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November 19, 2009
changing the rules of the game
Over the past two weeks we briefed analysts at Gartner Group, Forrester Research and TDWI about our business coming off a strong quarter. End user customers looking for data integration solutions are fortunate to have these analysts. They are smart, work hard and really make an effort to understand IT challenges particularly as it relates to being responsive to the business. So I asked them all a simple question: "What is the biggest problem out there? Is it handling exploding volumes of data? Is it processing complex data? Is it providing tools that enable best practices? Is it providing usable solutions for non-technical users? I was hoping for a few yeses, since expressor addresses all of these pain points. I got a different answer - "it's cost." Data Integration vendors charge too much for their software!
You'd think there would be an easy answer to that. Let's just drop the price and we'll sell more volume. But software vendors don't think that way. Take the recent dialogue between our VP of marketing and his equivalent at Talend: http://blog.expressor-software.com/data-integration/expressor-and-talend-debate-pricing-models-transparency/. Talend wants to compete with the big guys and play by their rules. After all, data integration is really hard, and customers like to do many POCs over many months and blah, blah, blah. Where's the innovation here?
All vendors should be committed to changing buying behavior by making data integration simple and extremely usable by making the hard things easy and the impossible things possible. And then charge a fair price. My hunch is that more customers will buy and they'll buy quicker.
-- Bob Potter, president and CEO
Posted by expressor software at November 19, 2009 12:15 PM
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