Enterprise Data Transformation vs. Simple Mapping

More and more enterprises are adopting distributed, event-driven Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) to improve agility by creating a loosely coupled infrastructure in which Information Technology (IT) assets can be quickly optimized to support changing business goals. However, many organizations are finding their SOA implementations hard to manage and plagued by complexity, as they migrate toward enterprise rollouts encompassing hundreds of applications and services.

Point-to-point mapping tools are hard to scale and manage when requirements change. Physical mapping between applications and services devolves SOA into the same tightly-coupled architecture it was supposed to replace. Each change results in higher maintenance costs because it is unclear what impact that change will have—this lowers IT departments’ productivity as they manually determine the impact of the change, making and testing fixes throughout the production environment. From a compliance and governance perspective, this ‘accidental architecture’ lacks visibility and is hard to adequately control.

The purpose of this document is to arm forward-thinking organizations with enterprise-focused information so they can make informed and intelligent decisions regarding data mapping and integration initiatives. Specifically, this paper contrasts and compares the features and functionalities between Liaison’s Contivo VMS™ and Altova’s MapForce®.