Dataprix

Analyst firm Aberdeen Group recently published a study on the use of data integration and BI in SMBs.  Talend underwrote this report, because we found that the analysis and conclusions presented by Aberdeen analysts David Hatch and Michael Lock were very much aligned with our view of the market, namely that:

• Data integration is an essential part of a BI architecture
• Open source bring unmatched flexibility to agile companies

An important part of this report is a review of which technologies and tools are used by “Best in Class” users vs. “Laggards” - this is an aspect of the Aberdeen methodology that is very interesting.

The study can be downloaded at no charge.

David Hatch and Michael Lock will also be preesenting in a Webinar that Talend is organizing jointly with Aberdeen on Dec. 10 at 10 am PT (1 pm ET, 6 pm GMT, 7 pm CET), in which they will discussing some original data points, specifically related to the use of open source and data integration and how companies leveraging these technologies are getting an edge over the rest of the market.  Please sign up for this Webinar.

Yves

Several publications have recently reported on how our customer Levolor, a division of Rubbermaid, is using Talend Integration Suite to replace manual coding of their data integration processes.

• Loraine Lawson from IT Business Edge published Lessons Learned in Switching from Hand-Coding to a Data Integration Tool, an interview she did with John Shafer, application developer for the e-business portion of Levolor.  John gave Loraine this interesting conclusion: “From this, I’ve learned to definitely research open source, because it gives you the capability to look at a tool — especially if you’re coming from a situation where everything is hand-coded. You can take an existing problem, take a tool such as Talend, build that existing problem and see what’s going to happen, see what you’re going to run in to, see what questions come up. You can figure this out early without really any investment and see how you get there and start asking the questions.”
• Ian Palmer from Linux.com also interviewed John Shafer in Levolor leverages Talend to better manage floods of data. Interesting highlight from this article: “Before deciding to implement Talend more than six months ago, Levolor eyed a number of other alternatives, such as Business Objects’ Data Integrator, and it also took a look Jitterbit and Pentaho. While Shafer acknowledges that Levolor was not originally interested in an open source application, he says that flexibility, time constraints, and cost issues tipped the scale in the favor of Talend.”

More Talend users case studies coming soon…

Yves

In the past few weeks several of our partners have announced new implementations or versions of existing implementations of Talend, embedded in their products.

• Our GIS partner, Camptocamp, announced version 1.3 of Spatial Data Integrator, an Open Source Spatial ETL. SDI, developed by Camptocamp, is based on Talend Open Studio.  It reads/writes common GIS formats, manipulating spatial features, metadata creation and publication.  We launched SDI along with Camptocamp at the FOSS4G conference in Victoria, Canada, one year ago, and it’s great to see the product evolving, with support for new data types, new components, and addition of new libraries.
• Along with 3 partners in the field, Key Information Systems, Systech Solutions and IBM, we launched the Smart i Appliance at the recent IBM Information on Demand conference. Talend Integration Suite was actually selected as the ETL embedded in the Smart i Appliance, a plug-and-play Business Intelligence appliance that runs on IBM’s System i (ex-iSeries, ex-AS/400). It is BI that works in a simple, affordable, open source Business Intelligence appliance.

These examples illustrate the momentum that Talend is getting in the OEM space.  Several more strategic partnerships will be announced soon - stay tuned.

Yves

We officially announced last week the start of a formal Talend Certification program.  This Certification is awarded to individuals who successfully complete a comprehensive online test covering all aspects of the use of Talend Open Studio in real-life situations.

This program is the result of a lengthy (and patient) design process.  We had to design the test (craft lots of relevant questions, organize them in several consistent sets so that the same questions would not be asked every time…), set the certification threshold, administer the test to a number of volunteers, etc.

The goal is pretty simple.  There is a larger and larger number of consultants and developers out there who say they are Talend experts.  With good reasons - more and more customers are looking for Talend expertise.  Most of these people are indeed experts.  But unfortunately a few aren’t.  Individuals who have received the Talend Certification will stand out from the crowd!

The Certification can be awarded to a consultant working for a Talend SI partner, or to a data integration developer working for a company using Talend.  However, one thing to remember: it is the individual who is certified, not his company.

• Are you a Talend developer or consultant and want to stand out? Get certified.
• Are you looking to hire Talend talent or seeking a SI who can get your project done?  Ask them if they have received the Talend certification.

Already 50 consultants (from SI partners) have received the Certification as part of our pre-launch (see our press release for some names).  We expect them to be in the hundreds by year end.

Yves

I agree with Michael Wheeler’s recent remark.  In an Open Solutions Alliance newsletter, the CIO and Finance Officer of Redmayne-Bentley said “Our view is that there must be fantastic opportunities for long-term investors among various software companies with at least a foothold in the open source arena.”

We need to look at this in context - what does the current economic melt-down mean to us?  Open source is clearly a better position if you compare it directly with the traditional space, because it’s more flexible and more predictable in terms of cost.

Today’s climate requires new ideas and a strategic look at how to optimize basic parts of our business across the board.  Three rules will cover it:

• Optimize Costs
  Costs are tight right now.  Expense costs are lower in our arena and clearly we need to generate a very simple, fast ROI.  The open source model (try before you buy) is a big advantage in validating solutions.
• Optimize Efficiency
  This means adding value to the core business for partners.  We need to concentrate on producing solutions that customers really need and steer clear of the speculative.
• Optimize Productivity
  We must generate more value in terms of productivity.  This doesn’t mean doing the same things as the competition.  We can’t just provide the same tools for the same performance; we need to provide better performance.

If we can address all three points, we’re not just resisting the financial crisis - we won’t have a financial crisis.

This has been our core strategy since we started the company and we plan to continue along those lines.

Bertrand

This week was again a rich one for Talend.  3 events: TDWI in New Orleans, CRM Expo in Nuremberg (Germany), and Sugar CRM Acceleration Summit in San Francisco.

TDWI was rich in announcements for open source:

• ParAccel, JasperSoft and Talend Collaborate to Deliver Integrated High Performance Business Analytics Platform
• Infobright and Talend Form Technology Alliance to Simplify and Broaden Access to Self-Managing Data Warehouse Technology
• Infobright Releases New Connector for Pentaho Data Integration
• Pentaho Partners with Netezza to Deliver Complete Data Warehousing and Business Intelligence Solutions

We announced a three-party partnership with JasperSoft and ParAccel.  We also announced an alliance with Infobright.  Infobright in turn announced connectors for Kettle (PDI), who announced a partnership with Netezza.  Is your head spinning yet?

The pattern here is interesting.  Open source and proprietary vendors form more and more alliances. The two models are not opposed, they are complementary.  I actually had chats about these announcements with David Hatch from Aberdeen, Philip Russom from TDWI, Mary Jo Nott from the BeyeNETWORK, Mark Madsen from Third Nature - they all agree that open source is taking a new dimension and that its credibility no longer has to be proven.

All this of course is reflected in several podcasts: the one I did with Bob Seiner from the BeyeNETWORK, but also the one with Kim Stanick from ParAccel, and with Jose Morales from JasperSoft.

Another event this week was CRM Expo in Nuremberg, Germany.  Another great forum for Talend to prove the value of open source data integration in the context of business applications.  We were there with our SI partner MyCRMSpace, and Cecile and our German team are back from the event with lots of great opportunities.

And to conclude on the CRM side of the story, we were also sponsoring the CRM Acceleration Summit in San Francisco. Vincent delivered a ten minute overview of “how to fix a mistake” - or how to migrate from a specific proprietary CRM to open source.  What makes things more interesting is that the said proprietary CRM vendor was actually holding its annual user conference at the Moscone Center, around the corner from the St Regis where the CRM Acceleration Summit was held.  And thanks to the pressure applied by this vendor, Sugar had been kicked out of the Marriott but instead got comped at the St Regis.  Not a bad trade-off…  Too bad Jean-Luc does not know how to take photos with his iPhone, I was looking forward to posting pictures of an open source event at the St Regis.

And to tie in on the title of this post - in some cases open source and proprietary software can be best friends - and in other cases, open source just triggers some pretty childish behavior in proprietary vendors!

Yves

“In 2002, David A. Wheeler published a well-regarded study that examined the Software Lines of Code (SLOC) present in a typical Linux distribution (Red Hat Linux 7.1). His findings? At that time it would cost over $1.2 billion to develop a Linux distribution by conventional proprietary means in the U.S.” (introduction to a 2002 study which estimates the total development cost of a Linux Distribution).

The Linux Foundation - a non-profit consortium dedicated to fostering the growth of Linux - recently published an update to this study written by Amanda McPherson, Brian Proffitt, and Ron Hale-Evans with the help of IDC. Using the same tools and methods to update these findings, the authors estimate that with today’s software development costs “it would take approximately $10.8 billion to build the Fedora 9 distribution in today’s dollars. It would take $1.4 billion to develop the Linux kernel alone.”

According to the press release published by the Linux Foundation, the Fedora 9 distribution contains 204.5 million lines of code in 5,547 application packages. The development effort estimate comes close to 60,000 Person-Years. Using the same calculation, the Linux kernel included in Fedora 9 counts 6.8 million lines of code and its value is estimated at $1.4 billion. The development effort estimate for the kernel alone exceeds 7,500 Person-Years.

From a client perspective, these investments are a bargain. As Matt Asay wrote, that’s “$10.8 billion that we don’t have to spend to get an exceptionally robust operating system. $10.8 billion that we depend upon every day when using Google, Amazon, and a dizzying array of websites, as well as many of the applications we use within our own companies.” Indeed, more and more enterprises are realizing that open source solutions exist to make them happier. A new IDC study states that the growth in adoption of stand-alone open-source software is accelerating and that the total market will be worth US$5.8 billion in 2011. The market reached $1.8 billion in 2006, and is predicted to grow 26 percent annually for the next four years.

There are several sides to this debate, however. On his blog this week, Dana Blankenhorn, ZDNet business journalist, asks “Are vendors vital to open source?”

Blankenhorn writes that “the most vital open source projects are run by non-profits - Linux, Firefox, Eclipse” but he overlooks Joe Brockmeier’s (Community Manager for openSUSE, a community Linux distribution sponsored by Novell) opinion: “To be clear, Linux isn’t run by a non-profit. Linux is an open project that accepts contributions from many vendors, including Red Hat, Novell, IBM, HP, and dozens of others. The Linux Foundation, which pays Linus’ salary, is a non-profit, but it isn’t really accurate to say that it ‘runs’ Linux. Firefox is run by a non-profit which works in conjunction with a corporation to help fund the operations of the project - and it receives much of that money from Google.”

We at Talend are, of course, convinced that commercial open source is a win-win model, far more efficient than proprietary solutions that lock clients into closed software, with the only goal to make money.

In her Linux Foundation blog, Amanda McPherson quotes Matt Asay who says, “open source eliminates the vendor lock-in that created the enormous margins of the proprietary software world. It has eliminated the terrible inefficiencies created by companies competing and trying to differentiate on platform components that should be commodities. Now they collaborate, as they do with Linux. So just as the margin has migrated, I would say so has the development burden. Just as we use pooled money in the form of taxes to create roads or airports, you want to share the development costs of your computing infrastructure, in this case the operating system.”

Talend invests in its own R&D to develop and enhance its solutions. Talend’s solutions are not developed by community contributors. Of course, we rely on our community for specifications, tests, and analysis of market demand and that is no small thing. This method - listening and taking into account client needs - has never been adopted as a real strategy by the proprietary vendors. However, that is one of the real values open source vendors bring to the market. For example, 30% of the connectors natively integrated in our products come from contributors. A business will finance the development of a connector in response to its own needs, and then transfer it to the community via the vendor’s new version. But the vast majority of our core code is produced by engineers who are on Talend’s payroll.

Evangelization, training, deployment services, and high-level integration services are others things that can really help customers.

In the real world, vendors like Talend dreamed of finding a model that would create a balance between client satisfaction and profit, R&D and sales. And I think we’ve been pretty successful so far: 500,000 copies of Talend Open Studio have been downloaded, and more and more customers are subscribing to Talend Integration Suite.

I will conclude by asking the question I’ve been mulling over since I read Blankerhorn’s post: does this kind of debate really benefit users? It is similar to the discussion surrounding the free nature of open source software which surfaced some years ago. User organizations were never fooled by this misleading concept. I rarely – if ever - met customers who sincerely thought that open source was a no-cost solution.

Bertrand

These are tough times.  Economies have tanked while debt is rising.  Real estate is down; loans of any kind are hard to get; the unemployment rate is up; disposable income is increasingly limited - and corporations are changing the way they do business.

In effect, these are good times for open source, because it makes enterprise-class data solutions affordable to organizations of all sizes regardless of budget cuts and limited staff.

Less cash and fewer employees means that companies must find more innovative ways to manage their IT needs.  The search is leading toward changes in how people and organizations use the tools they have and, increasingly, to open source and SaaS (Software as a Service). Business models are transforming to accept this.  And an open source solution like Talend’s is the most cost-efficient response to the new realities.

This is one reason that Talend has been steadily taking market share from proprietary data integration tools - optimal pricing; optimal cost.  Take only the functionality you want, when you want it.
But there are other reasons that people are choosing Talend solutions.  The Talend Community is a huge asset.  Hosted on www.talendforge.org, the Community has grown dramatically, to more than 2,200 active members. Nearly one-third of the more than 400 components in Talend Open Studio were contributed by Community members.

And, let’s face it - data integration is a growth market.  The volume of data a company has to manage doubles almost every 18 months and information systems are increasingly complex.  That’s not going to change because the economy is in a down swing. Scalable data integration is a must if companies are going to stay competitive, or even stay in business.

One of my VC friends was telling me recently that in his view only alternative deployment models such as open source and SaaS are in a position to generate the type of return on investment demanded by the market.  This explains the many successful investments in open source companies - and also why Talend is in a unique position to accelerate its growth on the global market.

Freedom of choice has entered the software world.  Software as needed - an emerging space responding to the needs of today’s consumers.  And a must-have in today’s economy.

Bertrand

Last month, Gartner released their latest Magic Quadrant for Data Integration Tools.

No surprise, Gartner’s analyses are still very conservative. Their analysts use mostly their rearview mirror, to look at what happened behind them, whereas they should have a radar to see what’s happening around them and ahead of them. More than a state of the market, the Magic Quadrant reflects past adoption of certain technologies by large accounts in the US, who are customers of Gartner. Updated every 18 to 24 months and reflecting the long cycles of traditional vendors, who used to take years before their could achieve a significant position on a market, this Magic Quadrant is no longer compatible with new development and adoption cycles such as the ones we can find in open source and SaaS. This quadrant includes a combination of dying technologies which have been acquired over and over again (ETI, Open Text’s Genio…), loading utilities (Syncsort, Pervasive, Sybase’s Solonde…) and real enterprise solutions (Informatica, IBM’s DataStage). One component is missing: open source - of course.

Some would say that open source vendors cannot afford to pay Gartner (I personally don’t think it makes a difference). This may be true for some vendors. But in our case, Talend is a commercial vendor with strong resources and could afford a contract with Gartner. But why? To hear that “open source is immature (probability 0.9) and will become mature in 5 to 20 years (probability 0.8)”? No thanks. We know, and our clients know, that open source has changed a lot over the past years and has become a true alternative for the enterprise (probability 1.0). Maybe even Gartner will realize this one day (probability 0.2)!

Yves

PS: For the record, I have worked with Ted Friedman and Mark Beyer (and to a lesser degree with Andreas Bitterer) for many years and have lots of respect for them as individuals. I think the problem has more to do with general Gartner policy with regards to innovation, than with individual analysts not seeing what is obvious.

Despite a thinner than usual crowd at Systems, our colleagues from Talend Germany and Cecile from the European marketing team are reporting a good event for Talend.  A lot more people are coming to the booth (as in looking for it, as opposed to stumbling upon it by chance) and are on a mission to gather information on our products.  Demos are being delivered back to back.  And overall, contacts are excellent - high level people with concrete projects.

Of special interest to our visitors: the new SAP connector (lots of SAP deployments in Germany…) and Talend Open Profiler, our new data profiling tool.

This week was a busy one for Talend in Munich, with in addition to Systems, the MySQL Central Europe User Conference on Tuesday, and SugarCRM’s CRM Acceleration Summit on Wednesday - all of which we sponsored.
Continuing with our focus on Germany, we will exhibit at CRM-Expo in Nuremberg on November 5-6 - if you are around, visit us there!

Yves

Talend’s Recent Innovation and Accolades

I’ll conclude my review of the main events in Talend’s recent history with the innovation and products announcements we made between January and September 2008:

• We announced the availability of Talend Data Quality, the first product to combine data integration, data profiling and data quality in an open source suite.
• We announced Talend Open Profiler, the first open source data profiler.
• We announced Talend Integration Suite 2.4, the first open source product with Change Data Capture to streamline data integration for enterprises.
• We announced version 2.3 of Talend Open Studio, the company’s flagship open source data integration solution.

Talend also was pleased to receive the following accolades:

• We were recognized by the SourceForge.net Community Choice Awards as a finalist in the category “Most Likely to be the Next $1 Billion Acquisition.”
• We were widely quoted in print and online news outlets such as InfoWorld, Network World, InformationWeek, Computerworld, PC World, and Linux.com.
• Talend’s successful business model was recently highlighted in an IDC white paper sponsored by Talend: “Talend has shown that open source technology does not always represent the trailing edge. In this case, it represents the leading edge,” wrote Carl Olofson in the IDC white paper: Talend Uses Open Source to Deliver Low-Cost, Easy-to-Use Enterprise Data Integration

Last, but not least, three events marked Talend’s internal growth this year:

• We bolstered our leadership team with the appointment of software industry veteran Jean-Luc Solans as vice president of strategy and business development. Solans previously worked at Hyperion, which was acquired by Oracle.
• We opened a new Benelux office, joining existing operations in California, France, Germany and China, and expanded our business development teams in existing offices, giving the company a substantial presence in North America, Europe and Asia-Pac.
• We launched our Talend Ambassador Awards, which recognize innovative and effective projects using Talend’s data integration technology. The City of Brantford in Ontario, Canada and Eurofins in France and Germany were among this year’s winners.

I couldn’t be more proud of Talend’s great strides in making enterprise-class data integration affordable to organizations of all sizes. And Talend’s rapid growth is set to increase in the coming months. We’re on-plan to increase our quarter-on-quarter revenues by 50 percent or more, double the number of company employee, and continue our geographical expansion with a focus on Latin America and Northern Europe.

As I wrote earlier this week, we will also continue to help our Community grow and contribute more to the product, develop our OEM program to target more ISVs, small and large, in all industries, and deploy additional programs to support our channel. Finally, while we continue to reinforce our position in the data integration market as the only viable alternative to proprietary vendors, we will also aim to become a key player in the SOA stack.

What an exciting program! More than ever we are committed to very ambitious goals this year. Stay tuned.

Bertrand

The new Customers section of Talend’s web site features dozens of case studies of customers of Talend, with the reasons why they have chosen open source data integration and the benefits they are deriving from it.

Check it out.

Yves

I’ve already talked about the Talend Customer base and adoption expansion.  Today, I’ll focus on the numerous partnerships we’ve built over the course of the past few months.

Talend developed several dozen partnerships to expand its ecosystem of technology partners and distribution/integration channels, including:

• Greenplum - Talend and Greenplum announced a partnership for software integration, marketing and sales, bringing new high-performance analytic capabilities to businesses of all sizes
• EnterpriseDB - Talend and EnterpriseDB announced a partnership that enables customers using EnterpriseDB’s Postgres Plus and Postgres Plus Advanced Server to use Talend’s open source data integration software to migrate and integrate data.
• ParAccel - Talend and ParAccel announced collaboration on joint sales and marketing initiatives to provide customers with high-performing data integration and management solutions.
• Microsoft - Talend announced plans to work with Microsoft to optimize Talend’s software on the Microsoft Windows platform.
• Pipeline Software - Talend and Pipeline Software, the SAP Integration Experts, signed an agreement to allow customers to integrate data between SAP and other business-critical applications.
• SageCRM - Talend and SageCRM entered into an OEM partnership that uses Talend’s open source data integration technology to enable seamless data exchanges between Sage CRM and many operational applications and external files.
• Coheris - Coheris, one of the major players in the CRM and BI markets, added the Talend Integration Suite to its offering.
• Knowledge Relay - Talend and Knowledge Relay announced an OEM partnership that enables Knowledge Relay’s Enterprise Visualization Suite to work with Talend’s data integration technology to manage the flow of BI information in the enterprise.

We are developing our OEM program to target more ISVs, small and large, in all industries, and to deploy additional programs to support our channel. As an extensive partner network, the Talend Alliance Program is an integral part of the Talend ecosystem. It provides access to advanced tools, while offering dedicated support and training to ensure optimal cooperation between Talend and the partner’s teams. Talend continues to build its partner network, and to recruit dynamic and knowledgeable partners. Learn how to become a Talend partner.

Next post will focus on innovation, industry accolades, and internal affairs.

Bertrand

Loraine Lawson from IT Business Edge interviewed Talend Integration Suite customer John Shafer from Levolor.

In this in-depth interview, Shafer explains how and why his company switched from hand-coded data integration to Talend’s open source data integration solution.  He discusses risk avoidance, learning curve, productivity, project documentation, etc.

Definitely worth reading.

Yves

Last week Teradata was holding their annual user conference at the Mandala Bay in Las Vegas.  For the first time, Talend sponsored this conference and we announced our partnership with Teradata. Overall, a great event:

• Open source is now recognized as an enterprise solution, as shown by the people who stopped by our booth there.  When you recognize 90% of the company names on the attendees badges, you know you are dealing with global enterprise clients!
  

• A couple interesting keynotes, including Dan Ariely, Professor at MIT Sloan School of Management, on irrational behavior, and Lance Armstrong, World Champion Cyclist.  But Teradata is used to getting prestigious keynote speakers - I remember in a past life when they had Lech Walesa on the roaster at a conference in Warsaw.
  

• I did meet with several analysts and journalists - see this blog from Curt Monash, and a podcast with Shawn Rogers from the BeyeNETWORK.

Yves

We just released version 3.0 of Talend Open Studio.  There are many new features in this release, including:

• Native support for SAP
• Support of advanced Extract, Load, Transform (ELT) mode
• Dependencies analysis
• Many new components and connectors (over 400 total)

You can check the full announcement for more details, and of course download this new version.

Fabrice

The news was posted today - the BeyeNETWORK announced the winners of their its annual Vision Award for Business Impact. In keeping with its mission to provide a global vision for business intelligence (BI) and beyond, this award recognizes the efforts of companies that have successfully used BI software and technology to positively impact their organizations.

And Talend is proud to be named a winner, in the Data Integration category, with its customer ETAI.

As Philippe Bobo, Software and IS Director for ETAI, says: “When we launch the assembly chain for the shippable database, we know it will run without error and we won’t need to edit the consolidated data. Talend’s Open Source model does not cancel all costs but it alleviates them significantly, especially in the deployment phase.”

Yves

Many of our webinar attendees had asked for it, there were a few technical challenges, but we finally posted several of our past webinars online for on-demand replay.

Simply visit http://www.talend.com/webinar/archive/index.php to view the list of webinars that are available on demand. Then click on Play Now, fill out the registration form, and here you go - 45 minutes to an hour of free data integration content, that include:

• A presentation of the topic
• A product demonstration
• A live Q&A session

More subjects will be added so please check back!

Yves

The autumn is a very special time for Talend; the season marks the launching of Talend Open Studio in October 2006.

And what a road it’s been these past 2 years!  Over the next few posts, I’ll take advantage of this anniversary period to give you a progress report on several topics (adoption, customers, partnerships, innovations, and awards).  This first one will cover the increase in the adoption of Talend Open Studio and its customer base.

The popularity of Talend Open Studio, Talend’s flagship open source data integration solution, has risen sharply since its introduction two years ago, with over 2.5 million lifetime downloads.

The outstanding growth in the past year on all front - customers, partnerships and downloads - showcases the strong demand for Talend’s open source data integration tools to provide optimally priced solutions for organizations of all sizes. Our Community has been instrumental in helping to further develop and enhance our products.

Highlights for Talend in the last year include:

• The number of Talend Open Studio downloads has more than tripled in the last year to 500,000 core product downloads.
• Talend has welcomed over 200 new paying customers since the beginning of 2008, including many global organizations such as Yahoo!, US Cellular, SwissLife, Honda Bank, Virgin Mobile France, Shopping.com, Levolor, MyBuys, Car & Boat Media and Eurofins.
• Since its launch, Talend has been steadily taking market share from proprietary data integration tools such as Informatica PowerCenter, IBM WebSphere DataStage and SAP/Business Objects Data Integrator.
• The Talend Community hosted on www.talendforge.org has grown dramatically, to more than 2,200 active forum users. Nearly one-third of the more than 300 components in Talend Open Studio have been contributed by Community members.
• Talend-related online Communities or groups in social networking environments are growing significantly, especially on LinkedIn, Viadeo, Xing and Facebook.

I’ll leave the conclusion to our financial partner, Jean-François Gallouin, from Allianz Private Equity Partners, a leading venture capital firm which has supported Talend from the beginning: “Today only alternative deployment models such as open source and SaaS (Software as a Service) are in a position to generate the type of return on investment that is demanded by the market. This, of course, explains the many successful investments in open source companies and is why we strongly support Talend, which is today in a unique position to accelerate its growth on the global market.”

The next post will be devoted to partnerships.

Bertrand

A highly strategic set of processes and tools for defining and managing non-transactional data entities, Master Data Management (MDM) is often poorly implemented. As defined by Wikipedia, MDM has the objective of providing processes for collecting, aggregating, matching, consolidating, quality-assuring, persisting and distributing such data throughout an organization to ensure consistency and control in the ongoing maintenance and application use of this information. This can entail a customer name, a product code, an account number, supplier information, etc.

A company often manages a number of databases which feed information into strategic applications (Accounting, HR, CRM, etc.)  Except in very rare cases, these databases are managed by different people in different departments which use the data in different ways. Without some sort of coordination, inconsistency can undermine the efforts a company makes to maintain “clean” and homogeneous databases.

The concept of Master Data was invented to qualify and standardize the way organizations describe data within a common repository that is applicable on a company-wide scale.  Contrary to a classic Data Warehouse, MDM keeps track of the evolution of the data in the context of the application so as to guarantee synchronization between the repository and the source systems.  MDM is particularly important with BI and reporting projects which require consolidating data from heterogeneous sources, and also when implementing Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) or CRM applications.

MDM is essential to managing database updates; as a company evolves, its database must accurately reflect these changes. Updating one or two databases manually is possible, of course, but when it concerns a multinational organization with branches in dozens of countries, with hundreds of databases (sometimes in different languages), such an update becomes quite challenging.  On the other hand, a repository is easy to create and the affected databases update automatically.

These stakes are well-known to database administrators, but are less familiar to management.  However, they have enormous influence on corporate activities, particularly in the area of finance and organization: a mailing undertaken on the basis of badly managed data has little chance of making a satisfactory ROI; an out-of-date file used by a call center can lead to the loss of a customer; departments using different bench-mark data will have trouble collaborating, etc.

In the interest of convincing management of the need for MDM, SearchDataManagement.com has just published an extremely interesting interview with Rob Karel of Forrester Research, “Selling your boss on master data management“. The podcast provides some insights to help you sensitize management to the problems MDM can solve, while also describing the primary business drivers that will encourage your company to initiate an actual Data Governance strategy (cost saving, enhanced efficiency, reduced compliance risks, etc.)

MDM is an essential part of data integration systems and, for this reason, Talend offers tools for integrating a corporate repository. For example, one of our customers in France - a company providing outsourced services for health insurance providers - has just implemented a centralized CDI hub (Customer Data Integration) to run all of it’s CRM, ECM, and management applications.  The system makes it possible for Customer Facing Agents to access all customer information via a single interface.  This has spectacularly improved the quality of service while realizing substantial cost savings.

Bertrand