A Q & A with the ER/Studio product management team

As I move forward preaching the Embarcadero gospel, ahem - praise its name, I want to turn the attention to some of the people that make and market our products. Having done this for quite some time in my past, I want the stories to be told! Creating and managing product is an incredibly rewarding job and I am absolutely confident when I say the team we have doing this are some of the best folks on earth.

Anyways, I want to kick this series off by briefly interviewing Jason Tiret and Josh Howard who formulate the product management (Jason) and product marketing (Josh) arm of the modeling product line here at EMBT. That product group formulates the 'Design' part of Embarcadero's Design-->Build-->Run mantra and historically includes ER/Studio, EA/Studio and DT/Studio with new products coming soon. I wanted to provide a lens into what exciting things are brewing in their laboratory users can expect but moreover give you a chance to hear from some extremely passionate people who make the wheels go round here.

GREG: Hey fellas! Thanks for taking the time today to answer my questions. Lots of exciting things going on the in the world of the modeling camp here at Embarcadero. Jason, you’ve been managing ER/Studio and our modeling products for quite some time now. With CodeGear acquisition now complete, and with CodeGear bringing in flavors of modeling of its own into the family, how has this affected your job? What do you envision looking forward?

{JT} Thanks Greg. The job will be expanding and growing into new areas which is absolutely a good thing and I am tremendously excited for it. CodeGear brings a lot of modeling history and technology to the table through their app dev tools (RAD Studio and JBuilder ). We are consolidating teams and I'll be working on plans and vision to ensure meaningful integration between these technologies. An interesting point is that both CodeGear and the DatabaseGear teams have moved forward with similar architectures and technology stacks (Eclipse in this case) which makes much of the process of technology integration simpler and quicker for us to execute on to market. We’ll obviously be looking at new functionality and packaging that we can integrate with the tools on the ‘data’ side of the house and strengthen our current (and future) offerings. I’ll certainly need to knock the dust off my UML books!


GREG: Cool! On the ‘data’ modeling side of the house, I am seeing some wicked stuff being built for global distribution of metadata. Josh, tell me a bit about the forthcoming ER/Studio Enterprise Portal. What is its raison d’etre? Who would be a typical end-user of this product? Where can people get more information about it during this trial period?

JOSH: The Enterprise Portal was basically designed to help Data Architects share and communicate the metadata stored in the ER/Studio repository, and make it available as a self-service reporting tool to the organization. And since the Portal is accessed through a browser, the Data Architect and their modeling teams can literally share all this rich metadata to hundreds of different users throughout the enterprise, whether they are business analysts, database designers, or application developers. Over the years, we witnessed so many of our ER/Studio customers, large and small, develop these hand rolled solutions to distribute metadata. Some very sophisticated...like what we are productizinig, and others mainly automated macros to pump out information from ER/Studio which was becoming known as this 'hub' of information at these customer sites. So, we made teh choice to productize this need and sell it to our customers in a manner that enables them to distrubute quickly and broadly in a way everyone gets: e.g. using a web browser.

GREGK: Indeed. I spent many hundreds of hourse working on this very problem with customers. So, when does Portal ship?

JOSH: While this product won’t be made available to the public until late August, interested parties can certainly test-drive the Portal by sending an email to betas@embarcadero.com or by visiting the beta center. We’re also throwing in a 20% discount to help incentivize those early adopters into trying the tool during the beta release.

GREG: That sounds extremely compelling Josh. Jason, how was this product built? What technologies formulate the backbone of the Portal?

{JT} We looked at a lot of different technologies to build the portal on and settled on an open source platform called Pentaho. We deeply integrated this stack with our ER/Studio Enterprise Repository to do the required extraction of data from the repository database into a reporting data mart that Pentaho's sophisticated BI 'tools' can help exploit. Ultimately this will provide customers with a platform they can customize themselves and provides a ton of slick, “self-service” reporting and searching capabilities that their end-users can leverage.

GREG: Josh, help me understand the state of the state better with ER/Studio. Talk to me about the successes of this product as of late? The sales force loves to sell this product but I’d like to hear some details as to why? Why is it winning?

JOSH: With the explosion of data within the enterprise, and the need to truly understand how the data is used and accessed, companies have elevated the importance modeling and using it to respond to changing business conditions, reduce data redundancy and improve productivity . So, it’s no surprise that ER/Studio continues to be one of the fastest growing data modeling tools out in the marketplace.

The reason why our sales force loves ER/Studio is because the product sells itself. Since 1996 when the product was first released, we have sold thousands upon thousands of licenses because we’re providing a high-quality product with a robust feature set that has been driven from our customers, at a fair price. And because the cost of modeling has come down over the last 10 - 20 years, and less expensive modeling tools are available, you now have tons of people modeling in the organization, so we’ve built out ER/Studio and it’s add-on products to accommodate all these new users with collaborative modeling features like the Repository and now the new Enterprise Portal. We’ve also put together some cool packaging options, like bundling in EA/Studio with ER/Studio Enterprise, so I think those are just a few reasons why we continue to win out in the marketplace.

GREG: Jason, the ER/Studio team (engineering, PM and QA) have been very predictable in their release pattern with major releases…e.g. launching a major release with numerous patch releases to inject features and updates to ensure customer demands are being met and ensure competitiveness. Humor me and look into your crystal ball and elaborate a bit on what you see as core demands of ER/Studio’s end users (e.g. data modelers/architects) and how you see the next major release of ER/Studio servicing them.

{JT} “Source of record” is a big deal these days for many organizations. They need to know where data originated and all of the places it is being used from your traditional OLTP to Data Warehouse to Data Mart sense, but that’s expanding to front-end reports, XML, web services, etc. We already had some nice functionality for doing source/target column mappings and capturing the transformation rules. Now we want to expand that capability to provide visualization and modeling of the actual transformations.


GREG: That sounds excellent guys and I appreciate the time. Our readers will be amped to hear about this progress. Two final questions:

Jason: What’s your handicap?
{JT} Technically it is 14, but really it’s more like a 7 on some holes and a 21 on others. Ha!

Josh: What are you riding?
JOSH: I've got to support the local mountain bike scene here on the Front Range so I rock the Yeti 575. It's a great bike for the riding I do here in Colorado.

Thanks again guys! Looking forward to seeing this product released!