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Leading ETL Vendors Announcing Disappointing Quarters

Pretty much across the board, ETL vendors are announcing disappointing quarters. Informatica and Ascential both lowered their expectations earlier this month in advance of their earnings announcements. Embarcadero also announced a slowdown in sales, and Business Objects had a spotty deal closing record (they sell Data Integrator, formerly ACTA, in case you didn't know). Given the still-weak economy, it shouldn't come as a surprise that this is happening.

I'm the middle of an ETL evaluation covering the major players at the moment. What I find odd is that of the final four companies in my evaluation, I had trouble with three of them returning my calls and identifying sales teams. Given the firms' shaky second quarters, this is not the sign of a motivated sales force, even if we are at the beginning of a new quarter. A slow economy is a reasonable excuse for poor sales and earnings, but I believe bad sales execution may be a factor in some of these vendors' results.

In my current evaluation, if one of the vendors were very responsive and on the ball, they would be ahead in the ranking right now.

Posted by Mark Sunday, July 18, 2004 5:43:00 PM | permalink |