Integration tool

We are trying to evaluate different vendors for ETL tool.

Here is some of our requirements and the list is growing.
Scheduler
Monitoring
Monitor the actual error data set
Auto recovery of failed Jobs
Alerts
Integration with 3rd parties
Sales Force
Facebook
Google
Financial Software like Net Suite
Provide Packages as Service
Cluster and Job Distribution
New components and Tasks
Lookups, Validation, & Functions in mapping
Hardware maintenance - should be light
Performance
Caching
Data Partioning with Microsoft SQL - Do any of you know whether this is possible with SSIS? Meaning, the tool will figure out on what criteria the target table is partitioned and insert the rows to the partitions directly without any additional logic/configuration!!!!
Change Data Capture using Data Streams (Transaction Logs) - Is this really a integration tool stuff or just Database functionality?
Transactional
Size of the transaction
Size of the Read/Write
Support for executing
Architecture
Sharing the Data source
Maplets - Have any of you heard about this? What this is, basically reusing just the mapping.
Version
Deployment
Generation of Metadata?
Re-usable Libraries

I am in favor of using SSIS that does most of it, Can any body tell whether the tools you used supported above features. We are looking at Pervasive, Cast Iron, Talend, Boomi, and Informatica.

Any body has any good experience with any of above.

Thanks,
Nachi

I'm a big fan of Informatica. You seem to have a good grasp on the operational aspects (i.e. moving data, writing mappings, etc.) of developing ETL. I'm not sure if you appreciate the importance your last grouping, Architecture. This is where a metadata driven tool will outshine a non-metadata based tool. Additionally, Informatica add ons provide a holistic suite of tools needed for data warehousing including data quality, MDM, test data generation, metadata, and so on.

Data partitioning is handled in the database. All you need to do is define the tables correctly and the database inserts the data in the correct partition.

Don't forget availability of resources & skills.

Depending on your geographic location, access to experienced resources may be challenging and/or expensive. If you are planning on training internal staff, then you may need to consider accessability and cost of training.

I'm also a big fan of Informatica. It is truly and enterprise class ETL tool and finding good contract resources on and off shore has never been a problem.

Disclaimer: I work for an IBM business partner in Australia. Your description looks more like cloud based integration rather than traditional ETL Data Warehouse integration. This would make Cast Iron a better fit than ETL tools as it has the integration for sites like SalesForce and Google Apps and as an integration appliance it may be more secure than an ETL server to breaches from outside the company. It offers re-usable mappings via the hundreds of templates already built such as customer integration between SalesForce and SAP that could help map and load data from SalesForce to a Warehouse in a couple weeks. Cast Iron isn't as functional as ESB or enterprise ETL in terms of application integration and Data Warehousing so it can be used as the cloud integration layer for ESB and ETL tools.

DataStage is the IBM enterprise ETL tool - it has an SOA pack and a SalesForce Connector for private/public cloud base data integration and its XML transformation and relational transformation functions are very good. From your description I get the feeling DataStage and Informatica are overkill for this requirement. ETL tools like these are very flexible and can be used across Data Warehousing, migrations and interfaces so if you had more use cases the ETL platform becomes more valuable.

SSIS will do most of what you want.
You can also go to www.codeplex.com to get SSIS add-ins such as specific connectors to SalesForce.com etc

A former colleague of mine, James Beresford, has built a package to allow metadata driven ETL in SSIS. Check out http://www.bimonkey.com/ His code is also available on codeplex.

If you've already got SQL Server, I wouldn't spend money on another ETL package unless there is a real need to.

Thanks all for your input. Sorry for the delayed reply.

We ended up purchasing Pervasive Data Integrator.

BoxesAndLines,
We looked at Informatica and liked it then anything else out there. Since it was way too expensive then what we planned for we didn't buy it.

Pervasive has support for Data quality and meta data. For MDM we are going to use SQL 2008. I missed the test data generation part so we will live without it.

LAndrews,
Good point about skills. We are going to train internal resources because they showed lot of interest in it.

spothr,
Thanks for the suggestion.

vmcburney,
We looked at Cast Iron and it was on par with Pervasive. We went with Pervasive due to cost reasons again. Otherwise both the tools had all the functionalities we wanted.

Mr Simon,
I like SSIS. I had downloaded most of the plugins from codeplex and used it. I also tried the trial versions from Pragmmatic works and Cozyroc. But, I was in a situation to buy something other than using SSIS for all other integration needs other than Data Warehouse. So we ended up buying a new tool.

To be honest Pervasive and all these other tools do have some advantage over SSIS. SSIS is very less expensive but not friendly for non-tech people who can do few integration without tech involvement.

Thankyou all for the time and valuable comments,
Nachi