You obviously haven’t read much in this blog.

You also obviously haven’t read Justin Swanhart of Kickfire’s suggestion that I get out of the industry due to what he perceived as my negativity about Kickfire, or else you haven’t read my multiple mentions of the fact that Kickfire is a client.

Indeed, it would be hard for you to find a client I write about regularly I don’t from time to time say negative things about. Of the top of my head, for example, I can recall things I’ve written disagreeing with marketing messages from Netezza, Microsoft, Greenplum, Aster, and Vertica, all of whom are clients.

But thank you for mentioning that your company, whoever they are, is interested in further discussions with Expressor at some point down the road.

As far as Expressor is concerned, tt would seem they have a different execution model that seems to be partner driven, probably a reason why they are announcing partners. Their partners do seem to be high quality and are specific to the space they intend to go after.

My company looked at Expressor, and continue to watch them, it has a lot of potential. We may not be ready to move forward now, we just paid a full years maintenance with our current ETL vendor, but we thought it was certainly a vendor to watch and will engage again with them later in the year.

Sir, do you have anything positive to say about any of the vendors you write about? You seem to be very misinformed about a lot of the companies you have covered and their representatives seem to be correcting you. Perhaps the negativity is a consequence if these vendors have retained you or not!

Roger

As for your questions whether we’re selling anything or offering anything the market cares about – the answer is yes, in both cases. I alluded to our customer acquisition momentum last time we talked (in February at TDWI in Las Vegas) and we are progressing very nicely on that trajectory. In fact, several of our customers are acting as private references and were interviewed by Gartner as part of the research that resulted in expressor being recognized as a 2009 Cool Vendor in data management and integration.

You haven’t seen any customer announcements from expressor for two main reasons. First, most of our customers are G2000 accounts with one or more entrenched ETL/DI vendors already in place. And as expected, they are not inclined to upset their existing vendor relationships yet as they rely on these vendors to support their deployed applications. Second, as you know, many large companies have stringent PR policies in place making it difficult to receive public endorsements, particularly for a startup like expressor. We are fully aware of the importance of customer announcements and are working to share our successes with you and other industry watchers ASAP.

As for the value of what we’re offering, I can say that customers, prospects and partners have told us they believe the key benefits of our solution are data processing performance, our ability to efficiently process complex data, our new and innovative approach to semantic data integration, and the fact that we are 60 – 80% less expensive than their incumbent DI solutions. We are definitely being “invited to the party,” and are working on a dozen or so POC engagements at the moment. But you don’t need to just take my word for it. Earlier this week, in response to a blog he posted about next-generation DI solution vendors like expressor making gains against the established vendors, analyst Philip Howard of Bloor Research said that he had received a private comment about his article from a major organization looking to move from Ab Initio to expressor (http://www.it-director.com/technology/data_mgmt/content.php?cid=11366).

Finally, regarding our user interface, we believe that our role-based UI approach is a major strength, and we are rapidly evolving our tools and platform based on end-user and partner feedback. We’ve just released expressor 2.0, and have received very positive feedback on it from analysts across the industry (http://www.expressor-software.com/bloor-report-on-expressor-v2.htm).

So I would say that we definitely are accomplishing something!

Dr. Michael Waclawiczek
VP of Marketing
expressor software