Customer data integration can be defined as the process of collecting or assimilating and managing customer information from all the resources that are available. The data so consolidated includes the details of the customer, customer valuation data (the process in which a company evaluates its past data and on its basis selects quite a few customers to augment its profits) as well as information garnered via direct marketing or interaction (for instance through advertising campaign that seeks to obtain an action from specified group of consumers in response to an interaction from the marketer).

Adequately performed customer data integration results in important sections of the company to have constant access to the most current and complete view of customer information available. So customer data integration forms a significant element of customer relationship management. Customer relationship management stands for methodologies; software and often Internet capabilities that enable an enterprise manage customer relationships in a systematic way.

While poor integration of data can endanger ERP, CRM, data warehousing and business intelligence initiatives for the data at the foundation of these efforts does not provide a correct picture of your business.

In order to minimize risk and ensure the delivery of project on time and within budget, it is important to have a proper data integration strategy. Data integration is not confined to matching and linking of data but is also about having an access to right data sources at the right time. Data integration is all about working within a current application atmosphere that leads to good quality information received at new data targets during data migration or combination efforts.

Data integration helps public and private sector organizations in UK to get the most out of their communications infrastructure. There are five major levels of integration that most businesses try to deal with-

1. User interfaces or enterprise portals

2. People or collaboration tools

3. Business processes or business process management systems

4. Enterprise applications integration

5. Data and metadata or extract, transformation and loading, enterprise information integration and enterprise content management tools.

Data integration tools and techniques are important because operational systems have come up everywhere. In recent years various organizations have employed EAI and asynchronous message queuing products from IBM, Sonic Software, Tibco Software and others to maintain operational data.

The ability to integrate data through data integration eradicates a lot of droning, time-intensive processes such as data entry, printing of reports, and manual consolidation and use of data produced by different software applications or other data accumulating or producing technologies.

Point of sales systems, payment processing solutions and bookkeeping systems can also be interfaced via the use of data integration techniques meant to eradicate the need for duplicate entry saving you loads of time and money. Planning for automation and data integration will enable you to enhance your business.

At present data integration solutions provider Informatics has collaborated with the European IT company Bull to establish a reseller, support and integration network spanning Europe, the Middle East and Africa.