I never liked the term EII much to describe federated data services such as Oracle Data Service Integrator, so when I read the blog entry “Whatever happened to EII?” by Rob Karel and James Kobielus from Forrester, I felt confirmed in my thoughts.
I agree with the blog in that federation aka EII should not live in isolation; it is best included in both SOA and Data Integration strategic dimensions, as it is one of multiple DI tools to prepare raw enterprise data for consumption, besides data consolidation/replication, as well as data quality and master data management. The other dimension is its placement in a SOA landscape, as it is one of several data service providers from the disciplines of data integration (Data access, data federation, data movement, master data, data quality) to serve the business services in your enterprise architecture.
Just like an ESB or a business process manager are more than EAI, federated data services are more than EII.
In that sense data federation is not a monolithic answer to a problem, but rather as a piece in the puzzle for full data integration.
