An increasing number of business users and software applications need to process information that is accessible via multiple diverse information systems, such as database systems, file systems, legacy applications or web services. We describe the Enosys XML Integration Platform (EXIP), a commercial XQuery-based data integration software platform that provides a queryable integrated view of such information. We describe the platform architecture and describe what the main principles and challenges are for the query engine. In particular, we discuss the query engine architecture and the underlying semistructured algebra, which is tuned for enabling query plan optimizations.