ETL eases data transformation demands
- Article 3 of 3
- Global IT Delivery, October 2006
A profile of ETL Solutions.
ETL tends to be a server-heavy process. Extracting, transforming and loading data from one database to match or merge it with data from another has overheads and is complicated: the niceties of address matching and the meanings of identifying codes to different departments occupy almost whole industries by themselves.
Bangor-based ETL Solutions offers something different: an embeddable Java-based engine for ETL that can easily be made part of an existing business process. Using a drag-and-drop GUI for simpler transformations and a human-readable mapping syntax for more complicated operations, users can define the transformation and the software will create the appropriate engine.
“Most ETL solutions can solve 80-90% of the problem simply,” says ETL Solutions’s business development director Karl Glenn. “But that’s 10-20% of the problem that needs to be solved by hand-coding. But the cost to do that can be high.” Which is where ETL’s Transformation Manager product suite comes in.
ETL Solutions’s management board bought the technology in April 2002 from its original owner and their then-employer, Prism Technologies. Hired the previous year to create business for Prism Technologies’s Corba-messaging software, Glenn found instead that potential clients in London’s banking sector were far more interested in the “also-ran” ETL product the company had developed. When Prism Technologies decided to end work on the software, Glenn and some of his fellow executives thought it promising enough to raise funding to launch ETL Solutions. Combining their own equity with finance from the Welsh Assembly and Finance Wales, they bought the software and Prism Technologies’s Welsh operations, which had developed the software.
The company now produces a range of products based on the technology. Customers include four of the world’s largest banks, oil companies and aerospace firms. ETL also earns almost 50% of its half-million pounds annual turnover from consulting services. Nevertheless, it remains at heart a development company, says Glenn: the company has just completed a second round of financing through Finance Wales to expand its operations, enhance the product range – potentially creating solutions for particular verticals – and increase sales.
The company’s Blaenau Ffestiniog base means the cost of expansion will be smaller than might be expected: “The cost base is a lot smaller here, Bangor university produces a great deal of good graduates, there’s a great deal of loyalty and you see a lot of interest from people wanting the lifestyle available here.”
That lower cost base means the company stands a greater chance than it might have done when facing larger and more well-known competitors such as Kalido and Hummingbird. ETL Solutions hopes the portability and maturity of its technology will grab the attention of potential customers.