SQL Server 2008 delivers on the Microsoft data platform vision by enabling organizations to run their most mission-critical applications while lowering the cost of managing the data infrastructure and delivering insights and information to all users. This platform has the following qualities:

• Trusted — Enables organizations to run their most critical applications with very high levels of security, reliability, and scalability.

• Productive — Enables organizations to reduce the time and cost required to develop and manage their data infrastructure.

• Intelligent — Provides a comprehensive platform that delivers insights and information where your users want it.

Integration Services is a platform for building high performance data integration and workflow solutions, including extraction, transformation, and loading (ETL) operations for data warehousing.  The flexible and extensible architecture of SSIS allows it to address most of the technology challenges to data integration

At its core, SSIS is a comprehensive, fully functional ETL tool. Its functionality, scale, and performance compare very favorably with high-end competitors in the market at a fraction of their cost. The data integration pipeline architecture allows it to consume data from multiple simultaneous sources, perform multiple complex transformations, and then land the data to multiple simultaneous destinations.