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December 8, 2009

what's so magic about Gartner's latest Magic Quadrant update?

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Gartner recently updated their Magic Quadrant (MQ) for data integration tools and with the exception of one new vendor, who was included based on their free download open source business practices, little has changed, including the top right-hand quadrant. As you would expect, the MQ leadership quadrant continues to be controlled by Informatica and IBM DataStage, who've become the safe bets, not because these tools are innovative and/or affordable, but because they represent the status quo.

I have stated in a number of earlier blogs that there is no doubt in the eyes of industry analysts, pundits, and vendors alike that the tides are changing in favor of much more affordable data integration tools like expressor. Based on that premise, you should expect that the MQ picture will look totally different three years from now.

Back to Gartner's MQ: the MQ inclusion criteria are that a vendor must generate at least $20 million of annual software license revenue from data integration tools or maintain at least 300 maintenance-paying customers for their data integration tools. Although expressor is aggressively expanding its customer base on a quarter by quarter basis, neither of these two inclusion criteria applies to us yet. To accelerate the process we could always open-source our code and charge for support, but would that help us execute on our vision? I don't think so. Our company's mission is to truly redefine data integration by developing and marketing a next-generation data integration system based on breakthrough usability and a metadata-driven semantic foundation. And in our opinion, open source and breakthrough usability just don't go together well! Our end user is not a Java developer.

Our goal is not to develop yet another me-too product but a revolutionary system with a totally new data integration paradigm that overcomes the fundamental deficiencies of today's ETL and data integration tools (including the open source tools). In this context, let me highlight some of the key issues with today's technologies that we are addressing with our solution:

  • All ETL tools (with the exception of expressor) map data directly from sources-to-targets. When you make changes to your sources or targets, or you map existing sources to new targets, you are forced to start all over again.

  • None of the existing data integration tools offers a viable concept of reuse. Since all your mappings are tied to source and target metadata, all your business rules are tied to physical metadata. So if your physical metadata changes, for whatever reason, you end up writing and testing the same rules over and over again.

  • All current systems - including open source tools - require very expensive ETL developer/programmer resources, and every other role involved in the data integration process is an afterthought. Lately, you hear the likes of Informatica claiming that they also focus on business users, data analysts, and other non-developers. But what's clear is that they really can't because their metadata foundation is geared towards technical users, not business users.

    • I could go on telling you about all the limitations of existing ETL and DI technologies. It's hard to believe, but even MQ-leading quadrant DI tools still have issues handling complex (XML) data and are challenged by throughput performance tests. So you ask why? The short answer is that today's leading data integration tools (Informatica, etc) have been built on 15-year old architectures for metadata management and data processing. It's as simple as that!

    In case you didn't know, expressor was recognized earlier this year by Gartner as a Cool Vendor in Data Management and Integration due to our strong, innovative meta-driven solution. Gartner analysts are very favorable towards our unique, patent-pending approach to data integration and they are being briefed frequently by us on our product roadmap and aggressive customer acquisition goals for this year and 2010. Watch our space.

    - Michael Waclawiczek, VP marketing

    Posted by expressor software at December 8, 2009 12:45 PM

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