I'm not only concerned about hand-coding versus ETL tools; 
I'm also concerned that potential buyers of ETL tools and the market in
general are only looking at a small number of players in the ETL
marketplace.

For many years industry analyst research groups
have identified the top two product vendors: Informatica and IBM (from
its acquisition of Ascential Software). So, naturally, these two appear
on any evaluation shortlist. The rest of the evaluation shortlist
usually includes the bundled products (mentioned in my recent posts)
that come with the databases, BI tools or applications that the
evaluating company already owns. Beyond these usual suspects, other ETL
or data integration products are pretty obscure and almost invisible,
at least from a general market perspective.

>>>Continue this post on The Data Doghouse