TimeXtender

TimeXtender specializes in data warehouse automation for companies with 500 to 2,500 employees, especially those with hybrid Microsoft environments. Heine and Anne Bach Krog Iverson founded the company in Denmark in 2006 to automate complex ingestion processes that had bedeviled their former consulting clients. TimeXtender has since grown to 87 employees and more than 3,300 customers through internal development, acquisitions, a network of more than 200 resellers, and expansion into the United States.

Small and midsized organizations use TimeXtender to consolidate siloed tables into a data lake, model a data warehouse, and define data marts for multiple BI tools and endpoints. TimeXtender ingests and prepares multi-sourced data for BI and analytics in an extract, load and transform (ELT) or ELTLT sequence. For example, its graphical interface enables data engineers and architects to configure commands in SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS) or Azure Data Factory (ADF), then automatically generate and deploy the associated code. The TimeXtender product has an operational data exchange (ODX), modern data warehouse (MDW) and semantic layer. Together they help manage the lifecycle of data pipelines that feed ad hoc BI queries, reporting and advanced analytics. TimeXtender still supports scripting where necessary for customization.

In 2017, TimeXtender converted to software as a service (SaaS) and a subscription-only pricing model. The product offering consists of TimeXtender Portal, TimeXtender ODX Service and TimeXtender Desktop. It supports on-premises, cloud and hybrid deployment models, with a focus on SQL Server, Azure and now Snowflake. Most implementations remain on premises. TimeXtender supports most modeling styles and extracts data from more than 250 sources, the most popular being SQL Server, SAP, Dynamics, Oracle, DB2, REST and CSV. Supported targets include Microsoft SQL Server, Azure Synapse Analytics, Azure SQL Database and Snowflake. In 2023, TimeXtender released its GenAI-based XPilot to assist and guide users. It also acquired Exmon and BI Builders to strengthen its data quality, master data management, documentation and DataOps capabilities. We can expect the vendor to continue to add support for sources and targets.