Currently I am required to make the case for bringing in an ETL tool to use in our Oracle data warehouse. All of our code is hand-written in PL/SQL and we have no metadata management currently, so I have plenty of ammunition technically to justify the tool.
However, the problem I am having is financial. I've spoken with and e-mailed plenty of vendors, detailing where I am in the process (no budget or project yet, just feasibility) and asking them for a ballpark cost figure for their tool at the low and high end. I'd like to put into my proposal a general cost figure associated with the more robust high-end tools like Datastage/Informatica down to the cheap/free tools like DTS/OWB.
However every single vendor (Oracle and MS excepted, costs are right on their website) dodges the price question, instead insisting they come in for a demo. I try and explain again where we are in this process and I usually get no reply afterward. Are ETL tool prices some sort of secret? To me this seems like poor customer service, after all I am trying to make a case to buy an ETL tool from one of these vendors who refuse to even give me a vague idea how much it will cost.
I did plenty of google and gartner work but the only figures I can find are $200,000+ for Informatica and $180,000+ for Datastage. What that amount gets me I'm not entirely sure. OWB is $5k and DTS free since we have SQL Server in-house. I'm so far failing to find an idea of how much the Cognos, BO, and SAS ETL server cost and like the "big guys" they are dodging my price questions. Anyone have any advice?