This is an important question which I’d like to address in this blog.  As some of you may already know expressor is primarily targeting medium size SMBs and departmental projects in Global 2000 enterprises.

Important sectors in this market are Microsoft-centric SQL Server accounts that are using Microsoft SSIS for standard ETL tasks.  expressor commonly complements their SSIS usage for high-performance BI / data warehousing and other complex data integration initiatives.   In a majority of these accounts, traditional data integration vendors like Informatica and open source ETL vendors aren’t even considered by these companies for two primary reasons:  cost in case of Informatica and the Java-centric nature of products like Talend.  expressor however fits extremely well into these environments, as our highly affordable data integration product is built around Microsoft Office tools including Visio and Excel and optimized for SQL Server and other Microsoft applications.

In more heterogeneous and complex data integration environments, we are more likely to compete with Informatica and Talend — and with Ab Initio and IBM DataStage on occasion.  Talend’s strategy is to chase every Informatica opportunity and try to beat them on price, because that’s the only thing they can really compete on.  We believe that Informatica is and remains to be the better data integration tool than Talend both in terms of features and usability.

So here comes expressor, who is increasingly spoiling the party for these two vendors.   Our expressor 2.3 product beats Informatica and Talend hands down on performance and processing of complex data today — we have not lost a single POC against these guys in these kinds of situations.  As it regards software license and maintenance costs, I have blogged several times in the past that expressor is between 60 – 80% less expensive than Informatica and that we even beat Talend on price in typical project scenarios.

We will be heating up the competitive battlefield even further with our upcoming expressor 3.0 release later this year.   With 3.0 we will be rolling out a brand new Studio version of our product that will allow you to perform a multitude of standard data integration tasks at no charge.  Our premium expressor 3.0 offering will include a host of new innovative capabilities and will feature significant UI and usability improvements to make it the easiest enterprise-class data integration product to download, use, and maintain on the market.

These are exciting times for expressor and the entire data integration industry.

Michael Waclawiczek, VP of Marketing, expressor software