Expressor
Analysis of Expressor Software and its data integration products. Related subjects include:
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 | 5 Comments |
Is Expressor Software accomplishing anything?
Expressor Software is putting out a ton of press releases to the effect that it has signed up another reseller/systems integration partner or, in some cases, sponsored a webinar. Less clear is whether Expressor is selling much of anything, delivering product people care about, and so on. The one time I visited, Expressor told me that user interface was its strength, then showed me something very primitive and explained — as the famed joke* would have it — how good it was going to be.
*That would be the Thrice-Married Virgin, although I’ve recently seen versions in which the poor unfortunate was married 12 times. The last husband on the list is always a computer or software salesman, who keeps telling her how good it is going to be. I first heard the joke from Flip Filipowski. I decided it must not be too terribly sexist after hearing Sandy Kurtzig tell it to a group of stock analysts.
Am I missing anything major?
Edit: I emailed the company on May 8, asking what Expressor had in the way of customers. There has been no response.
| Categories: EAI, EII, ETL, ELT, ETLT, Expressor, Humor | 9 Comments |
Clearing some of my buffer
I have a large number of posts still in backlog. For starters, there are ones based on recent visits with Aster, Greenplum, Sybase, Vertica, and a Very Large User. I suspect I’ll write more soon on Oracle as well. Plus there’s my whole future-of-online-media area. And quite a bit more will grow out of planned research.
So there are a whole lot of other worthy subjects I doubt I’ll be getting to any time soon. In some cases, of course, other people are doing great jobs of writing about same. Here are pointers to a few links that I am glad to recommend:
- I wrote recently that I’ve discovered a number of different in-memory OLAP engines. Cindi Howson far outdid that, writing at length for Intelligent Enterprise on in-memory analytics, in an article that seems to itself be a teaser for a longer, free white paper on the subject.
- CouchDB posted an eye-catching, risque slide presentation promoting CouchDB and, more generally, key-value stores, at least for internet applications. And yes, they’ve integrated MapReduce.
- Merv Adrian posted favorably about Birst, with special reference to its OEM efforts. As previously noted, I was highly unimpressed with Birst’s end-user BI story at the time of its September roll-out, and Jerome Pineau’s recent examination did nothing to reassure me. But perhaps OEM is a different matter.
- Merv also offers an interesting post about data integration upstart Expressor, and a highly favorable one about “visualization” vendor Tableau.
- Ann All interviewed Nigel Pendse, who grumped that BI features are overrated, and what end users really want is great query performance. I’m not so sure about the features side of that, but I’m hugely in agreement about the performance. That’s a big part of why the analytic DBMS industry is so vibrant. It’s also why in-memory OLAP is suddenly so hot.
Partial overview of Ab Initio Software
Ab Initio is an absurdly secretive company, as per a couple of prior posts and the comment threads on same. But yesterday at TDWI I actually found civil people staffing an Ab Initio trade show booth. Based on that conversation and other tidbits, I think it’s fairly safe to say: Read more
| Categories: Ab Initio Software, Analytic technologies, Benchmarks and POCs, Data integration and middleware, EAI, EII, ETL, ELT, ETLT, Expressor, Pricing, Talend | 14 Comments |
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 | 4 Comments |
Expressor pre-announces a data loading benchmark leapfrog
Expressor Software plans to blow the Vertica/Syncsort “benchmark” out of the water, to wit
What I know already is that our numbers will between 7 and 8 min to load one TB of data and will set another world record for the tpc-h benchmark.
The whole blog post has a delightful air of skepticism, e.g.:
Sometimes the mention of a join and lookup are documented but why? If the files are load ready what is there to join or lookup?
… If the files are load ready and the bulk load interface is used, what exactly is done with the DI product?
My guess… nothing.
… But what I can’t figure out is what is so complex about this test in the first place?