The VP of engineering at one of the US's leading database marketing services firms explains why his company chose expressor.

Q: What were the business drivers behind your purchase of expressor?

A: Cost-savings and improved performance and scalability. Our current DI solution is very expensive. We're also getting off our mainframe to increase the company's overall competitiveness because it's too expensive and proprietary. expressor is helping us with that migration.

Q: How long have you been looking for a replacement for your current DI system?

A: We've been looking for the last three years — since we first signed with our existing vendor. We never got over the sticker shock we had because their licensing model was so expensive and restrictive.

We looked at open software and other packaged applications, but none of them really "floated my boat" until we looked at expressor.

Q: Why?

It had to be high-performance software, first of all, and expressor's parallel data processing engine more than matched the performance of our existing product. But expressor's vision of a role-based development environment was another deciding factor for us. We have different users in different roles — one set of analysts with lots of customer interaction who help define our business rules and another group who are only concerned with deep technical issues and building the actual system, for example.

By allowing us to finely detail all of these roles, it's easier for each group to focus on what they do best. They can each have their own "sandbox," and not have to worry about what any other group is doing, unless they do need to communicate, and the expressor process facilitates that, so everything stays on track.