Quite a few people have asked me who’s buying our product and why – so I thought I’d share my views with a larger audience.
expressor software was founded on the principle that data integration software should be easier to use and priced in a way that companies could use it for all of their data integration needs, not just the 20 to 30 percent of “high-end” data integration projects. Anyone who’s been to our website or read our blog knows that our software licensing and maintenance costs tend to be 60-80% less than what others charge and that our two primary product differentiators are ”smart semantics” and “breakthrough performance.”
We use smart semantics to describe how expressor maps fields from multiple and diverse external data resources to common business definitions — in order to build a semantic metadata abstraction that enables efficient reuse of business rules and collaborative team development to empower organizations to significantly shorten development time and effort.
Our semantic metadata approach is a huge win for project users such as data analysts, who can create reusable business rules (based on these common business terms) that aren’t tied to the physical metadata of various data sources and targets. Or ETL developers, who can now much more quickly develop and test data integration flows in expressor by relying on data analysts on the project to help them define and create the business and transformation rules governing the application, on data stewards to help them create and maintain the semantic data mappings in expressor, and on data architects to use expressor to specify the data connectivity and data parallelism requirements for the application.
Additionally, expressor has developed easy to use, role-specific GUI tools to facilitate efficient communication and collaboration of project managers, data analysts, data stewards, data architects, and developers participating in a ETL/DI project.
Our breakthrough performance is powered by the fastest parallel processing engine in the industry. expressor can move significantly more data from sources to targets than other ETL/DI systems and is quickly establishing itself as the price/performance market leader. Because of this unique capability, expressor has targeted its earliest sales efforts at Ab Initio customers, many of whom are largely satisfied with the flexibility and speed of their current system, but also very unhappy with the pricing and inflexibility of this eccentric vendor. Our price/performance leadership position now not only allows us to compete against the established players at the high-end of the market but extend our reach to mid-market companies, who have similar data volume and performance demands but can’t afford to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars for an ETL tool, and are forced to continue to hand-code their data integration applications.
It has been easy selling price/performance. The tech industry has loads of vendors that made a business this way. On the other hand, smart semantics has required more education and evangelism, and during our early sales and marketing efforts didn’t give us the immediate gratification we were looking for — but a funny thing happened on our journey. Customers said, “I believe you’re fast and economical, but solve some of my problems that can’t be solved by throwing hardware and money at the problem and then we’ll discuss using expressor as an alternative.”
I’m happy to say we’ve successfully met that challenge – and that smart semantics were the key.
One of our recent wins was with a communications platform company that sells solutions to the healthcare industry. By pre-normalizing the relevant metadata into rationalized, semantic terms that were easily understood by customer service representatives, we could abstract and reuse complex business logic and dynamically change the way an application runs. Using expressor, customer service reps can now load patient record data from multiple sources into a repository for much more accurate and possibly even life-saving healthcare updates.
Another recent expressor win was with a clinical trials outsourcer, who needed to handle complex XML data combinations by normalizing data across nested arrays within the XML document. With smart semantics, we could take the metadata definitions from external specifications and match it to data arriving from internal and external sources – and create new functions for non-technical users – as opposed to coding the logic in transformation functions. The smart semantics rationalization process liberated the company from its reliance on technical ETL developers.
Those are just two recent examples. We also keep a running survey on our web site, asking visitors to choose the single most compelling capability of expressor: smart semantics, breakthrough scalability, total lifecycle management or affordability. Smart semantics is the leading vote-getter by a two-to-one margin over the second choice, breakthrough scalability – 48% to 24%.
So what does this say? Maybe the world is ready for a new way of doing data integration. We don’t intend on marginalizing the ETL developer. We simply think there are a lot of business users and analysts that need to integrate data – and expressor can help.
- Bob Potter, president and CEO
