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In a highly competitive marketplace, companies are placing increased demands on gathering and analyzing data that will help them make critical business decisions. Enterprise data integration tools are essential in generating actionable insights that organizations must incorporate into their business survival plans. Choosing a product simply because it's full of bells and whistles could be a disaster. That's why it's necessary to follow a time-tested set of rules that determine the software features that best match specific corporate needs.

To start the product evaluation process, gather and prioritize your enterprise data integration requirements. And because there can be so many variables in those requirements, including a mix of structured and unstructured data, it's important to find vendors that can support a variety of integration use cases like ETL processes, application integration, cloud-based and real-time integration as well as data virtualization, cleansing and profiling. Once the software requirements are established, create a list of specific product features and functions that best fit your use cases and budget.