Hello - My name is Joe Burns and I am in the Marketing Operations group for a global automotive OEM. My official title is Marketing Analytics Program Manager and I'm responsible for delivering a variety of key performance metrics for advertising, marketing, and lead management. That also means I'm required to run a solo covert IT shop for marketing, because like many of you we have resource constraints! So finding tools that are easy-to-use with a high-degree of functionality are very important for us.

We were in search of an ETL tool to build a departmental data mart when we discovered Talend. Initially we were not sure that it would satisfy our requirements. But after several weeks of evaluation, we were very pleased with Talend's capabilities. It contained all the functionality we needed "off-the-shelf". It also provided us a way to incorporate custom business logic where necessary. We now have 14 different data source from a variety of external formats that we use in our data mart. This would have been impossible to do without Talend.

While all the above is important, I've also been impressed with the user community. Because of the community's global nature, I don't have to worry about translations or support for internationalization for our global business. I know there's a dedicated community that we can go to for answers and support.

We've also established a local user group for users in the Mid-South region of the United States. It's been a fun project organizing the group, seeing how others are using Talend, and sharing knowledge with others. If you are nearby and would like to join us, search for "Mid South Talend Users Group" on LinkedIn. We meet quarterly and have great support from the Talend staff across a number of levels.

It's been exciting to see the progress of both the tool and the community and I look forward to sharing many more successes with the Talend community.

"Mid South Talend Users" Group on LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/groups?gid=3256896

Hi, my name is Konstantinos Fardelas.

I work in the IT and Telecommunications Sector. The last few months I have been collaborating with Telecompare SA, a consulting company in Greece, undertaking important Telecom Audit and Management projects.

During these projects, I had the chance to meet new colleagues who introduced me for the first time to Talend Open Studio. Talend Open Studio is far beyond a simple piece of ETL software. It proved to be a really precious tool, executing consistently crucial business procedures such as data migration and synchronization tasks in less time and effort.

While digging in Talend Open Studio, I had discovered the option for a Greek translation through Talend Babili and I had already made a to-do note, when EL/LAK, a non-profit Greek organization that promotes and develops open source software for education, public and business sector in Greece, announced a sponsored initiative regarding translation of open source software that could be useful in the Greek public sector.

Today, Talend Open Studio User Guide release 3.2 is fully translated in Greek and is publicly available on TalendForge. Future releases of Talend Open Studio will always add some new lines in their User Guides, so the source files are also publicly available in Talend community Wiki for anyone who wants to keep it up to date. In addition, the Talend Open Studio interface is almost fully translated and I hope the Greek language will be available and error-proof in the next Talend Open Studio update.

Please contact me if you have any questions or suggestions for future actions regarding Talend Open Studio.

Hello, this is Mohamad Sibai, CIO of Softway, a Saudi Arabia-based company focused on Open Source Enterprise Solutions.

As a technical decision maker at Softway, we have spent enough time and effort evaluating suitable open source tools to manage our own and our customer’s overall data and application integration, as well as the legacy system migration and the data synchronization with extensibility and scalability options. Of course Talend was the perfect match. It includes data quality options which solved a lot of issues that we were stuck with in some particular projects.

On the other hand, we were very careful to select the handiest solution with a graphical interface in order to make the life of our service integration team easier. Talend is an easy to use solution and has a visual interface for job creation and deployment. The learning cycle is very short, the components library is huge and it is easy to create new components.

No need to mention prompt response we always get from Talend on both sides (Sales and Support). And I have to send my warm regards to the Talend community for their valuable contributions.

As Talend has been added to Gartner's “Magic Quadrant for Data Integration Tools” in November 2009, it gave us the satisfaction and confidence we had chosen the right tool.

We think that adding the Arabic language to Talend is challenging, because we are using non-Latin characters with a right to left orientation. However, this is useful as there is a huge movement in the region towards open source enterprise applications and we hope to see more community contributions in this domain.

Hello, my name is Benoit Courtine and I work for AlcionGroup, as Project Manager for Java IT Projects.

Two years ago, I worked on a small data migration project. I didn't know Talend and commercial ETL’s were out of budget, so the project was developed in Java. During this project, I inquired about data migration tools and discovered Talend Open Studio. I was impressed: number of connectors, intuitive product,... After that, I worked on a similar, but more complex project and this time, I chose Talend: this project was developed more than twice as fast, and was much easier to maintain.

I then learned a lot about Talend (taking a Talend Training). I got certified and decided to get involved in the community, developing components (that can be found on Talend Exchange) and participating in a Talend French forum.

Talend has become a real "Swiss Army knife", and can help on various tasks. Since I discovered Talend, I have been using it on all my projects, even those that do not deal with data migration or transformation. My entire company has also been convinced by Talend’s efficiency and has become a Talend partner: most of our data projects are done with Talend.

Community forum profile
My (French) blog

My last advice: try it! You will not regret it!
See you.

Hello, my name is Patrice Soulet.

I discovered Talend a long time ago, at its beginning even before version 1.
Having over 10 years of experience in ETL, the product seemed to have great potential, even if it had only some features in its first version.

Today, Talend Open Studio has evolved and is more than just an ETL tool.
I work in a consulting firm in the insurance industry that publishes a mathematical calculation software, Calfitec, and I use Talend Open Studio daily, not only to feed the software database, but also to manage backups, automate testing,...
Possibilities are vast and this single tool can replace several other!

Not only is it a quality tool, but it is also simple to manipulate even by non-professionals: I have never learned java. It is to facilitate the use of Talend Open Studio that I participated in the Babili project.

Hello, my name is Arnaud and I work in a global Industry company. My job is IS project manager for the supply chain, more specifically for BI and ERP needs, based in France.

The project that led us to Talend is a Data Quality project for our data warehouses. Because we were not using any ETL tool, we wondered whether such a tool could be of any help to get a better overview of our data flows, and/or a better flexibility in changing these flows.

This is how I discovered Talend.

Since then, my company started to use Talend for some particular issues, but not in a production environment. Now, we use it when the cube response is too heavy according to the need, and for one-shot data transfers.

But I am convinced that the tool is very efficient, that is why I spent some time with friends of mine, who have become Talend-addicts, to help the community.

I'm quite familiar with the English language and I've been working in computing for years, so working with an English tool is not a problem. But, when I saw on the Talend Forge website that translations into several languages were needed, I couldn’t help to give it a try!

The main reason is that I am tired of reading bad French translations in user guides, documentations, tools, etc. made by automatic translators. Sometimes, it becomes so hard to understand those translations that I prefer to revert back to English!

Then, I spent some time trying to translate different terms used within Talend tools using the Babili tool. The major difficulty was to find the closest meaning while not increasing dramatically the number of characters used!

But I can see now that the translation into French is almost over. I'm pretty eager to see the final result!

Hello, my name is Josep Curto and I work for a System Integrator in Spain. There I focus on implementing Business Intelligence systems with a special attention to the Open Source Business Intelligence market.

I have driven my career with a clear vocation for higher education, being a professor at the Autonomous University of Barcelona (UAB) and the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (UOC). At UOC, I teach Business Intelligence.

I'm also a Channel Expert for BeyeNETWORK Spain, writing articles about BI.

How did I come to Talend Babili?

For my job, I need to monitor the Business Intelligence Market. In the past few years, a collection of open source products have come on the market. These products help reduce our clients TCO without any quality or functionality loss. In fact, they can address all enterprise needs. Thus, I usually recommend Talend Studio and Talend Profiler as the right choice.

Thanks to Sandra Masse, I discovered the Talend Babili Project during a product presentation in Spain. I found Babili that was the perfect way for me to collaborate with Talend because the Spanish translation had not started yet and I usually don't have time to suggest enhanced functionalities or report bugs. I hope this way, more people get to know the Talend products in Spain. This project is a great idea because the community can take part to it easily.

Hello, Everyone. My Name is Kensuke Saeki.
My company works in Computer System Integration in Japan.
I joined the Talend Babili Japanese Translation in the Talend project.

I work with the Open Source BI programs from Jaspersoft.
The ETL tool from Talend is very useful and powerful. However, I felt the program needed a Japanese translation.
That is why I joined the Talend Babili project.
In Japan, although an application is efficient and there is no problem using Japanese code and data inside a system, it doesn't become popular without a Japanese interface.

Recently, many U.S and European OSS engineers and organizations arrived in Japan.
I hope these communities and OSS Engineers can exchange with each other.

There is still a big market for BI in Japan so I am hoping to help promote Jaspersoft and Talend.
These tools will be promoted to users and engineers.

When I heard Talend was interested in Japan, I felt the time had come: I could be an actor to help Talend on the Japanese market! I hope Talend will change the Japanese BI market.

Hello, my name is Timur Laykov and I work for a company that provides internet services.

I have a good deal of experience working with Data Warehouses and ETL tools. I have worked extensively with a commercial off the shelf ETL tool, and although it was good - I did not like it's proprietary programming language, it was very expensive and some design decisions were simply not right.

When I first heard about Talend, I was really impressed, an open source ETL tool that can generate source code in Perl or Java! That was a vision of mine from the day I started using ETL-s.

Then I started digging deeper and found a lot of great things about Talend - it is flexible - you can expand it easily, create your own components, or just embed some Java or Perl code in your Talend application. It also has this neat concept of context variables, metadata, a great user interface and tons of components that can be used to build your application, and it works on virtually any platform that can run Perl or Java.

So when we decided to create ETL-s for our new Data Warehouse - I immediately suggested we use Talend. We decided to give it a try, and that was a wise decision. Our first application is now running in production and has been live for almost a year , even better we have never had problems with it. It's stable, reliable, easy to maintain and very flexible - we have already made changes, and found that was very easy and straight-forward.

Of course with all software - there were some issues. The difference with Talend is unlike other proprietary software, you don't need to wait for Talend developers to address the issue. There are great tutorials on Talend, so you can easily fix a bug. Internally Talend is solid and well-designed - it is easy to understand the code - and easy to make changes. We also created a set of our own components to suit our needs.

There were some issues that we could not resolve by ourselves, but we had a community to assist us. I posted my comments on Talend forum - and immediately got a response. I submitted a ticket - and was so surprised that when I downloaded the next version of Talend - my requested functionality was there! I really feel like I have participated in building a great product, it's a great feeling that your ideas are appreciated and valued by the community.

After my first experience with the Talend forums - I started to post more - to express my vision on the product and the application architecture. I have always found a lot of support and helpful hints from the community members - the Talend community is strong and very helpful - thanks guys!

As a native Russian speaker I also take part in Russian Translation on Babili. I started to translate documentation to Russian at talend.infosystemsolutions.com . I am collecting tips and tricks for Talend that I will post on this website.

Let me know if you need any advice or Talend consultation. We have a team of developers that can help you with your Talend project - big or small. You can contact us through this web form.

Community Forum profile

Hi, Steve Maziarz here.

I wanted to take a moment to tell you about how I came to find Talend Open Studio.

I was using a product from a major international computer firm which claimed to be a graphical ETL tool. After two months of working with this tool, it became painfully obvious that it was NEVER going to be able to live up to the task. So, I had to search for something else. During my search, I discovered Talend Open Studio. I downloaded it and started teaching myself the basics. Within two weeks of using Talend, I had accomplished more than I had in the prior two months.

Talend Open Studio was far above anything else I had found and the price was certainly right. Even better, when I did encounter problems, there was a robust community of people ready to help out. I was amazed at the built in connectivity and components. To this day, I still am.

I've used Talend for a number of projects at my current employer and will continue to be a fan and supporter of the product in other endeavors as well. I can see myself using Talend for many years to come in many ways.

In addition to my regular employment, I also assist Real Estate Agents in promoting their properties with virtual tours. Learn more at http://realtorvr.net

I have also created an eBook on squeezing the most miles out of each gallon of fuel. It is available for free. Just visit http://getmygasbook.com

I also maintain a presence on a number of social and business networking sites. I have over thirty years of experience in technology, business and marketing and enjoy helping others solve difficult business problems.

Finally, if you're just considering using Talend Open Studio, I can only say: DOWNLOAD YOUR COPY NOW and get started today. It's a wise choice!

Community Forum profile

Hi, my name is Dylan Jones.

I am the founder of Data Quality Pro.com and Data Migration Pro.com, free professional communities and education resources dedicated to data quality and data migration professionals.

The sites are for people who wish to take their career or business to the next level so you will find everything from career advice to expert articles and tutorials on all range of data quality and data migration subjects.

On Data Quality Pro for example we have recently released a free 21-page tutorial on how to use Talend Open Profiler.

We've also given away a free data quality pattern analyser, a version for Oracle (which is great for working with Open Profiler) and the other version is for Microsoft Access.

You can get the free Talend Open Profiler tutorial and Data Quality Pro data quality tools here:

• Talend Open Profiler Tutorial: http://www.dataqualitypro.com/data-profiling-tutorial
• Data Quality Pattern Analyser for MS-Access: http://www.dataqualitypro.com/pattern-analyser-access
• Data Quality Pattern Analyser for Oracle: http://www.dataqualitypro.com/pattern-analyser-oracle

This means you now have a free toolkit to discover and manage defective data in your data management projects.

I must say, I've really been impressed with the direction Talend have taken with Open Profiler.

For such a young product it has a wide variety of beneficial features that will support anyone undertaking data initiatives such as data integration, business intelligence, data quality improvement or data migration.

Data profiling is one of the pillars of effective data quality management. By using the Talend Open Profiler in a structured approach that we introduce in the first tutorial (further tutorials to follow), you are getting a huge amount of value for what is essentially a free data quality tool.

I would really welcome your views on what data quality topics or tutorials you would like to see in our communities and I'll do my best to get them published.

Please contact me if you have any suggestions (click here)

Thank you,
Dylan

Founder & Editor

Data Quality Pro: http://www.dataqualitypro.com

Data Migration Pro: http://www.datamigrationpro.com

My name is Volker, I live in Germany and work in the IT-department of a financial institute.

Even if we don't use Talend Open Studio in our company I was so impressed with the functionalities it offers that I decided to support the community about one year ago.

What is so special about Talend Open Studio that I took this decision to support it?

For years now, I've been working at improving my department's development processes and, doing this, I've been dealing with many different issues.

For example:

Imagine you have a bug tracking database, a list of requirements from your sponsor (they often use "state of the art" tools like Excel) and a list of planned releases on a web page. Now you want to figure out which requirement belongs to which release and which bugs are associated with them. So just connect the different systems and documents, do some magic and have fun with your new, valorized data. By the way, the magic is done by Talend Open Studio...

And why Talend Open Studio and nothing else?

I often need to write scripts for parsing, converting, importing and exporting tasks, I'd say, even more often than the number of components in Talend Open Studio (and there are a lot).

I obviously thought about creating a generic system or framework that would do the job, but I didn't quite find the time for it. And I found out that many ideas I've had about this, were actually already offered in Talend Open Studio. So why would I reinvent the wheel again?

Talend Open Studio has many features that make it very flexible and hence interesting:

• It is scalable very easily with your own components
• The functions are not reduced to "simple ETL", you can also handle files, send mail, execute dynamic system commands and much more
• Talend Open Studio is a code generator, you don't have to care about specific servers or heavyweight runtimes.
• All this is hidden behind an intuitive GUI which also offers enhanced documentation, meta-management and different runtime contexts.

Last but not least, when I am not working at the office, or giving you some advice in the talend forums I'm very likely to spend time with my wife and our two daughters. And although I only mentioned them now, they come first in my life.

Community Forum profile

See you!
Volker

My name is Olivier and I'm an engineering student.
Last year, I did an internship with a service provider company where I had to analyse different Open Source Business Intelligence tools including Talend Open Studio.

Since this internship took place, I've used Talend Open Studio for everything! I use it for professional tasks: for data migration and ETL; but also for personal project like: creating a personal feed reader, sending mail/SMS regularly, managing some contact lists, sharing some files automatically with friends.

I'm fond of Talend because it seems to have unlimited functionalities. I've spent the last two months developing new components and, with a minimum knowledge of java, I was able to add new functionalities, to help my clients and to perform my own projects.

I've spent a lot of time asking and answering questions in the forum. I think the Talend Community is one of the most important things for users and developers. It's comforting to know that someone certainly knows the answer to my question.
I hope that I will be able to keep helping you!

You can find in the Ecosystem, some components I developed for the Talend Community:

• tFileOutputPDF
• tJPGMetadata
• tBarChart
• tSendSMS
• tPieChart

Community Forum profile
And if you have time, take a look at my blog (FR): http://blog.ece.fr/olivier_de_rochebouet

Olivier de R. / Proxiad www.proxiad.com