Could'nt agree more with Lou Agosta's hypotheses that "Any valid data point is separated from a business problem by a number of degrees of separation" and "....we might call ETL a "degree separator undo-er.""
My experience being that enterprises still have a long way to go before they recognize that ETL is not just about technology and the "back-office" of a warehouse.Most of the investments are made in data-visualization arena , I do recognize that the "front-room" has to be very user friendly and intuitive but that does not mean that we compromise on the investment, technology , infrastructure , quality.
The acquisition of BO by SAP has thrown such a situation for companies who are looking at the BO "end-to-end" solution in my opinion the data integration tool in that stack has a long way to go before they can compete with products from Informatica or IBM.At the same time the BO visualization and dissemination capabilites are well known.
Enterprises who commit to "end-to-end" solution being offered should also concentrate on the ETL piece of the stack and put it through tests before committing to any one solution. because the data integration piece is the backbone of the system and it could adversely impact the future plans if wrong choices are made.
