1 July 2025
Over the past decade, the data integration landscape has undergone a major transformation. This shift has been fueled by a growing demand for agility, scalability and lower cost of ownership—ushering in a new ecosystem of tools. We've journeyed from data warehouses to Hadoop, from data lakes to cloud data warehouses and now the lakehouse architecture beckons.
Challenges with the evolving data technology landscape each shift—from ETL to Hadoop-era data lakes to cloud ELT—has forced system integrators and IT teams to rethink their data strategies from the ground up. But as organizations look to adopt newer platforms, they’re often confronted with a mess of overlapping technologies and mounting technical debt.
IBM Business Parter Dot Group, a UK-based data engineering system integrator with over 27 years of experience, is seeing these challenges firsthand. To help companies overcome these challenges, Dot Group has partnered with IBM to deliver a practical, value-first approach to data integration using IBM® watsonx.data® integration, a modern data integration tool that embeds the full spectrum of data integration capabilities for orchestrating data across formats and pipelines.
“The promise of democratizing data and giving people self-serve access to data never really happened,” says Simon Parkinson, Managing Director at Dot Group. “Most customers we see have ended up with multiple ERPs, ETL tools, databases, BI platforms—and yet, they still have the same ambition of trying to get enterprise insights.”
The result is a challenging environment where teams spend most of their time maintaining existing systems instead of innovating. “Many companies struggle to piece together a step-by-step roadmap to dig themselves out of this cycle,” Parkinson explains. “The question really is: how do you architect that first stepping stone while ensuring that every stepping stone thereafter continues to deliver value?”
In this environment, the biggest challenge isn't just finding the right tools—it's knowing where to start, how to simplify, and how to deliver incremental value without embarking on multi-year transformation projects.
“Tool proliferation is the key here,” Parkinson continues, “customers are looking for one tool that interoperates well, with simple license models, all in one marketplace. IBM watsonx.data integration genuinely feels like customers will be able to start with any singular use case—whether it’s ELT/ETL, data observability, real-time streaming or data replication—and branch out as needed,” explains Parkinson. “Before you had to buy the whole oil tanker. This is much more lightweight and fluid.”
“The idea being customers can license for one part and then effortlessly start mini pilots and POCs for other capabilities without having to go through all of the architecture review boards and procurement processes that become so time-consuming and expensive,” Parkinson shares.
While AI adoption is absolutely a top priority for business leaders across all industries, systems integrators and IT teams remain bogged down by foundational data quality issues. “Our experience is that companies are still stuck in the AI experiment phase because the lack of quality in their data is holding them back,” says Parkinson. “Before they can move to the next phase of AI maturity, they have to first fix their data.”
Once implemented, IBM watsonx.data integration will enable Dot Group and IBM customers to:
“Hopefully, by offering different data integration capabilities within one unified control plane, companies can unlock agility, productivity, and scalability. That, paired, with the new user experience, means your data engineers or data architects won’t need to be experts in seven different tools,” Parkinson continues. “They can be one expert capable of using seven different tools. They can just get going.”
Discover how watsonx.data integration can empower your data teams to accelerate data delivery for AI and analytics with a unified control plane to integrate structured and unstructured data, using any integration style.
Experience IBM watsonx.data integration for free.
About Dot Group
IBM Business Partner Dot Group is a UK-based data engineering system integrator with over 27 years of experience helping organizations manage, move, and optimize their data. Originating from the acquisition of Ascential Software—the original authors of DataStage and Informix—Dot Group has deep technical roots and a long history of working with enterprise-scale data systems.
About Simon Parkinson
Simon Parkinson serves as Managing Director of Dot Group, where he leads the company's expertise in IBM technologies and data engineering solutions. An IBM Champion, Simon specializes in helping organizations eliminate data bottlenecks and transform their data integration strategies to unlock real-time insights and competitive advantage.