As you know, data integration is an essential and fundamental basis for data warehousing, business intelligence (BI) applications, master data management applications, data migration projects and scalable data service architectures. The data integration software market is mature, with more than $1.4 billion in sales estimated for 2008.

Using a Gartner euphemism, the data integration software business is deep in the trough of disillusionment. Technologies enter this phase because they fail to meet expectations and quickly become unfashionable. Our industry's technology used to be called ETL, or extract, transform, and load. There was an enormous amount of hype associated with ETL that never materialized. Performance of these tools was and still is awful, there was no reusability of code and transformation rules from project to project, and you had to be a Ph.D. from MIT to use the products. Add to this dilemma the fact that these tools have an entry point of $250,000 to $1M just for the software, and many end users want only $65/hr hired consultants working on the technology, and you got a mess. It's no wonder the penetration of ETL has never exceeded 30% in the global 2000.

But the traditional ETL vendors were smart. They made a few acquisitions of data quality/data profiling companies and some metadata management companies and got Gartner to redefine the sector as data integration. These data integration suites still fail to deliver on true productivity. Data integration remains to be complex and expensive. These are bad attributes in this economy.

This all being said, the ability to transform operational data from heterogeneous internal and external sources into actionable, insightful information has moved from a "nice to have" to a "must have." Companies can no longer stay competitive unless they can exploit its data as a weapon in a fiercely competitive market.

The phase after the trough of disillusionment is the slope of enlightenment. This new phase occurs when a company actually starts gaining productivity with the technology. That's where expressor software comes in. Our product is easy to use and our customers are able to reduce their total data integration costs by 40% or more.

If you'd like to learn more about what we do, please read on.

Bob Potter
CEO