing capabilities, metadata management, the ability to perform sophisticated transformations, and the availability and reliability safeguards associated with the extraction, transformation, and loading of data, can cost a customer beaucoup bucks."