Frees staff to focus on data workflow and on what can be done with data, and away from the details of the technologyThere are areas they can do better in, like most software companies that are still relatively young. They need to expand their capabilities in some of the targets, as well as source connectors, and native connectors for a number of large data sources and databases. That's a huge challenge for every company in this area, not just Equalum. If I had the wherewithal to create a tool that could allow for all that connectivity, it would be massive, out-of-the-box. There are all the updates every month. An open source changes constantly, so compatibility for these sources or targets is not easy. And a lot of targets are proprietary and they actually don't want you to connect with them in real time. They want to keep that connectivity for their own competitive tool. What happens is that a customer will say, "Okay, I've got Oracle, and I've got MariaDB, and I've got SQL Server over here, and I've got something else over there. And I want to aggregate that, and put it into Google Cloud Platform." Having connectors to all of those is extremely difficult, as is maintaining them. So there are major challenges to keeping connectivity to those data sources, especially at a CDC level, because you've got to maintain your connectors. And every change that's made with a new version that comes out means they've got to upgrade their version of the connector. It's a real challenge in the industry. But one good thing about Equalum is that they're up for the challenge. If there's a customer opportunity, they will develop and make sure that they update a connector to meet the needs of the customer. They'll also look at custom development of connectors, based on the customer opportunity. It's a work in progress. Everybody in the space is in the same boat. And it's not just ETL tools. It's everybody in the Big Data space. It's a challenge. The other area for improvement, for Equalum, is their documentation of the product. But that comes with being a certain size and having a marketing team of 30 or 40 people and growing as an organization. They're getting there and I believe they know what the deficiencies are. Maintaining and driving a channel business, like Equalum is doing, is really quite a different business model than the direct-sales model. It requires a tremendous amount of documentation, marketing information, and educational information. It's not easy.
