June 12, 2012
QlikTech bought Expressor
QlikTech has bought Expressor. Notes on that include:
- Expressor wanted to offer data integration/ETL (Extract/Transform/Load) that was all things to all people — great parallel performance, great UI, great price, etc.
- In practice, Expressor seemed to focus on cheap/easy ETL in the Microsoft Windows (I mean server) market.
- Expressor never got much traction. This seems confirmed by the “more than 20” figure for headcount mentioned in the acquisition press release.
- Both the press release and some tweets by QlikTech’s Donald Farmer seem to confirm that Expressor is being taken off the market for “boil the ocean” ETL. It will be companion technology to/integrated technology in QlikView.
- Unsurprisingly, Donald indicated that Expressor technology would expand past its Microsoft focus. (Edit: “If needed”)
Categories: Business intelligence, EAI, EII, ETL, ELT, ETLT, Expressor, Pricing, QlikTech and QlikView
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5 Responses to “QlikTech bought Expressor”
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Very curious to see what QlikTech will do here.
As far as I’m concerned, it’s tough to beat the nimbleness of QlikView’s existing built-in scripting language. It’s basically pure in-memory ETL, so my test cycles are super fast, and in balance I get the job done very quickly. It does lack the visual metaphor, but I’m starting to think that’s overrated and doesn’t necessarily lead to “self documenting code” as some like to say.
If you’re an SSIS 2008 pro, and know how to use the Persistent Cache, you’ll understand where I’m coming from.
I started the day concerned about a buy versus build approach, but this makes good sense. QlikView falls short in the enterprise on metadata, data lineage. It comes up in sales and implementation. Expressor addresses these areas.
In addition, sales demos try to avoid revealing the script language and have long wanted something visual. QlikView needs to seem as easy to get started as its competitors.
Expressor’s Datascript (Lua) language will enable integration with web services and sharing community code. This is too difficult to do in QlikView today.
That’s what I see so far.
There is not only the metadata (business, technical and operational) and integration aspects (SOA, integration with predictive analytics, BI loopback to operational systems) but data quality and poly-structured data also were difficult or almost impossible to address properly with the Qlikview ETL scripting language.
And yes possibly this layer will have some performance impact compared to native scripts until it is optimized. Still it goes towards proven BI practices and addresses in short/medium term the main concerns I had recommending Qlickview for medium size companies.
Next good move? I would spot integration with R and navigation cross models.
Hello – thanks for your comments and your insight. I would like to clarify a few points. The core of the acquisition focuses on Expressor’s semantic framework and metadata-driven capabilities that it brings to QlikView not ETL. This includes data governance, impact analysis, data lineage and a redefined approach to creating metadata for QlikView applications. Having graphical ETL is extra for those who need it or want to use it. In regards to extracting field metadata from QlikView files, we have seen tremendous interest in this from partners. Allowing them to reverse engineer existing QlikView applications. It has given them clarity, enabling them to create this single consistent view of their data assets across multiple customer’s QlikView applications. They have also found it useful when converting “customer designed QlikView application” over to their hosted environment. They reuse what was designed by the customer and map in the new sources of data with QlikView Expressor.
In addition to the current Read and Write QlikView operators, there soon will be available the QlikView Expressor Connector. It can be used to load the data into QlikView from Expressor metadata vs. having SQL and Load Scripts in multiple QlikView files.
Yes there will be more enhancements to this product line shortly.
Overall, it is a solution that fills some gaps and is complimentary to QlikView. So all time invested will not be wasted.
http://community.expressor-software.com/blogs/mtarallo/65-let%92s-not-argue-semantics-%96-i-beg-differ.html
Take care and regards,
Michael Tarallo
QlikTech Sales and Marketing
(formerly Expressor Product Advocate and Pre-Sales Director)
As alternative you may consider using our ETL-Tools QlikView connector. It works directly with 23 data sources has more than 300 data transformation and validation functions plus it has powerful GUI which makes it it easy to design complex data transformations even for new user.
The trial has no limitations and can be downloaded today
http://www.etl-tools.com/etl-tools/qlikview-connector/overview.html
We are constantly adding new functions and data sources
Mike