It was a close race for Gold in the data integration category, but in the end, judges were most impressed with SAP BusinessObjects Data Services. The product unifies SAP BusinessObjects Data Integrator and SAP BusinessObjects Data Quality Management into a single platform. The vendor boldly states that this enables organizations to access, transform, cleanse, enrich and deliver any type of data (structured or unstructured) from any source to any target at any frequency. It says SAP BusinessObjects Data Services provides a single environment for all data integration and data quality needs -- such as development, metadata, runtime engine, management, security and data connectivity – and is fully Web-services enabled and positioned to support a service-oriented architecture.

Released in April 2008, SAP BusinessObjects Data Services includes many unified controls, according to the company, including single drag-and-drop development interface, single metadata repository, single administration console and one runtime environment to deliver enterprise performance and scalability for data integration and data quality. The company also touts "advanced performance features," including parallelism, pushdown processing, grid computing, table partitioning, native bulk load for most databases, parallel process threads, aggregation, caching techniques, change data capture, and 64-bit architecture support.

The pricing model for Data Services is based on customer segments, so organizations can purchase a package that fits the scale of their project. In addition, BusinessObjects says the pricing model allows the purchase of various product add-ons, so that companies can customize the package to their specific project as their deployment or needs grow over time. According to the submission form, a Starter license for small to medium-sized businesses (SMBs) is priced below $50,000. For midsized and large enterprises, license prices depends on customer requirements. Products are also available in a Software as a Service (SaaS)/on-demand pricing model. And for an integrated small-to-midsized enterprise bundle, Data Services is included in the BusinessObjects Edge Series, which is a complete BI product for small and medium-sized enterprises. More information is available on the SAP BusinessObjects website.