Providing a unified enterprise-wide data platform that feeds into consumer applications and meets the integration, analysis and reporting users’ requirements is a wish that often involves significant time and resource consumption. As an alternative to developing a data warehouse for physical integration of enterprise data, the article presents data virtualization technology. There are presented its main strengths, weaknesses and ways of combining it with classical data integration technologies. Current trends in data virtualization market reveal the great potential of growth of these solutions, which appear to have found a stable place in the portfolio of data integration tools in companies.