In April, Expressor Software visited the Boulder BI Braintrust (BBBT) and spent a few hours taking us through their story. Positioning themselves as a provider of high performance semantic data integration software, Expressor shipped their first commercial release in May of 2008 and are targeting Global 2000 and government entities in the US and EMEA. With $16M in funding, and an executive team with experience in the market from firms such as IBM, BEA, Informatica, Knightsbridge and Ab Initio, Expressor has built a foundation that will allow them to attack the market aggressively, selling price performance for data integration .
Expressor’s pricing is aggressive, based on what they call “channels” (units of parallel processing), and they have a calculator to help determine how many will be needed to achieve customer requirements for throughput and latency. It’s easy to add additional channels; a software switch is flipped and on you go. Making it easy to do business with them is a focus, which will stand them in good stead competing with other vendors for complex data integration, such as ab initio, whose sales process is often off-putting with prospects.
Expressor hopes to leverage partners as a key sales channel. They’re also targeting data warehouse appliance (DWA) vendors and see powerful leverage there; some DWA sales involve more costs for the feeder software than for the appliance itself. Complex data integration projects also very often involve systems integrators – TDWI studies have documented this recently – so the go to market strategy is a sound one considering that their price structure will not support a large enterprise direct sales force.
While the products are in early stages of development, Expressor’s approach appears promising. Basing their flow on defining semantic definitions using a variety of software assists to match and rationalize data elements, Expressor effectively decouples some early design work from the physical connections. This allows business-savvy analysts to be at work in the early stages of projects – which often is not the case, resulting in expense and delays. Expressor has a role-based approach to the individual tools, so data analysts, architects, and administrators each have their own – and all sit atop a common metadata repository, eliminating complex hand-offs and error-prone translations.
The BBBT conversation included some lengthy asides about effective use of memory architectures and subtle differences between programming languages that Expressor asserts underpins their performance advantage. They claim some recent wins over ab initio, who they see as a key competitor for their custom-code based target market sector.
This is a young product, and the team shared a development roadmap that will continue to enhance it through the next several releases. But with its emerging partnerships (some significant ones to be announced in Q2), an upcoming product release before the end of Q2, and some early reference customers in place, indications are that Expressor will be a factor in the market in 2009, and one to watch.
Is there any update for Expressor?
Is this software too good to be true?
Eric,
We would be more than happy to update you on our company and our semantic data integration system. Please drop us a brief note at info@expressor-softwareDOTcom (replace “DOT” with “.”) and we can take it from there. And/or register for our upcoming Nov 19 webinar on building an affordable, end-to-end data integration lifecycle solution to learn more about our product and partnership with X88.
Dr. Michael Waclawiczek
VP, Marketing
expressor software
expressor software just announced expressor 3.0, a next major version of its affordable data integration platform. Version 3.0 features a brand new, free data integration application, expressor Studio, which you can download from http://www.expressorStudio.com.
I haven’t discussed this release with Expressor. But I’m always in favor of trying it yourself, and the firm makes that possible with the download. If you are a reader of this blog and test it, let me know what you find.
Has the focused shifted for Expressor offering to be purely for the Microsoft server market?
Hi Ryan,
We are primarily focused on the mid-market, which includes the SQL Server market but other markets as well.
Our expressor 3.0 platform ships with high-performance database drivers for Oracle, DB2, SQL Server, Informix, Sybase, PostgreSQL, and MySQL. In addition, expressor includes a generic ODBC driver that allows you to connect to any other ODBC-compliant data source.
Although many of our customers use Oracle and/or SQL Server, we do have several customers who use a data warehouse appliance from either Netezza or Teradata. To that point, one of our recent customer wins is the shoe retailer Skechers, who is building an EDW with expressor and Teradata.
Please feel free to contact me at mwaclawiczek@expressor-software.com if you have any further questions at this point.
Regards,
Michael
See Merv tweeted about this and was in the mood to take a look. It is a weekend so why not put some alternative point of view, may be not the one expressor like. I am following this market for a long time and think can identify the real value vs marketing hype. Expressor would have to sweat a lot to have some serious progress. They have just a few customers they have so far, 5 or 6 that were not heavily discounted. They have just one customer with teradata and may be one or two with netezza and don’t see how their strategy is going to succeed against ‘fake’ open source talend or even pentaho which they both try to eat from same SMB or midmarket plate. Giving away beta was weak and late response to fact that anyone can always download the talend or pentaho . I call them fake OS , especially talend because you would need to pay a bunch of money in order to get enterprise features which are bundled with paid versions only. Don’t see any big difference between french talend or american expressor other than talend has more money in bank and more aggressive in its marketing. expressor is not able use even a patriotic “american fries” sentiment anymore since we are in good relationships with France these days 🙂
There’s a lot in here to comment on, Robert. It’s important to bear in mind that Expressor first shipped only two years ago. It’s garnered some early attention from the analyst community in oart because of a focus on the sizable part of its market (the majority) that relies on hand coding and doesn’t want to invest at the rates larger vendors like ab initio and Informatica – and the megavendors like IBM, Oracle et al charge.
It’s not unusual for early wins to be heavily discounted, even off the lower prices Expressor charges. As for how competition against Talend or Pentaho will go, that’s what the next few years will tell us. Anyone interested in these products should, in my view, have Expressor on their list. Whether they get to the short list or win the business will depend on execution. They’re well funded and early enough that there is room in the market.