Last week Kamal Hathi and I were in Las Vegas for the TDWI (Data Warehousing Institute) conference. This is really the first general trade show at which SQL Server Integration Services has been on show. Microsoft had a booth at which I did a 30 minute demo every hour. The demo was simple enough but did show a lot of our features. Given the audience, I specifically concentrated on data quality features, which also demo very well.
The reaction was great. We only had about 8 seats for attendees, but in fact every demo was packed and we attracted a large number of people who stood around watching. A lot of people came back again and again, which was fun. Even better, a lot of those coming back were actually from other vendors attending the conference. There was a good number of data integration products represented: Ab Initio, Informatica, SAS, Ascential, Information Builders and Oracle were all there. I think it's fair to say we got more attention than any of them. In fact, I believe we got more attention than any other product at the show. SAS had a conjuror doing card tricks - he was impressive. Naturally, I could not be upstaged, so worked up my own card trick. And it worked. Quite nicely too. The look on Bill Baker's face was priceless when the name of a card chosen by an attendee popped up in the SSIS debugger!
The reaction to the real features was great too - except for the worried looks from the other vendors! Actually, that was better than great! :-)
I had a good conversation with the staff on the Oracle booth. They are in a similar situation to us: previously their data integration tool, Warehouse Builder, was relatively underpowered compared to those from the pure-play vendors. Now they have a really competitive application which will probably become the default choice for Oracle shops. However, I do hear from their customers that even the new version is very difficult to use compared to SSIS. We hear of people re-engineering their Oracle Warehouse Builder apps into SQL Server Integration Services in a fraction of the time it took to build in OWB. So I am sure that SSIS will make inroads to Oracle shops too, much in the way that DTS did.
Nevertheless, the Oracle folks and I did find a lot in common. Not least the fact that we now own much of the data integration space by default. Why would anyone consider a pure-play vendor before at least putting their database vendor's toolset through a thorough Proof of Concept? Of course, we will not win all of these - the pure play guys are still ahead in some areas - but we will win enough to make a huge difference. And of course as we move forward with the new versions, features and capabilities, we will increasingly meet every need of our customers.
I also met with the guys on the Ab Initio booth. Ab Initio really costs a great deal of money, and services on top of that are frequently also very expensive. The result is that I hear of installations costing well over $500k a year to run. That's a huge sum, and customers are naturally anxious to move away from that cost base. Yet Ab Initio really do some very nice work at the high end of the market. It would be interesting to see if we can find some synergy there to enable our customers and theirs to get the best of both worlds. But I wonder if it would even be possible? They are quite a secretive company and did not exactly open up. In fact, they would not even run through a full demo with me. But they did drop by our booth (several times) and saw our demos.
I am glad I concentrated my own demos on data quality as it was a big thing at this conference. There were a lot of vendors, and a lot of questions about quality issues. SSIS has some great data quality features built in, which gives us interesting possibilities with data quality vendors. Our data quality features enable a great toolkit approach which can be used to profile, score, cleanse and audit data for variations, duplications and exceptions against generic or specific business rules. The vendors have more specialized features - cleansing against databases of known addresses for example. In fact, they fulfill a lot of interesting needs: they can match addresses to postal routes for more efficient mail drops, or check databases for deceased customers, or capture errors such as a Street address part entered in the City box.
Putting these specialized features together with our generic toolkit has a lot of benefits for both sides. From our point of view, SQL Server Integration Services customers can benefit because they have access to a very full range of quality features. For the quality vendors, we lower the entry point for doing serious data quality work, with the result that more data warehouses and integration projects will start to concentrate on data quality - and a significant number of those customers will begin to look for the specialized features that the data quality vendors can provide.
One interesting possibility is that other vendors will start to lower their prices, or provide entry-level versions to party with newly-empowered customers in our space. This will likely include data quality vendors of course, but also some of the pure play data integration guys. One way or another, SQL Server Integration Services is going to make a huge and, for users, very welcome difference to the data warehousing and data integration market.