The most recent TDWI webinar had a guest analyst, David Loshin of Knowledge Integrity. The presentation was sponsored by Liaison and that company’s speaker was Manish Gupta. Given that Liaison is a cloud provider of data integration, it’s no surprise that was the topic.

David Loshin gave a good overview of the basics of data integration as he talked about the growth of data volumes and the time required to manage that flow. He described three main areas to focus upon to get a handle on modern integration issues:

• Data Curation
• Data Orchestration
• Data Monitoring

Data curation is the organization and management of data. While David accurately described the necessity of organizing information for presentation, the one thing in curation that wasn’t touched upon was archiving. The ability to present a history of information and make it available for later needs. That’s something the rush to manage data streams is forgetting. Both are important and the later isn’t replacing the former.

The most important part of the orchestration Mr. Loshin described was in aligning information for business requirements. How do you ensure the disparate data sources are gathered appropriately to gain actionable insight? That was also addressed in Q&A, when a question asked why there was a need to bother merging the two distinct domains of data integration and data management. David quickly pointed out that there was no way not to handle both as they weren’t really separate domains. Managing data streams, he pointed out, was the great example of how the two concepts must overlap.

Data monitoring has to do with both data in motion, as in identifying real-time exceptions that need handling, and data for compliance, information that’s often more static for regulatory reporting.

The presentation then switched to Manish Gupta, who proceeded to give the standard vendor introduction. It’s necessary, but I felt his was a little too high level for a broader TDWI audience. It’s a good introduction to Liaison, but following Mr. Loshin there should have been more detail on how Liaison addresses the points brought up in the first half of the presentation – Just as in a sales presentation, a team would lead with Mr. Gupta’s information, then the salesperson would discuss the products in more detail.

Both presenters had good things to say, but they didn’t mesh enough, in my view, and you can find out far more talking to each individually or reading their available materials.