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August 28, 2009
YouTube video on better business practices
Just published another YouTube video segment from the Top 10 reasons to choose expressor series. Click below to see expressor's CEO and president Bob Potter provide an industry veteran's perspective on the business practices of enterprise software vendors.
And click here to download a copy of the Top 10 brochure.
- Steve Casey, marketing
Posted by expressor software at 10:30 AM | Comments (0)
August 21, 2009
Youtube video on lifecycle management for data integration
Just published another YouTube video segment from the Top 10 reasons to choose expressor series. Click below to see Rick Barton of Emunio Consulting talking about lifecycle management for data integration projects.
And click here to download a copy of the Top 10 brochure.
- Steve Casey, marketing
Posted by expressor software at 1:30 PM | Comments (0)
August 20, 2009
Buying the farm
Buying the farm
Couldn't resist jumping into the Ab Initio discussion over on IT Toolbox. Click here to catch up and feel free to join in.
- john russell, chief scientist and co-founder
Posted by expressor software at 11:45 AM | Comments (0)
August 17, 2009
Why business users need to have a seat at the table
Have you ever had an ETL developer explain to you what exactly the business problems are that their non-technical (business) counterparts need to solve and you'll get a bunch of answers, some true, some made up on the fly, and some based on tidbits of information they got from various people on the project.
You ask yourself why this is the case, and the simple answer is the technical folks often are just too far removed from what's happening in the business and what the business really needs. Don't get me wrong, the same thing happens in my industry, where brilliant developers create commercial software they envision meets a customer's need and then come to realize that what customers really want is quite a distance away from what they have developed.
This is why the two sides have been struggling for years on how to best communicate between themselves. In fairness, the software industry (in my humble opinion) has made better progress than IT in Global 2000 companies to structure the requirements and software development processes and use tools that facilitate these processes. Wonder why? Put simply, the software industry has had more resources to bring to bear to build up viable product management, development, delivery, and maintenance processes.
IT in many end-user companies is in a different position. They simply have to do too many things with limited and often shrinking budgets and resources. They tend to have more churn, more people coming and going, more projects being staffed by consultants that come and leave after the initial deployment. You get the idea!
This makes it especially difficult developing data integration end-user applications that can be easily maintained, are adaptable to business changes, and offer reusable components for future projects. I challenge you to take a close look at any deployed ETL application years from now and decipher what all the business rules mean that where implemented in the application. Will you be able to go back to a specification sheet that's closer to how business users look at these rules and analyze whether the current application actually does what it is supposed to do? The answer is no - because the original specifications created by business and data analysts (using Excel spreadsheets) do not reflect the actual implementation of these rules any longer by the time they get deployed in a project.
Many of you in business and IT have experienced these kinds of problems many times over but have had little help by commercial data integration software in tackling these very important issues. It is a fact that today's ETL software was built for technical and not business users.
We at expressor are changing that and have developed collaborative, role-based GUI tools that implement and facilitate business-driven data integration. This is not just a cool idea! It's happening. Watch the space!
- Michael Waclawiczek, VP of marketing
Posted by expressor software at 10:15 AM | Comments (0)
August 13, 2009
data integration software pricing gone crazy
I was talking to one of our prospective customers the other day and was reminded again how addictive it is to fall into the enterprise software pricing trap, which is all about extorting every possible dollar out of a client's IT budget so that the vendor can continue with its outdated and outrageous business model.
Whether it is with our direct competitors in the data integration business or any other enterprise software company, the rule of thumb is that the average enterprise sales person can do a maximum of 12 transactions per year (equals one transaction per month). Take an average license sale of 250,000 dollar that implies that the sales person will roughly have to sell 3,000,000 dollars of license software to make his or her annual sales quota. If a company can do that than it can run a profitable company based on a direct sales model.
So, you question, what does a company have to do to achieve an average 250,000 dollars ticket price per transaction? Well, let's look at the likes of our competitors. The version of the story I got had the following 'data integration buffet menu:'
- Charge per CPU (based on the size of the server machine)
- Charge more for 64-bit versions of the software
- Charge more for an advanced edition repository
- Charge more for additional data cleansing and matching
- Charge more for additional data profiling
- Charge more for a grid option package
- Charge more for a high-availability option
- Charge more for a mapping generation option
- Charge more for a metadata exchange option
- Charge more for a partitioning option
- Charge more for a pushdown optimization option
- Charge more for a real-time option
- Charge more for a team-based development option
- Charge more for unstructured data option
- Charge more for a mainframe production license
- Charge more for connectors to source and target systems
And the list goes on and by the way if you add up all the options you are likely going to pay seven (7) figures for a reasonable amount of software to load an average data warehouse or similar.
I am not implying that one shouldn't be charging anything for some of the above capabilities, but the way today's traditional vendors approach their pricing is to create as many options as possible to assure that their sales folks have something to sell to meet their sales quota – whether you can really cost-justify those extra costs or not is really secondary to the vendor's way of thinking.
This line of thinking has permeated our industry for a long time and continues to be the case for many data integration, middleware, database, data warehousing, and other enterprise infrastructure companies. No wonder why even Gartner believes that the software industry has to change and make the costs of data integration software much less expensive. That's what we believe and is one of the reasons of our existence.
- Michael Waclawiczek, VP of Marketing
Posted by expressor software at 3:45 PM | Comments (0)
August 11, 2009
YouTube video on systems integrators and DI
Just published another YouTube video segment from the Top 10 reasons to choose expressor series. Click below to see Robert Scott of Acxius Strategic Consulting talking about the importance of systems integrators to successful data integration projects.
And click here to download a copy of the Top 10 brochure.
- Steve Casey, marketing
Posted by expressor software at 4:00 PM | Comments (0)
August 6, 2009
YouTube video on data integration TCO
Just published another YouTube video segment in the Top 10 reasons to choose expressor series, featuring Dr. David Waddington of The Information Difference exploring how next-generation data integration solutions can lower users' total cost of ownership.
Posted by expressor software at 9:30 AM | Comments (0)
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