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March - 2006 - issue > Entrepreneurship
Piyush Gupta The Data Entrepreneur
Imran Shahnawaz
Wednesday, March 1, 2006
We are setting up at the baseball diamond and we are going to swing. Usually when you swing you hit a home run or get stuck. However, in our case either we are going to hit for home run or singles,” says Piyush Gupta, co-founder and Chief Executive Officer, Exeros Software that is into the data integration space.

Data integration in itself is not a difficult job for any company but what makes it painful is the time and money consumption that often takes months if not days or weeks to connect the data lying within different sources. Most companies either end up shelling a lot of money to integrate data, which is often done manually because machines wouldn’t know what to select and companies hire expensive consultants.

How would it be if machines could do that? Enter Exeros which precisely does that. Not only has the company pioneered the data integration but has made it simpler and affordable.

Software products that exist today to move, profile and cleanse data, don’t address the most time consuming aspect of data integration—discovery and debugging of source-to-target maps and transformation logic. The process of source-to-target data mapping is still manual and requires months of human involvement to discover data relationships, derive transformation logic and maintain source-to-target maps. Exeros’ DataMapper automates this manual process using the actual source and target data in self-verifying processes.

Data mapping is a critical job that often requires human intervention to discover the relationship between divided sets of data; and to help transform and maintain the source to reach the target. DataMapper automates the entire process by reducing time, cost and error. It automatically discovers, documents and validates up to 80 percent of the two sets of data.

Backed by a technology that shakes hands with disparate data, Exeros, founded in 2004 in Santa Clara, CA, has extended its reach to four business areas: Data Migration, Data Relationship Validation, Data Rationalization and ETL (extract, transformation and loading) Migration.

ETL migration is a $2 billion market and it has well-established players like Informatica and Business Objects that provides software tools for this market. However, these tools do not address the data discovery process and thus Exeros DataMapper software com-
plements them. It also helps consulting firms to do their projects faster and save valuable time and money for clients.

DataMapper has also found success in application migration and integration. DataMapper analyzes the data and automatically generates the relationships between legacy applications and new applications. The process requires automating the whole application to move the data by extracting and writing scripts. This saves time by 8x as opposed to the manual method.

A whole lot of companies are using DataMapper for master data mapping and DataMapper evaluates the data in multiple sources and documents which data is accurately mapped and where there are mismatches.

Mismatches or no, Gupta’s first attempt at being his own boss started in 2002 after stints at IBM and Informix. His first company Promeira Software, which was into e-commerce, was acquired 18 months after inception in 2004 by Ariba. Learning valuable lessons from his first startup, he decided to try his luck in technology-based model instead of e-business model.

A chance meeting with Alex Gorelik led to the sapling of Exeros being planted. Though Gorelik and Gupta had a blockbuster technology, VCs spiked the proposal when the duo approached them. They moved and got a few customers initially that translated into business and finally VC acceptance of the product.

Though Gupta didn’t have experience in building a product company, his instincts told, “If we succeed we will hit the homerun and if we don’t we still have the way of a reasonable exit.”
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