February 25, 2009
Introduction to Expressor Software
I’ve chatted a few times with marketing chief Michael Waclawiczek and others at data integration startup Expressor Software. Highlights of the Expressor story include:
- Expressor was founded in 2003 and funded in 2007. Two rounds of funding raised $16 million.
- Expressor’s first product release was in May, 2008; before that Expressor built custom integration tools for a couple of customers.
- Michael believes Expressor will have achieved 5 actual sales by the end of this quarter, as well being in 25 “highly active” sales cycles.
- Whatever Expressor’s long-term vision, right now it’s selling mainly on the basis of performance and affordability.
- In particular, Expressor believes it is superior to Ab Initio in both performance and ease of use.
- Expressor says that parallelism (a key aspect of data integration performance, it unsurprisingly seems) took a long time to develop. Obviously, they feel they got it right.
- Expressor is written in C, so as to do hard-core memory management for best performance.
- Expressor founder John Russell seems to have cut his teeth at Info USA, which he left in the 1990s. Other stops on his journey include Trilogy (briefly) and then Knightsbridge, before he branched out on his own.
Expressor’s real goals, I gather, have little to do with the performance + price positioning. Rather, John Russell had a vision of the ideal data integration tool, with a nice logical flow from step to step, suitable integrated metadata management, easy role-based UIs, and so on. But based on what I saw during an October visit, most of that is a ways away from fruition.
Categories: Analytic technologies, Data integration and middleware, EAI, EII, ETL, ELT, ETLT, Expressor, Market share and customer counts
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4 Responses to “Introduction to Expressor Software”
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Wanted to follow up on your blog summarizing your perspective on expressor, specifically on expressor’s performance and my vision for a next-generation DI system.
As you mentioned, I did spend years designing and implementing our parallel data processing engine. And I believe we got it right –- which should make expressor faster than anything out there today and for years to come.
Your analysis that my passion/vision is building a data integration system from the ground up is spot on. I started expressor to fix the flaws I found as a user of many other systems over the years, and I believe we’re well underway toward getting there in short order.
Regarding your October visit, what you saw then was our version 1.1 product, a maintenance release of expressor 1.0, which was released in July ‘08. I agree with you that 1.1 still had its share of rough edges, but I believe we’ve smoothed over or filled in many of those in the eight months since our initial product release.
For example, we’ve improved our GUI tools’ usability and functionality based on feedback from customers and partners, and are rolling out two new tools for semantic rationalization and metadata reporting in expressor 1.3, which we’ll announce at the end of March.
expressor 1.3 will also include new runtime features, enhancements, and new motors (connectors) in response to customer requests and things I want to do to enhance our real-time data integration infrastructure. We are working today on a number of interesting real-time opportunities including a very exciting cloud computing opportunity, and as expected there are new requirements we are addressing with every new engagement.
So while we’re still working on a fully realized implementation of the expressor product vision, I’m pleased with the progress we’re making toward that goal and look forward to sharing our progress with you again soon.
John Russell
expressor chief scientist
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