According to one of the latest researches by Aberdeen Group, issues with customer data may greatly affect organizations’ sales and marketing efforts. Besides, lack of trusted customer data and inability to target customers through customer data proved to be the top two of those issues, according to the respondents’ opinion.

This reveals the fact, that there’s still a lack of customer data integration and data quality at many organizations.

This seems strange to me, especially taking into account that experts have been talking a lot about the importance of customer data integration across the enterprise to give all the responsible a better view on who are their customers, what do they need and buy.

Even in a rather small company there could be several sources containing customer data, and not obviously those sources contain similar records, so customer data integration is the means to piece together the data puzzle.  Probably, mergers the number of which was significant in 2009 prevented numerous organizations from fulfilling their customer data integration initiatives.

Well, the fact is that more than 60 percent of Aberdeen’s survey respondents named customer data integration and other customer data initiatives among their top priorities for 2010.

When migrating data to the cloud, ensuring data quality is essential.  Data can’t be taken to the cloud as is, so before starting data migration, provisions should be made for data quality.

It’s wrong to start data migration, until data is checked to be accurate, complete, duplications are found and cleared up, etc. Otherwise, data issues will be taken to the cloud, which will make it inconvenient to work with the data.

One more thing to be taken into account before beginning data migration process is a provider’s possibility to provide fresh, real-time data, and give constant access to the data.

Normally, companies have best practices for data quality. Cloud providers also have tools for data management, so when those tools and company’s best practices are united, it makes data management more flexible, and thus a company will have possibility to control data quality when data is migrated to the cloud.

According to multiple predictions and publications, 2010 is going to become quite an interesting year for open source data integration.

Here, as you may remember, Gartner has proclaimed open source solutions “good enough” for data integration (extract, transform, and load, to be exact), and a bit later has mentioned (at last!) open source data integration and BI vendors in its Magic Quadrant, thus admitting that open source solutions can be mature enough to meet their functionality requirements.

Though sometimes there are still talks about the need to have skilled developers at hand, for the sake of support and maintenance, it seems that open source data integration tools move closer to becoming a mainstream, and not just a cheap alternative (with limited possibilities) to proprietary data integration solutions.

Proprietary BI and Data integration vendors seem to admit this fact, as, according to Gartner, some of them have introduced free “starter editions” of their solutions.

All this brings us hopes that times, when open source data integration tools were regarded just offerings for small and mid-sized businesses, are passing, and open source offerings will gain the right to be deployed in large enterprises alongside commercial proprietary BI solutions.