I got a grumpy comment from Expressor on that blog post but I didn't think I was hard on them.  I just tried to refute the FUD in their marketing message.  I think it's pretty obvious that a fifteen year old software product with hundreds of millions of dollars of development put into it has a greater range of functionality and better scalability than a new product.

Expressor has a great idea with semantic metadata and offer a cheaper option than the larger vendors.  Talend and other open source vendors are bringing tool based data integration to the masses.  If you don't have a big software budget they are both worth looking at.

Its absurd to think that a small company can win on marketing ploys only.  It doesnt work that way.  Being a veteran of both start-ups and large enterprise software companies, I can assure you that the only way for the former to succeed is through innovation.  And innovation has to happen along two dimensions: product and how it is brought to market.

Regarding product, expressor has innovated in two areas; namely around what we call smart semantics and data processing engine performance.  We are the only vendor on the market that has developed a semantic metadata abstraction layer enabling us to shield users from having to deal with physical metadata of the source and target systems.   We do this through a step we refer to as semantic rationalization, which by the way is highly automated by the algorithms we use in our software.  The benefits of smart semantics are manifold ranging from simplifying the development and offering a level of reuse of business rules and other project artifacts not seen in any DI system before.  We started with a clean slate and we did learn from our mistakes, which is counter to McBurneys criticism.  Our employees are from IBM/Ascential, Informatica and Ab Initio and they experienced firsthand that changing software architectures that are 10 to 20 years old is hard to impossible.  Moreover, these software platforms are comprised of software products from different companies, which make the task of unifying these platforms even more challenging.  On the second expressor differentiator, product performance, our parallel processing engine is the fastest on the market.  Our early adopter customers have benchmarked us against their incumbent technologies, and we have outperformed everyone thus far  and welcome additional benchmark opportunities against any competitor any time.

Regarding our strategy of selling our product, we dont believe in making software excessively expensive and then requiring dozens of highly skilled consultants to come in and make it work.  As Gartner said in August 2007, data integration is too complex and expensive.  We can prove business value in one day, while the established vendors need the better part of a week just to install their software.

In summary, small vendors cant out market the behemoths.  Thats not the way it works.  They can only succeed through product innovation, customer adoption, referenceability, and innovative business and pricing models.  Lots of small companies have succeeded in this way and we welcome companies to bring us in and check out our marketing claims.  What is there to lose, besides a few hundred thousand dollars off your DI software maintenance bill.