Which integration solution is best for a company that wants to integrate systems between sales, marketing, and project development operations systems?

Abe,

The first thing that you should understand to set expectations properly is that there is no magic bullet. As a former partner of mine wisely said, the biggest V of data is "V-Integration."  =).  Every single integration tool that we have reviewed or worked with has a significantly incomplete inventory of integrations, although they will never admit that. Why is this? Quite simply because integrations depend on the tools that are used, the versions that are used, and the way that these tools have been customized. Add to that the fact that the tools are being updated all the time, and new tools are appearing and being applied at the LOB level, and it is pretty much impossible to keep up. So, integration vendors are forced to assign limited R&D resources to work on the most popular integrations and pretend that this is representative of all of the others that exist. What is one to do then? You need to take an inventory of the applications that are specific to your situation. Then when you evaluate vendors, you need to ask them to demonstrate those integrations specifically and provide references of customers who are actually using them successfully. If you are lucky, you will have modern versions of popular applications that have RESTful APIs, and this should make your job a lot easier. In terms of approach, you have two options: use an integration tool (e.g. MuleSoft, Boomi, Apigee, or larger vendors such as Informatica, or Oracle) to connect your applications together. The other approach, which we favor, is to commit to a data platform (our chosen vendor after a lot of research was Cinchy) and bring everything into that platform (in priority order over time) to give you a lot more flexibility and efficiency over the long term. The reason that we eventually came to this conclusion is that so many integration activities start with the assumption that integration tools will do the trick and end up as largely custom integration projects once the true capabilities of the integration partner are understood. Hope this helps!

Hi Abe,  before talking about the integration tools , i would recommend  you to prepare a source system understanding document. This to cover : i. type of source system  ( ie rdbms / nosql/api/etc) ii. nature of data that you plan to pull along with the volume iii. frequency of data pull...... these questions will form the baseline for your selection process and then you can start with your integration journey. Next step will be do feature comparison per tool . Do let me know if you need more information. Thanks

Hi,
If you are looking for an enterprise Integration solution then IBM CP4I on OpenShift is the best for an on-prem environment. Red Hat® OpenShift® Container Platform can provide a highly available foundation for running integrations.

Hello Abe! Like the comments of other friends, more information is needed about your requirements, but if you want to suggest an ETL tool in the cloud, I recommend Data Factory. It is an ELT/ETL tool that can plug into multiple sources and send your data to multiple destinations.

Hi Abe, I would require a few more details on your requirements. However, with your current request, I would like to recommend Maiora's DO IT RIGHT (DiR) which is a lightweight ETL tool. 

DiR helps you to integrate data from various sources and departments. Also, perform data quality checks, standardization checks, check for data duplication and transform data. You can extract the required results in any file format, such as Excel, SAS, JSON, and many more. 

DiR is a user-friendly ETL tool that does not require much technical knowledge to perform any activity. Also, it has a good user interface that can be further simplified as per your requirements and usage. Considering you are a university, this tool is efficient and very cost-effective.