[2010-03-10] Talend Document: Building a Robust Business Case for High Quality Master Data - An Information Difference White Paper

Projects addressing data quality or master data management frequently struggle to get approved by senior management, and only around 60% of such projects proceed with a proper business case - causing high rates of cancellation and failure.

This white paper explains the key elements for building a proper, quantified business case. It presents the measures that are favored by corporate finance departments, and helps develop a strong business case for data quality and MDM projects. A number of real-life examples with quantifiable benefits are also included.

Armed with the materials in this white paper, you will be in a good position to deliver a high quality business case for your data quality or MDM project!

The Information Difference is an analyst firm focusing on Master Data Management (MDM). Its founders are pioneers who helped shape the MDM industry, with in-depth MDM global project experience.

[2010-03-08] Talend Blog: The evolving CIO mind on open source

CIOs point of view on open source is clearly evolving. Four years ago, the word on the street was that open source solutions were insecure, riddled with amateurish support, and we were hearing that the viability of OSS companies was a wild bet at best… Of course the spreading of FUD by proprietary vendors did not help.

Readers of this blog know that I always feel important to make it clear that open source is not only a way to cut costs. Hence the interest I found in the report on the first Open CIO Summit, organized by the Open World Forum in Paris in late 2009.

According to this report, CIOs regard OSS more as a source of innovation than as a way to directly save budget. If open source is often portrayed as a way to cut cost, CIO Summit participants give this cliché a pounding: they consider that the main benefit of open source is to help them to innovate easily in their IT, combining various elements: a dynamic ecosystem, the availability of a broad variety of software functions, modularity, compliance with standards, easy access, customization capabilities, and of course, lower costs. With OSS, they can test alternative options, without risk.

Secondly, the main interest offered by OSS lies more on standards and flexibility than code openness. CIOs know that code openness is a guarantee of customization and security, but they feel more attracted by standards compliance to guarantee flexibility and interoperability. OSS can be customized more easily than proprietary software, and OSS vendors are faster to take into account clients needs.

Finally, the main barrier slowing down the adoption of OSS seems to be usability: user interfaces of OSS tools have to be enhanced, in terms of ergonomics and design. OSS products have the reputation to be developed by technicians for technicians. And moreover, if adoption fails, the enterprise goes back to proprietary software with no second chance for OSS… This last point is quite important, and we addressed it from day one, in the very first versions of our products. I guess we succeeded: Talend customers often underline the ease of use and speed of learning of our tools in the case studies.

The report concludes that for CIOs, OSS is more an opportunity than a risk, if the enterprise knows how to manage best practices – which is essential in a quite tough economic environment. Of course, this is nothing new for us at Talend.  But this level of awareness (92% of CIOs are now using open source solutions or tools) is clearly encouraging.

Bertrand

[2010-03-02] Talend Blog: An Interesting Survey on Open Source Business Intelligence

Our friends at Aberdeen, a leading industry research firm, are currently running a survey on the use of open source technologies for BI deployments.

They feel that many CIO’s are compelled to evaluate open source business intelligence as a way to reduce their costs, and they are trying to figure out if that is the best way to reduce total cost of ownership, or whether there are approaches using traditionally licensed BI software that yield a superior TCO.  Similarly, does the open source model bring other business benefits, such as faster innovation and a more flexible deployment approach?

This research survey will determine what strategies and actions companies are taking to:

• Reduce the total costs of ownership of BI deployments.
• Increase access to, and adoption of BI capabilities.
• Foster faster development and deployment of new BI applications, reports and views.

Whether you use open source for your business intelligence systems or not, I would encourage you to take this 10 minute survey and you’ll be able to compare your organizations use of BI resources against its peers, and learn how open source BI might bring benefits to you.  Everyone that completes the survey will receive from Aberdeen a complimentary copy of the final research reports on open source BI and total cost of ownership.  Individual responses will be kept strictly confidential and data will only be used in aggregate.

Yves

[2010-02-12] Talend Blog: When proprietary vendors discover the power of community (but get it wrong)

Informatica recently announced the Informatica Marketplace - “the destination for buyers looking for data integration solutions.”  Informatica developers will be able to sell Informatica-related assets on this marketplace. Looks like a community to you? 

For Informatica, it means leveraging the work of their users to expand their footprint. That’s a good opportunity - for them.

But will there be interactions and collaboration between users?  Or is it going to be like the Apple App Store?  Would you call the App Store a community?  Beyond ranking an application, there is not much interaction between users, and Apple rules everything.

A few nuggets I picked along the way:

• “You determine the price for your goods.*” – but the footnote says “*All terms and conditions subject to change at Informatica’s discretion.” So maybe Informatica will end up deciding the price of your goods. Which percentage will they keep? 30%, like Apple?
• “Retain the IP rights” – great, Informatica is not going to strip you down from your IP. In a true community that would not happen anyway.

Now, an hypothetical scenario. An Informatica partner comes up with a new connector to - say - SAP.  And wants to sell it for $5k. Knowing that Informatica sells their own SAP connector for $100k or more, do you think they are going to allow this one to be sold on their marketplace? Ever wondered why you can’t find an alternate MP3 or AVI player on the Apple AppStore (even a free one, like VLC)?

At the end of the day, it’s not a community. It’s an additional way for Informatica to make money. It will not benefit their users. It will only benefit Informatica.

And the cherry on the cake?
“If you don’t have access to the Informatica Platform for development - you can rent it by the hour on Amazon.”
Another source of revenue for Informatica: people building stuff for the marketplace.

So why did Informatica use the term community all over the place in their announcement? This is not a community.  This is a new revenue vector for Informatica.  Maybe Wall Street will like it.  But what about their users, who are already nickeled and dimed?

If you are looking for a real community, where you can exchange, interact, and truly benefit, Informatica Marketplace is not the place to go.  Try open source instead.

Yves

[2010-02-10] Talend Forum Announcement: For test only, Talend Open Profiler 4.0.0M3 is available

Download and try the third milestone of Talend Open Profiler 4.0 at http://www.talend.com/download.php

Below are some new features:

- Analysis of a set of columns are enhanced
- Ability to use Java User-defined indicators
- New type of UDI (with numeric values)
- Menus to drill down into the values on pattern matching indicator

See the full changelog at http://talendforge.org/bugs/changelog_page.php

[2010-02-10] Talend Forum Announcement: For test only, Talend Open Studio 4.0.0M3 is available

Download it

This is the third milestone for Talend Open Studio 4.0.

Below are some features of this third milestone:

- OpenBravo components
- Die on Error on tMap
- Enable Informix Bulk inserts (tInformixBulkOutput).
- tELTMSSQL, tELTSybase and tELTPostgreSQL components
- Enable PreparedStatement for the all DB Row components
- MacOS X ini file points to correct launcher

Discover the full list of fixed bugs on the bugtracker changelog page.

[2010-02-09] Talend Document: Loading and Analyzing Web Data: Considerations and Recommendations - A Bloor Research White Paper

Founded in 1989, Bloor Research is one of the world's leading IT research, analysis and consultancy organizations.

In this Analyst White Paper, Research Director Philip Howard explains why web-based data, that includes not only clickstream data but also Web 2.0 user behavior information, is essential to analytic applications. He explains the complexity of incorporating this type of data in conventional analytic environments, and the technologies that are involved to optimize the process.

The white paper also describes a number of real-life use cases and their constraints and analyzes which technologies provide required capabilities.

[2010-02-06] Talend Tech Blog Olivier CARBONE: How to embed the Talend Open Studio 5′video

The 5mn Demo is now on YouTube! Feel free to embedded it on your website, blog, intranet …

See below the code:

<object width="425" height="344"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/NyUw1Zmf_-8&hl=fr_FR&fs=1&"></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/NyUw1Zmf_-8&hl=fr_FR&fs=1&" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="425" height="344"></embed></object>

In another way, the Rapid Learning often use this kind of video. Fast, friendly, this media is a good solution to transmit information to an expert team

More vidéo: http://www.youtube.com/user/TalendChannel

Scenario:

After the declaration of a delimited file in the metadata, the video shows the design of a job to read the data included in the delimited file.

The tMap component and the Expression Builder are used to transform the data.

In a second step, a mysql connexion is declared and a join between the 2 sources is designed in the tMap.

In the last minute, the video shows the SQL Builder and the data are recorded in a mysql table.

talend, video

Source: ocarbone.free.fr

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[2010-02-05] Talend Blog: Welcoming Open Source MDM

Talend enters a new market and everything changes - literally.  Last week, we introduced the first open source MDM solution and one week later the market landscape has undergone substantial consolidation with the two leading pure play MDM vendors being bought by larger companies.

Last spring as we were considering an extension to our product line, we carefully considered the MDM market because it is a natural extension of our historical core competencies of data integration and data quality.  We also evaluated the market conditions to see if it was ready for an open source solution.  What we found was a quickly maturing market that was gaining significant momentum.  These three factors lend well to the introduction of an open source alternative.

Our goal with Talend MDM is to democratize this space, just as we have done with data integration and thus far the reception has been amazing.  We have introduced an affordable, open source alternative at a fraction of the cost of cost-prohibitive and disjointed proprietary technologies.  In just over a week and a half we have had over 1500 downloads of the Talend MDM Community Edition.  The press and analysts and more importantly, our current customers have accepted our message and the blogosphere, twittosphere and other o-spheres are abuzz with open source MDM stories.

Then, everything changed.

Last week, Informatica bought Siperian and this week, IBM acquired Initiate Systems.  The two largest pure play vendors were consumed by bigger fish.  This changes the landscape and shrinks the battlefield.  This is business as usual in the proprietary software market; consolidation of closed, black-box technology in the hands of megavendors who control the entire data management stack chain and can dictate their terms to customers. All the while, we are immediately considered a leading pure play and are one of only a few independent MDM vendors.

This consolidation validates both the MDM market and our approach.  The two large acquisitions denote the mark in time that a baseline monetary value was placed on this growth market.  MDM is no longer a nascent market, it grew up and is here to stay.

The consolidation also validates our product strategy.  We have introduced a unique MDM solution.  It is driven by an Active Data Model and packages data integration, data quality, master data management, workflow and stewardship into a single platform.  This past week’s acquisitions represent a strategy to cobble these features together to meet the market demand.  We haven’t cobbled features together; we have united them on a single platform.

I am confident that we offer a compelling MDM technology and the initial interest has confirmed this.  Talend presents a flexible solution for the vast array of domains that need mastering and we will financially, strategically and technically help simplify the MDM business case process. Talend MDM decreases the time to value for MDM implementations and provides an ecosystem and community for sharing MDM discipline, governance, process, and organization…  it democratizes the market.

The problems that MDM addresses have been around forever and they will continue.  In fact, this MDM earthquake we are experiencing represents market maturity.  In this fundamental shift, we feel the time is right for open source MDM.

Bertrand

[2010-02-02] Talend Document: Using data integration to drive down costs and increase profits in high transaction industries - A Telesperience issues paper, sponsored by Talend

Data integration (DI) is often seen as merely a technical discipline, but this ignores the vital role it plays in helping enterprises achieve their business goals. It is essential that business managers, as well as technical staff, understand how better DI can help deliver against key commercial goals, such as helping the organization become more efficient, agile, innovative and customer centric.

Telesperience research indicates a pattern of high and increasing demand for DI from the business, as well as a recognition that DI is a key strategy for lowering costs and improving business performance. However, most enterprises also report that their DI projects over-run on either cost or time (or both) and that DI costs are either too high or more than anticipated.

This paper explains why DI is an important weapon in an enterprise's competitive arsenal by analysing how poor DI inflates costs, by revealing the current DI drivers, and by explaining how DI can contribute to commercial success.

Telesperience's Research Director Teresa Cottam says: "Our research demonstrates that companies that are able to deliver DI projects quickly, reliably and at low cost will out-perform their rivals, because they will be able to exploit new technologies and insights to gain competitive advantage and reduce their costs."

[2010-01-28] Talend Press Release: The UK government can reduce cost and risk by migrating to open source

The UK government can reduce cost and risk by migrating to open source

When will the public sector learn from the private

MAIDENHEAD, UK - January 28, 2010 - The news announced yesterday by the UK government that it expects to make savings of £3.2 billion annually from 2013/14 on made through transformation in public sector information technology has been broadly welcomed by open source specialist Talend, and more generally by the entire open source community in the UK.

Bertrand Diard, Co-founder and CEO of Talend, commented: “The announcement that the government’s ICT strategy will focus on a smarter, cheaper and greener public sector ICT infrastructure should be welcomed by both the industry and tax payer alike,”

“Under the IT Strategy the government intends to create one secure, resilient and flexible network which will enable every area of government to adapt their ICT to best deliver for the public. However it appears that they are still wedded to the ICT solutions of the past.”

“Critically for the first time, the plan intends to bring together all government departments, local government and wider public sector organisations to remove unnecessary overlaps between departments and avoid the costly duplication of IT,” he continued.

“The intention is to deliver efficiency savings by increasing the use of online services, streamlining contact with the public and reducing digital exclusion. The challenge will be to deliver just that and not just another IT White Elephant on the scale of the NHS IT Programme for Change, now costing £12 billion, £8 billion over budget and eight years late,” he added.

According to a recent policy document from the Conservative Party, Delivering Change: IT that Works, the UK government spends more per capita than any other government on ICT.

Bertrand said: “Having spent £108 billion on ICT in just eight years, it is clear that the UK government needs to assess its current spending activity. The Rowntree report “Data Nation” in March 2009 examined 46 large UK public sector databases and concluded that a quarter of the public-sector databases reviewed are almost certainly illegal under human rights or data protection law. It recommended that the current databases should be scrapped or substantially redesigned.”

“Considering that this assessment included the National DNA Database and National Identity Register, ContactPoint, it is outrageous that more than half had significant problems with privacy or effectiveness and could fall foul of a legal challenge. Service levels and security need to be significantly improved as the recent blunders could be detrimental to the nation,” added Bertrand.

In 2009, the UK government took a positive stance towards reducing IT spend by encouraging the use of open source in government IT systems. In recognition of some of open source software’s true benefits, the government updated its policy and introduced an action plan to drive the adoption of open source tools.

Bertrand responded: “The government is still resistant to open source tools despite its stated aim to adopt open source. Open source software does pass a number of complex tests to be accepted by the community. In fact, open source products are put through greater testing before GA release than proprietary based products,”

“At Talend for example, over 1,000 of our community members are involved with testing milestone beta releases. And a recent study by independent analysts has proven that open source database MySQL has ten times less defects than Oracle!” added Bertrand.

One of the major benefits of using open source software is that in having such a passionate community of followers, the software is constantly being developed and improved. In contrast, proprietary software’s code cannot be developed by its users to meet evolving business needs and can therefore become dated within a matter of months.

These arguments stress that open source is a professional and supported offering. With open source being able to integrate with legacy systems, risk is automatically reduced as organisations no longer need to spend massive amounts of IT budget on replacing major IT systems that may only be required in the short-term.

Bertrand said: “It is no longer acceptable for the UK government to continue spending such huge volumes of money on poor ICT, when there are cost effective and adequate alternatives such as open source solutions.”

“The government has been presented with the opportunity to dramatically improve the current databases and slash ICT spend by adopting open source solution where possible, enabling the public money to be put towards improving other vital areas. The next few years will prove valuable in determining whether they take this opportunity or not,” Bertrand concluded.

[2010-01-26] Talend Forum Announcement: Talend MDM Community Edition 3.2.0 is available

Download Talend MDM  Community Edition now!

Talend MDM provides the key functionalities across Data Integration, Data Quality, Master Data and Data Stewardship all through a single development environment. This unique approach allows you to install, implement and manage a single solution across all these key functional groups decreasing complexity and time to value for your MDM project.

[2010-01-24] Talend Press Release: Talend Introduces Rapid, Flexible, Open Source Master Data Management Solution

Talend Introduces Rapid, Flexible, Open Source Master Data Management Solution

Talend Offers First Comprehensive Solution for Data Integration, Data Quality, Master Data and Data Stewardship Built on a Single Platform

LOS ALTOS, Calif. - January 25, 2010 - Talend, the recognized market leader in open source data integration software, today announced the availability of the first open source Master Data Management (MDM) solution. With the launch, Talend is democratizing the MDM market with an affordable, open source alternative to cost-prohibitive and disjointed proprietary technologies. Talend’s comprehensive MDM technology enables organizations to quickly implement an enterprise-wide master data hub and ensure consistent, uniform control of any master data across the organization.

To meet strategic business objectives, organizations must streamline processes, create new revenue opportunities, reduce costs and facilitate company growth. High-quality master data is extremely valuable when it is available to enterprise business processes and analytics; however, implementing a master data project is often challenging, architecturally complex, time intensive and expensive. “As user organizations gear up for the economic recovery, they still need to maintain vigilance on costs, so we expect to see continuing downward price pressures in the MDM market,” said John Radcliffe, research vice president at Gartner. “2010 will see new entrants to the MDM market, bringing in different business models and pricing structures. They will start to offer alternatives to resource constrained organizations wanting to kick off MDM initiatives.”

Talend MDM represents a fundamental shift in the MDM market. It is the first comprehensive solution for data integration, data quality, master data and data stewardship built on a single platform and available at a fraction of the cost of traditionally complex and dissociated solutions. This approach accelerates and simplifies MDM implementations while providing flexibility to expand its value over time. Talend MDM’s unique data model allows organizations to immediately model and master any data domain, beyond customer and product and systematically improve data quality across enterprise systems. The solution reduces complexity and provides the necessary data stewardship tools that help teams efficiently collaborate on master data and meet data governance requirements.

Bolloré Africa Logistics, the leading integrated logistics network in Africa, established for more than 50 years in 41 countries is an early adopter of Talend MDM. “We have chosen the Talend MDM product to meet our unique requirements for mastering and integrating our critical business data, in order to align our field offices and create more efficient processes across our operations on the African continent,” said Thomas Darbois, CIO of Bolloré Africa Logistics. “When in production, we will benefit from the flexibility and the performance of the solution, in order to manage all the various activities across our network. The unique approach of configuring data integration, data quality and master data management in a single environment, and the integration of the solution, aims to reduce our deployment times and increase our leadership.”

Key features of Talend’s new MDM open source software include:

• Active Data Model: Talend’s Active Data Model allows organizations to immediately model and master any data domain, beyond predefined models for set domains. It is the center of the master data implementation and drives integration, quality and lifecycle of the master data.
• Domain Driven Integration: Talend MDM uses data model driven events to drive when and where data is synchronized, augmented or distributed. A graphical tool provides over 400 proven components and connectors to build integration processes for the master data.
• Master Data Quality: The Active Data Model allows users to validate, resolve and augment master data. The solution delivers a robust data profiling tool and provides components for name and address standardization, callouts to external standardization services and augmentation routines.
• Data Stewardship: The collaborative interface provides a set of tools for a team to collaborate on and create a trusted and reliable set of master data and the appropriate stewardship tools to manage the process of updating and managing the master data through a lifecycle.
• Talend Studio: Talend Studio provides a single platform for managing the data model, configuring integration, administering data quality and creating stewardship workflows to enable rapid implementation and to simplify management.

“Today, master data management is a discipline that only the largest companies can afford to deploy, and even some of those are freezing their roll-outs due to high perceived entry costs” said Raphaël Benoliel, director of the enterprise information management business unit of Business & Decision, a leading Systems Integrator in the data management field. “Talend has proven their ability to transform the data integration and data quality markets into a volume business with their innovative and cost-effective solutions. We now believe that the MDM market is ready to go mainstream and welcome Talend MDM as a critical solution to bring enterprise-grade or domain-specific MDM to a larger number of companies.”

“Talend’s mission is to provide companies with breakthrough open source data management solutions and MDM is a giant step forward,” said Bertrand Diard, co-founder and CEO of Talend. “Within the last year, we have seen a landslide of large companies adopting open source technologies to rationalize their IT deployments, as well as smaller organizations finally getting the budgetary means to adopt consistent and optimized data management for the first time. Open source drives innovation and Talend will continue to lead the market with the goal of offering the best solutions to our customers.”

Talend MDM is available immediately and exists in two editions. Talend MDM Community Edition is provided under the GPL license and can be downloaded at no charge from http://www.talend.com/download.php. Talend MDM Enterprise Edition is provided under a subscription license. For more information, please visit http://www.talend.com.

[2010-01-20] Talend Document: Open Source Master Data Management - The Time is Right

Many organizations consider high quality master data as a key strategy for accomplishing corporate objectives. Proper master data management (MDM) is indeed extremely valuable when available to enterprise business processes and analytics, however, master data projects are often politically challenging, architecturally complex, time intensive and expensive.

MDM is a natural extension to data integration and data quality. Open source MDM introduces a new, more accessible approach. It reduces implementation complexity, time to value and cost. In fact, as in many other markets, open source helps organizations overcomes obstacles and realize their goals.

This White Paper provides an explanation of why the time is right for open source MDM, and predicts the effects of open source on the MDM marketplace.

[2010-01-18] Talend Blog: The view from 2010

In hindsight, it’s easy to say that 2008 didn’t start very well, but most of us didn’t realize it until mid-September when Lehman Brothers became the first domino in a spectacular crash that has been likened to 1929. We found ourselves entering a recession, which has been rather euphemistically defined as “a pronounced deceleration of economic activity.” In other words, things screeched to a halt.

The world has been through down markets before in many arenas—housing, food shortages, medical care, employment—but it was a first for the software industry. Yes, the dot com bubble had an effect in 2001, but software essentially carried on.

Back in 2008, when I was looking ahead at the beginning of 2009 the plan was then — despite a challenging economy — to grow aggressively quarter after quarter; double the number of company employees; and continue our geographical expansion. We would 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.

How did we perform against goals?

Talend started 2009 on a high note. In January, we secured $12 million in a Series C funding round. Our revenue more than doubled. We started the year with 100 employees and now have a staff of 200. Our customer base grew from 400 to over 1000 and is now increasing at the rate of 100/month. Core product downloads more than doubled — from 700,000 to 1,500,000.

We opened a new office in the UK, reinforced our German team, continued to rampup our US operations.  In just the past 6 months we’ve seen a 100% increase in the adoption of our technology by software vendors under the OEM model through our “Powered by Talend” program. In November, Gartner positioned Talend in the “Visionaries” quadrant of the “Magic Quadrant for Data Integration Tools;” a clear validation of the commercial open source model in general, and of Talend in particular.

I’d say that we’re better than on-target. And that’s just from a business standpoint. Let’s look at products.

In the past year we released new major versions - 3.1 & 3.2 - of Talend Integration Suite and Talend Data Quality, incorporating significant new functionality for each. 2009 also introduced specialized products:Talend Integration Suite MPx for high scalability, Talend Integration Suite RTx for real-time integration, and our Lifecycle Platform. In September, Talend acquired the MDM technology developed by Amalto, placing Talend on track to deliver the first open source MDM solution, providing organizations the same features and benefits found in proprietary MDM solutions – at a fraction of the cost.

So where are we now, as we enter 2010?

The economy is slowly improving and Talend is now playing with the “big boys” - IBM, Oracle, Informatica, SAP, etc. We’ve proved that we’re the next generation in terms of products and innovation, and we’ve won many technical challenges in the face of our competitors. Our market is growing exponentially and our team has never been stronger or more ready.

2010 is set to be another very successful year for Talend.  We are looking forward to its challenges!

Bertrand

[2010-01-12] Talend Forum Announcement: Talend Open Profiler 3.2.3 is available

Download and try Talend Open Profiler 3.2.3 http://www.talend.com/download.php
This is a bug fixing release.

[2010-01-12] Talend Forum Announcement: Talend Open Studio 3.2.3 is available

Talend Open Studio 3.2.3 is available now, you can download it.

Bugs have been fixed. To see the change log, click here:
http://www.talendforge.org/bugs/changelog_page.php

Best regards

          shong

[2010-01-11] Talend Document: The 451 Group - Impact of Economic Conditions on Open Source Adoption

The 451 group is an independent technology-industry analyst company focused on the business of enterprise IT innovation. The company's analysts provide critical and timely insight into the market and competitive dynamics of innovation in emerging technology segments.

This report titled Climate Change: User Perspectives on the Impact of Economic Conditions on Open Source Software Adoption, is based on a survey of more than 1,700 open source software users and customers, assessing their current attitudes on the key benefits of open source software, including cost and flexibility.

The report serves as a practical guide for understanding the financial benefits of open source. It also includes an updated version of The 451 Group's guide for calculating the financial benefits of open source in enterprise IT projects. It provides a basic financial analysis approach and calculator to identify and capture the costs and potential benefits of open source software.

Note: This report is made available to you through your relationship with Talend. It was researched and published by The 451 Group, an independent industry analyst company, and is part of The 451 Group's Commercial Adoption of Open Source service. The report is available to the named recipient only and must not be shared externally to your organization

[2009-12-21] Talend Blog: The totalitarian Wikipedia regime

Banana republic? Communist regime? Fascist regime? Which descriptor suits best Wikipedia? In any case, don’t be a dissident. Or you may just disappear. Wikipedians don’t like dissent.

In August 2007, a courageous dissident (ShawnRog) wrote an article on Talend Open Studio. And then in August 2009, another dissident (Jim380) added an article on Talend, the company. But neither ShawnRog nor Jim380 are apparatchiks. Nevertheless their contributions remained published for a little while.

Then a real Wikipedia apparatchik, Ihcoyc, decided that enough was enough, and who were these people who dared write about products and companies he did not know himself. Ihcoyc is a real Wikipedia expert specializing in religious content, and also an attorney from Indiana (per his profile). He actually wrote an essay The presumption of non-notability for Internet related, computing, and services businesses, in which he proclaims:

I presume that a business or product is unlikely to be notable if it:
- Relates to technology, software, computing, or the internet;
- Is a service or publicity business; or
- Provides goods or services to other businesses rather than the general public.

So here goes Ihcoyc, who cannot tolerate stuff he personally does not know about, and he slams the two Talend pieces with a request to delete:

The page is here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/Talend

His claims: that references like eWeek, PCWorld or InfoWorld, or even Gartner, do not count. If it does not appear in the Indiana Bar Association Gazette, it isn’t relevant to the Wikipedia readers.

Now comes another Wikipedia apparatchik, Mukadderat, the same one who decided to delete the article on Expressor (for the same bad reasons), and strangely enough, he concurs with a terse:

delete nonnotable; one of many.

You will notice the clear explanation that Mukadderat offers.

A few dissidents then chime in. But they will not be heard, because they are Untermenschen or “SPA” – read Single Purpose Accounts, i.e. people who are only interested in one subject – IT in this case. And are tagged as such by the apparatchiks on Talend’s deletion page.

Just to make sure, the page is now tagged with an explanation: “Wikipedia is not a democracy, you can say what you want but we will do what we want”.

Another apparatchik, ThemFromSpace, got several changes of heart. He first said to keep the articles (“Keep the SPAs put in enough references to evidence that the article has the coverage to meet WP:N“). Then to merge the two articles. And finally to delete. Was pressure applied? Did he get scared to loose his editor privileges by siding with dissidents? Who knows…

The story is not over. I doubt Wikipedians will read this blog (after all, they are not interested in IT), and even if they do, it will only unnerve them more. After all, who are mere mortals to question the power of the Wikipedia self-proclaimed gods?

There is a high chance than the articles on Talend get soon deleted by a courageous Wikipedia administrator, like the aptly named “secret” who annihilated Expressor from Wikipedia (even the history of the deletion is nowhere to be found now, unless you bookmarked the page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/Expressor. It was still visible last week on Expressor’s page – these guys try to clean their tracks).

Apparently this happens to many small companies. Teresa from Telesperience summarized it well in her post Is Wikipedia discriminating against tech firms?

So – banana republic, fascism, or communism?

The first two types of regimes usually rely on a strong “leader” (whether he be a former sergeant or colonel from a colonial power, or a Führer or Duce – they are all the same) and use repression as a mean to avoid any challenge to their regime. If there is any ideology, it’s always rotten at the core.

Whereas communism started with a generous idea – provide for all members of a community. Of course we all know what happened to this idealism and to which excesses communism has led.

Is Wikipedia like communism? A possibly great idea, but now so corrupted that it only serves its apparatchiks and kills dissidence? 20 years ago, the fall of the Berlin Wall marked the beginning of the end for communism. What will happen to Wikipedia?

Yves

**  UPDATE December 23, 2009 **
The deletion debate is closed, reason prevailed.  A number of Wikipedians did not support this ludicrous call for deletion, and pointed to other abusive cases made by Ihcoyc.  They actually found some good references that I had never even noticed.  Proof that not all Wikipedians are corrupt.  Thanks to all who supported us.
One last word: let’s remain cautious.  Corruption is insidious.

[2009-12-14] Talend Blog: An endangered species

In a smart IT world, clients would cheer when a price drop was announced. But in our glass-half-empty world, customers only show joy when they hear that a price increase has been postponed!

This is the sad reality of the proprietary IT universe. “SAP Announces Delay in Maintenance Fee Increase” and (particularly DSAG and USF) express their delight.

As mentioned in a previous post:

“The price of maintenance is thus set at 22% of the software license price, compared to the 17% it was previously. However, this increase will not take full effect before 2015 for current customers - the cost of support will go up 3.1% annually, rather than an immediate 8%. New clients will be charged 22% as soon as they sign the contract.

In exchange, SAP agreed to jointly develop KPI benchmarking in order to measure the value of Enterprise Support (business continuity, business process improvement, protection of investment and total cost of operations) and to delay future increases until these targets are met.”

Eweek commented that on December 1 SAP announced “it will delay a decision on increasing customers’ maintenance fees until the beginning of 2010, in recognition of “ongoing pressures” on IT budgets in the aftermath of a global recession.” So, changing a maintenance fee from 18.36% to 18.9% is delayed; and that’s the good news!

In the aftermath of a global recession, we would be more inclined to suggest that they switch to open source. And it does seem that they’ve noted the trend. As Eweek reported: “SAP saw its revenues fall by 9% during the most recent quarter, due to an ecosystem-wide decrease in spending on business software.”

In response to the SAP decision, two of the user group members leading the project resigned, but “the Enterprise Support program is still on track.” So, besides the ongoing recession, what can SAP users expect? Nothing. As shown by Oracle’s decision earlier this year, the maintenance fee is set to rise to 22%. This is business-as-usual in the proprietary software world.

As I said in my earlier post: “Maintenance fees for open source solutions aren’t calculated the same way and, with no license fee, the open source alternative is far less expensive than a proprietary solution. And, finally, with free access to the source code, users can easily personalize their systems and at much less expense than contracting with SAP’s expert consultants.”

In fact, user reaction might be straightforward. They know that open source alternatives can help them cut expenses, while keeping the same level of service. And this is strengthened by Talend’s recent inclusion in the Gartner Data Integration Magic Quadrant. Open source is here to stay!

Bertrand

[2009-12-10] Talend Press Release: Decideo Barometer: Talend Wins a Golden Decideo

Decideo Barometer: Talend Wins a Golden Decideo

For the 8th consecutive year, Decideo.fr took the pulse of the business intelligence market. Talend is the first open source vendor to be awarded a “Golden Decideo”.

SURESNES, France - December 8, 2009 - Talend, the recognized leader in solutions for integrating open source databases, announced today that it has received a “Golden Decideo” in the annual Decideo survey. For the first time, the community of BI users presented this award to an open source vendor. And, for the first time, a data integration tool was recognized by the survey.

For the past 8 years, Decideo has taken the temperature of how companies use business intelligence. This profile promotes a better understanding of how and why companies use BI tools. The survey, conducted at the end of the year, is a real management tool for the BI market. Through a series of thirty questions, it measures practices, tools, and trends

Changing the decision making process
The 2010 edition, published today, confirms the importance of business intelligence in corporate strategy. The 90s heavily focused on backend systems, notably because of ERP. Optimization using BI tools is the major trend of the current decade and that is unlikely to change.

According to the survey results, in 2010 - despite economic uncertainty - 39% of enterprises will increase their investments in business intelligence and 53% will maintain their 2009 level.

As far as tools are concerned, after the consolidation vogue of 2007 companies have not viewed the market as definitively closed - quite the contrary. They have explored new avenues, with open source making a noteworthy appearance.

Talend: a successful emerging model
In terms of awareness, 49% of respondents voiced an opinion about Talend’s strategy, clearly demonstrating the company’s visibility in the marketplace and validating its communication efforts. For 40% of respondents, Talend’s impact on the decision support market is growing, with 47% reporting strong growth. In total, 87% of respondents believe that in the coming years Talend will be a leader in the BI arena.

“Talend is reaping the rewards of its position to provide a low-cost, open source solution, in line with market expectations” explained Philippe Nieuwbourg, publisher of the Decideo Barometer. “Everything isn’t free, or course. Some enterprise features are available at reasonable prices and services meet the professional expectations of companies entrusting a strategic part of their information systems to Talend. In addition, Talend’s marketing investment is paying off, with increased visibility and understanding in the marketplace.”

“We are pleased to see that the open source business model has been validated once again, with the Golden Decideo award,” said Bertrand Diard, co-founder and CEO of Talend. “Since 2006, Talend has been providing an alternative to the traditional proprietary model, typically characterized by lack of openness, high costs, and a lengthy return on investment. The results of the Decideo Barometer confirm our recognition by users themselves, who understand that our solutions enable them to better control data integration and data quality, while optimizing costs.”

About Decideo.fr

With over 8,000 members, Decideo.fr is the professional community of French speaking independent users and suppliers of decision support business systems. The Decideo.fr community surveys its members each year on various topics related to the use of decision-making in their business and their perception of market participants. These results are analyzed and published annually in the “Decideo Barometer.” Decideo.fr is the only French member of b-eye-network.com.

[2009-12-09] Talend Forum Announcement: New bulk mode in Talend translation platform Babili

Hi Talend community and translation contributors,

We have just added a new feature in Babili: bulk mode.

In a few words, the bulk mode is built on 2 "modules":

1. a web form to export/import translations (and resolve conflicts)
2. a desktop application "Babili Remote" where you can translate all Talend strings offline

Learn more:

* tutorial Babili Remote Quick Start - Export translations from Babili
* tutorial Babili Remote Quick Start - Import translations into Babili







Enjoy!

[2009-12-08] Talend Forum Announcement: For test only, Talend Open Profiler 4.0.0M1 is available

Download and try the first milestone at http://www.talend.com/download.php

The migration to Eclipse 3.5 allows a better support of Ubuntu 9.10 and you might also note that now the binaries are directly executables on Linux and MacOS.

[2009-12-08] Talend Forum Announcement: For test only, Talend Open Studio 4.0.0M1 is available

Download it

This is the first milestone for Talend Open Studio 4.0.

The migration to Eclipse 3.5 allows a better support of Ubuntu 9.10 and you might also note that now the binaries are directly executables on Linux and MacOS.
Discover the full list of fixed bugs on the bugtracker changelog page.

[2009-12-08] Talend Document: Practical Open Source Data Integration: Case Studies & Implementation Examples (Vol. 3)

Over the past few years, commercial open source vendors have been providing a real alternative to proprietary players. In the data integration space, enterprise grade open source solutions are adopted by many organizations for their data integration and data quality projects. These organizations span all industries, all continents, and all company sizes. More importantly, their projects range from ETL for business intelligence to operational data, data quality, master data management, etc.

This third volume of Practical Open Source Data Integration: Case Studies & Implementation Examples presents selected case studies, illustrating real-life implementations of open source data integration and its associated benefits.

[2009-12-08] Talend Document: Master Data Management Projects in Practice - An Information Difference Research Study

Master Data Management (MDM) has received growing attention recently as an essential component of information management alongside data governance and data quality. More and more, organizations are turning to Master Data Management as a key enabler in improving the timeliness, quality and reliability of business intelligence with the ultimate goal of improving business performance. Increasing regulatory requirements and the recent financial crisis have ensured that Master Data Management is increasingly finding its way onto the business agenda.

Information Difference conducted a survey of both end-user organizations and systems integrators aimed at gaining deeper insight into MDM implementations and their success factors. This report summarizes and analyzes the results of that survey, and presents practical recommendations on the "do and don't" of MDM. It also contains some enlightening findings on the use of open source and manual coding in MDM projects.

The Information Difference is an analyst firm focusing on Master Data Management (MDM). Its founders are pioneers who helped shape the MDM industry, with in-depth MDM global project experience.

[2009-12-06] Talend Press Release: Open source data integration spurs UK channel growth

Open source data integration spurs UK channel growth

Talend invites its current and potential partners to the first Talend UK Partner Summit

MAIDENHEAD, UK - December 3, 2009 - Following the tremendous growth of its channel network, Talend, the leading open source data integration vendor, has announced that it will be holding its first UK Partner Summit in Central London on Tuesday 12th January 2010, between 9am and 2.45pm.

A provider of enterprise-grade open source solutions, Talend boasts a range of proven technologies, including its award winning data integration and data quality tools, comprising advanced capabilities that dramatically improve the productivity of design, with the scalability to ensure optimal execution.

François Méro, General Manager-EMEA at Talend commented: “The channel’s demand for sophisticated open source data integration solutions has made Talend’s offerings very attractive and this has resulted in the company’s substantial rise in channel partners over the last few years, including Appko, Cimbax, Novena, Distinct, Luminary and Bolderwood, just to mention a few.”

“We are now firmly entrenched in the UK market and are continuing to expand with our recent open source MDM announcement, which complements our data integration and data quality product lines. Following this news, we are actively seeking further system integrators and resellers to help deploy our products within our core markets and the Summit will highlight the advantages of embarking on this journey with us,. It will also be an opportunity for our existing and future partners to receive complementary training on our products and solutions,” added François.

Attendees can register to take part in demos and discussions at the event. There will be an Open Keynote presentation by François Méro, General Manager-EMEA as well as exclusive presentations by Fabrice Bonan, COO and co-founder of Talend and Marcin Kierdelewicz, Talend Alliance Manager.

Dedicated to members of the Talend Alliance Program, IT system integrators and IT consulting companies in general, the Summit will provide attendees with the chance to explore and learn more about the Talend Alliance Program as well as the company’s business model and product offerings.

To register to Talend’s free event, visit: http://www.talend.com/partner-summit/uk/

[2009-12-06] Talend Press Release: Talend Launches Talend Integration Suite LCp To Support Enterprise-Scale Deployments

Talend Launches Talend Integration Suite LCp To Support Enterprise-Scale Deployments

Life Cycle Platform Enables Fortune 500 Companies to Improve Efficiency and Reliability of Enterprise Data Integration

LOS ALTOS, Calif. - December 7, 2009 - Talend, the recognized market leader in open source data integration software, today announced the availability of Talend Integration Suite LCp. This new enterprise data integration platform extends award-winning Talend Integration Suite to provide Fortune 500 organizations with a broad set of enterprise features, ranging from automated testing and code validation to multi-environment project repository management, to better facilitate enterprise-wide data integration projects and deployments.

Talend Integration Suite is an enterprise-grade, high-performance data integration offering that extends the functionality of Talend Open Studio, the company’s open source data integration platform. For the first time, organizations have a clear alternative to expensive, proprietary systems that require costly initial investment and rely heavily on IT resources for maintenance and upgrades. Talend Integration Suite LCp further extends the enterprise capabilities of Talend Integration Suite through features including:

• Testing Platform: By automating the quality assurance and regression testing of data integration processes on one single centralized platform, CIOs and IT managers can now automatically validate data integration processes before they are deployed, and perform automated regression testing of the entire integration architecture after any migration or update to the infrastructure.
• Repository Manager: Multiple project repositories can now be coordinated and the transfer of processes from one job repository to another can be automated. The repository manager can be used to link development repositories in order to exchange and share common logic, as well as development, test and production repositories to automate the qualification of jobs and their transfer to the next step. Workflows and permissions are also handled.
• Audit Platform: Organizations can analyze the degree of compliance of their data integration processes with their own set of development standards and best practices through an audit platform that automatically checks each job as it is developed. This enables developers to ensure their jobs are compliant with corporate rules, and IT managers to validate the work of their development team and systems integrators or contractors.

“Talend Integration Suite LCp reflects our commitment and dedication to offer our customers a cost-optimized enterprise platform providing fast time-to-value that can’t be matched by monolithic proprietary technologies,” said Fabrice Bonan, co-founder and COO of Talend. “We will continue our rapid pace of development in order to deliver data integration solutions that meet the increasing demands of large-scale data integration projects and deployments.”

Talend Integration Suite LCp is available immediately. For more information, please visit http://www.talend.com.

[2009-12-01] Talend Press Release: Talend Positioned as a Visionary in Magic Quadrant for Data Integration Tools

Talend Positioned as a Visionary in Magic Quadrant for Data Integration Tools

Evaluation based on completeness of vision and ability to execute

LOS ALTOS, Calif.- December 2, 2009 - Talend, the recognized market leader in open source data integration software, today announced it has been positioned by Gartner, Inc. in the “Visionaries” quadrant of the “Magic Quadrant for Data Integration Tools.”ⁱ In this report, which evaluates vendors based on a set of criteria that include “completeness of vision” and “ability to execute,” Gartner indicates that “Despite challenging economic conditions in 2009, activity in the data integration tools market remained strong. Demand for lower-cost tools and faster time to value, new market entrants, and ongoing consolidation via acquisitions of specialists put pressure on both niche and established vendors.”

“We view our positioning in the “Visionaries” quadrant by Gartner a validation of the ability of commercial open source vendors to provide customers with the enterprise-ready solutions needed to address their data integration challenges and improve business performance,” said Bertrand Diard, CEO and co-founder, Talend. “In my opinion, this inclusion reflects our ongoing commitment to innovation and delivering unmatched value to our clients. Open source vendors like Talend will continue to bring to market cost-effective, enterprise-ready alternatives that are right on par with leading solutions.”

To be included in Gartner’s “Magic Quadrant for Data Integration Tools,” Talend had to possess (within its technology portfolio) the subset of capabilities identified by Gartner as most critical from within the overall range of capabilities expected in data integration tools. Vendors also had to meet stringent market size and penetration requirements.

Talend’s flagship open source data integration solution, Talend Open Studio, has garnered more than five million lifetime downloads and one million core product downloads since its release in October 2006. Along with enterprise-version Talend Integration Suite, it is a less expensive and more scalable open source alternative to proprietary data integration solutions that require costly initial investment and rely heavily on IT resources for maintenance and upgrades. Talend Integration Suite is an enterprise-grade, high-performance offering that extends the functionality of Talend Open Studio, with technical support and additional features for collaboration and deployment in large enterprise settings.

Interested parties can request a copy of the Magic Quadrant for Data Integration Tools report at http://www.talend.com/gartner-mq, compliments of Talend.

About the Magic Quadrant

The Magic Quadrant is copyrighted November 25, 2009 by Gartner, Inc. and is reused with permission. The Magic Quadrant is a graphical representation of a marketplace at and for a specific time period. It depicts Gartner's analysis of how certain vendors measure against criteria for that marketplace, as defined by Gartner. Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in the Magic Quadrant, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors placed in the "Leaders" quadrant. The Magic Quadrant is intended solely as a research tool, and is not meant to be a specific guide to action. Gartner disclaims all warranties, express or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.

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ⁱGartner “Magic Quadrant for Data Integration Tools” by Ted Friedman, Mark A. Beyer, Eric Thoo; November 25, 2009.

[2009-11-30] Talend Press Release: NewFinance Capital integrates back office data with Talend Integration Suite

NewFinance Capital integrates back office data with Talend Integration Suite

MAIDENHEAD, UK - November 29, 2009 - Talend Integration Suite, the leading open source enterprise data integration solution has been selected by NewFinance Capital LLP (NFC) – a fund of hedge fund manager wholly owned by Schroders plc, to improve back office data management which is based in India.

NFC is the adviser/manager to the Opus funds of hedge funds and also provides advisory services to investors for managed accounts.

Mattias Altin, Development Team Leader/Architect at NFC commented: “NFC sources data from a number of external parties such as prime brokers, administrators, fund managers and Bloomberg. The data we receive is often in a variety of formats such as word documents, spreadsheets, and proprietary feed formats. This makes it increasingly more difficult for us to merge and maintain data manually.”

“It is fundamental that we have access to up-to-date data as we need to compile accurate reports on a timely basis for making investment decisions and to distribute to our investors. It is also important that we can demonstrate to our current and potentially new investors, the strong commitment we have in maintaining a high standard in our data processing procedures,” explained Mattias.

Talend Integration Suite is the first open source enterprise data integration solution, designed to support multi-user development, and to scale to the highest levels of data volumes and process complexity. The solution features an intuitive work environment and enterprise-grade deployment and monitoring capabilities.

Mattias added: “Being open source, Talend Integration Suite fits nicely alongside our existing IT systems so we have been able to keep costs down to a minimum. Its Java code generation approach permits us to respond to the business needs with ease and significantly cuts down on the development time. The studio can automate the scheduling of jobs from a secure central location, which will allow us to maintain a high level of process consistency and reliability with an accurate audit trail.”

François Méro, General Manager-EMEA, Talend commented: “Managing data integration by hand can be costly and inefficient. Talend Integration Suite will provide a clear structure to NFC’s data and its operations. It will help to severely reduce the time that it takes NFC to build and maintain integration processes, down from months to just days. In being able to work with up-to-date data the company will benefit from being able to take advantage of new exciting opportunities as productivity will be greater and customer service will be improved.”

[2009-11-30] Talend Blog: Gartner recognizes open source as enterprise data integration

Some will say “it’s about time”.  I won’t.  Although I’ll admit that I was impatient to see the Magic Quadrant for Data Integration been released.  It’s finally out, and well worth the wait.

But before getting into more details, I want to set some points straight.

Last year, I posted on this blog a comment on Gartner’s latest Magic Quadrant for Data Integration. This was perceived by some as a direct attack against Gartner analysts, an unprecedented action from a vendor according to an AR firm: Vendor complains in a very public blog post about Gartner’s Data Integration Magic Quadrant.  A lively discussion ensued, mostly with Gartner analyst Andreas Bitterer (Setting the Record Straight) and many other parties chimed in – analysts, vendors, etc.

I still stand behind what I said.  I feel that Talend’s instant traction a year ago should have been sufficient to get us in the Quadrant. Gartner’s policy is to look at previous years’ record. I disagree with this policy, but it’s clearly stated and applied fairly and objectively.  This is what’s important.

The second thing I feel I need to say, is that Talend is not a Gartner client.  I have seen many implications amounting to “you have to pay to be included”.  Well, I can affirm loud and clear that this is not true. At the time I write this post, Talend has never paid a penny to Gartner.  All this inclusion has cost us is time, convincing, sweat, stress – but it did not dent my marketing budget.

These past few months of interacting with Ted Friedman, Mark Beyer and Andy Bitterer have been very interesting.  The Magic Quadrant process is a well oiled mechanic, and the analysts are clear on what to expect.  Along the process, a few other research notes mentioning Talend have seen the light of day. One such report was on open source data quality, on which Jeff Kelly of SearchDataManagement.com has written, quoting Ted Friedman: “The most advanced of the open source vendors offering data quality tools is Talend”.  Another recent note by Gartner is titled “2009 Sees Increased Adoption of Open-Source Data Integration Tools” – but not been a Gartner client I don’t know precisely what it says.  I just know from gartner.com’s search engine that it mentions Talend.

Back to the new Magic Quadrant.  I got a courtesy copy from Gartner but obviously can’t and won’t share copyrighted material on this blog.  A few things which are important though:

• Talend is coming into the Quadrant as a Visionary.  In itself this is quite an accomplishment: many new entrants start as Niche Players and then slowly make their way to the right – if at all.  I’ll take that as a recognition that the commercial open source model enables a different delivery and development model.
• Talend is the only new entrant in the Quadrant this year, and obviously the only open source player in it.  Many vendors (proprietary or open source) have been trying to ride in the wake we created, as seen in numerous press releases and articles (“we are like Talend, except that…”).  They are not there yet.  Personally, I would love to see another open source player in the Quadrant, if only to reinforce the proof of the enterprise readiness of open source data integration.

What does that mean for Talend?  Is this a life-changing event?  I don’t believe so.  We acquired 800 enterprise customers, reached 5 million downloads, without this kind of coverage.  Still, is it going to help us in large enterprise accounts?  You bet it will.  Many CIOs, when they’ll get this report on their desk, will want to know more about us, and especially figure out how Talend can help them optimize their costs and increase flexibility.  We’ll be happy to tell them.  And to give them examples of how their peers have done it.  The same ones we presented to Gartner in the past year.  (Kind of chicken-egg story).

In any case, I am proud that Talend is joining the handful of open source companies recognized by Gartner in a Magic Quadrant.  Others who made it include Alfresco (Enterprise Content Management), Drupal, Liferay & MindTouch (Social Software in the Workplace), GroundWork (Network Management), MySQL (DBMS).  And I would be surprised if our friends at Jaspersoft and Pentaho did not make the next BI Quadrant.  They certainly deserve it and have the track record.

And, as Matt Asay recently wrote, maybe it’s time to upgrade open source perceptions of Gartner…

Yves

** UPDATE Dec 1, 2009 **
You can now view the full Magic Quadrant report, courtesy of Talend, by clicking here.

[2009-11-24] Talend Press Release: Sitelynx uses Open Source data integration to optimise performance

Sitelynx uses Open Source data integration to optimise performance

MAIDENHEAD, UK - November 24, 2009 - Talend Open Studio, an Open Source data integration solution, has been selected by Sitelynx Ltd, a UK search engine optimisation specialist, to help efficiently integrate data from a number of different infrastructures to boost business performance.

Sitelynx Ltd is the original search engine optimisation company in the UK and is leading the way in both natural and paid search, having recently expanded into Social Media and website conversion optimisation.

“Sitelynx collects millions of individual actions, including impressions, clicks and transformations,” said Peter Loleit, Head of SEO and Technology at Sitelynx. “In order to understand which campaigns are the most efficient, we need to consolidate all information in a data warehouse. We can then run regular analysis and data mining.”

“Sitelynx receives a huge variety of data formats. For example, we extract data from Pay-Per-Click platforms such as Google and Yahoo, whilst advertising and marketing platforms provide data in XML and CSV files. For this reason we needed an Open Source data integration tool, as proprietary software often does not have the capability to integrate a wide range of formats,” added Peter.

Talend Open Studio is a sophisticated and robust tool, transforming the process of ETL (loading a data warehouse) from a complex and time-consuming task to being effortless through the use of automated processes.

Peter said: “Using Talend Open Studio, Sitelynx will be able to accurately map and view a graphical representation of processes and workflow charts for each individual client. Plus, there is a strong community supporting the development of the product, meaning that we can now connect to Google Docs to extract data from spreadsheets if we wish.”

Talend Open Studio is enriched with a number of dynamic features that provide Sitelynx with a number of benefits. Most notably is its reporting function, which enables Sitelynx to extract current data from Pay-Per-Click campaigns and send it to the relevant person as a text message alert.

François Méro, General Manager EMEA, commented: “When dealing with such a vast amount of data in a range of formats, Open Source helps to eliminate a great deal of challenges compared to proprietary software, which has its limitations. With Talend Open Studio in place, Sitelynx can now streamline its data by consolidating all types of information effectively and without human error. The fact that Talend’s tool accurately integrates data and provides campaign reports automatically means that the company can now benefit from increased performance and efficiency as well as having sufficient information available to prove compliance.”

[2009-11-23] Talend Forum Announcement: Talend Open Profiler 3.2.2 is available

download it. http://www.talend.com/download.php

[2009-11-23] Talend Forum Announcement: Talend Open Studio 3.2.2 is available

Download it

32 bugs were fixed. This is a bugfixing release.

[2009-11-20] Talend Blog: Open source continues to conquer, but always conveys the same platitudes

I recently read the results of a survey by Computer Weekly and ResearchNow Business. The Computer Weekly IT Panel was launched in April 2009 and comprises almost 4,000 IT professionals working in a range of organization types, size, and business sectors.

These results confirm the growing adoption of open source technologies, and attribute it to the weak economic environment. To the question: In light of the economy, how likely is it that your business will use open source software in the future? only 29% of companies replied that they do not intend to use such technology. 26% already use open source, and 45% are thinking about using open source either throughout the company, or for a smaller project. The study determined that the “use of open source software appeared to be more common among smaller organizations, i.e., those with fewer than 50 employees and less than £10 million in revenue.”

While this is nice to hear, it only reflects part of the truth. Certainly, facing a slowing global economy, open source remains an essential alternative for companies seeking to reduce their costs. However, this is only one of the benefits - albeit the most common - attributable to open source.

Let’s look at some others, in no particular order:

• Open source also gives control of the code to users and thus scalability.
• Open source offers opportunities for customization that only an army of consultants could provide for a proprietary solution (and I’m not talking about the cost of implementation).
• Open source standards-based technology facilitates the integration of other tools – open source or proprietary – and blends seamlessly into a company’s IT system.
• Open source offers performance similar, or superior, to traditional solutions.
• Open source is generally based on a community that participates in development and is involved in product improvement. The community also contributes to knowledge transfer via forums, wikis, or online courses.
• Open source provides user-friendly features, designed for the majority of users.

Quite a lot, but this isn’t an exhaustive list. I haven’t mentioned reliability or security. And we have nothing to be ashamed of in these areas.

So, of course open source can help reduce business costs, but if you only think about it on that level, I don’t think many companies will rush to purchase.

Bertrand

[2009-11-19] Talend Press Release: Reed Exhibitions makes a stand with open source data integration solution

Reed Exhibitions makes a stand with open source data integration solution

Global events organiser chooses Talend Integration Suite & Talend Data Quality to synchronise data

MAIDENHEAD, UK - November 20, 2009 - Reed Exhibitions, the world's leading events organiser, has selected Talend Integration Suite and Talend Data Quality, the leading open source data integration and data quality tools, to help better manage the migration and integration of company data.

Reed Exhibitions will be using Talend's software to support its global enterprise applications programme by providing real-time integration between its online web platform which services over 400 websites and key business applications including Salesforce.com (a staple for Reed's sales and marketing teams). In conjunction, Talend's software will help to synchronise the company's global team as well as helping to align processes such as sales order processing across the Americas, Europe and Asia Pacific regions..

Reed Exhibitions runs over 470 events in 37 countries, bringing together over 7 million active event participants worldwide, and with 2,700 employees in 38 offices around the globe, the company handles high volumes of data. This also means that Reed Exhibitions receives data in a range of different formats that must be integrated accurately and quickly.

Dominic Shine, CIO, Reed Exhibitions commented: “We needed a sophisticated solution from a strategic partner to support our global rollout of enterprise platforms that had the ability to orchestrate sharing of data and enable streamlining of processes across our online, sales and financial platforms and importantly, to do so in real-time.”

“As we continue to harmonise our platforms across our group whilst supporting a range of existing disparate systems and a range of different formats for processing sales orders, we were attracted by the concept of using an open source tool to help keep costs low. It is important that we use a solution that can work efficiently alongside other real-time resources and has the capability to move data automatically to help meet client demands and compliance regulations, and Talend's enterprise open source solutions met our criteria perfectly”, continued Dominic.

Talend's award winning product, Talend Open Studio, is the most widely used data integration solution in the world. Talend Integration Suite provides value-added features and services that extend Talend Open Studio and is the first open source enterprise data integration solution, designed to support multi-user development, and to scale to the highest levels of data volumes and process complexity. Talend Data Quality works in conjunction with Talend's data integration tools to analyse and correct erroneous, duplicated or incomplete data.

François Méro, General Manager-EMEA, commented: “Leading in one of the most competitive industries, Reed Exhibitions needed a solid open source data integration solution and Talend Integration Suite and Talend Data Quality are exactly that. As intuitive solutions, they will enable the company to maintain a consistent framework for all industry events and therefore continue to provide a reliable and high standard of customer service throughout its operations. We look forward to working with Reed Exhibitions for future years to come.”

About Reed Exhibitions

Reed Exhibitions is the world's leading events organiser, with over 470 events in 37 countries. In 2008 Reed brought together over seven million industry professionals from around the world generating billions of dollars in business. Today Reed events are held throughout the Americas, Europe, the Middle East and Asia Pacific, and organised by 38 fully staffed offices.

Reed organises a wide range of events, including exhibitions, conferences, congresses and meetings. Its portfolio of over 470 events serves 44 industry sectors, including:

Aerospace & aviation, automobiles, broadcasting, building & construction, electronics, energy, oil & gas, engineering, manufacturing, environment, food service & hospitality, gifts, healthcare, interior design, IT & telecoms, jewellery, life science & pharmaceuticals, machinery, medical education, printing & graphics, property & real estate, security & safety, sports & recreation, travel.

Working closely with professional bodies, trade associations and government departments Reed ensures that each and every event is targeted and relevant to industry needs. As a result, many Reed events are market leaders in their field.

Reed Exhibitions is part of Reed Elsevier Group plc, a FTSE-100 company and world-leading publisher and information provider. In February 2009, Reed Elsevier reported revenues for 2008 of £5,334/€6,721m.

[2009-11-17] Talend Press Release: Infobright and Talend Announce Integrated Open Source Solutions for Data Warehousing, with Analytic Database and Data Integration

Infobright and Talend Announce Integrated Open Source Solutions for Data Warehousing, with Analytic Database and Data Integration

Two Versions Available Immediately, Including one End-to-End BI Solution with Jaspersoft

TORONTO, Ontario and LOS ALTOS, Calif. - November 18, 2009 - Infobright, the open source data warehousing company, and Talend, the recognized market leader in open source data integration, today announced the immediate availability of two integrated virtual machines. The first combines the Infobright® analytic database, Infobright Community Edition (ICE), with Talend Open Studio, the leading open source data integration tool. The second virtual machine bundles these same two products with Jaspersoft’s open source report server, JasperServer Community Edition, to deliver an end-to-end business intelligence solution.

Each virtual machine benefits from Infobright and Talend-s large and vibrant open source communities: With over five million lifetime downloads, Talend Open Studio is the most widely used open source data integration tool available, and Infobright is built on MySQL, the world-s most popular open source database. The joint solutions give developers the ability to quickly and easily download, install, test and deploy a powerful, self-managing analytic database in conjunction with a market-leading ETL (extract-transform-load) tool and business intelligence functionality.

“Together, Infobright, Talend and Jaspersoft are combining the rich capabilities that today-s businesses need to leverage their ever increasing and diverse data assets,” said Susan Davis, vice president of marketing at Infobright. “Offering a quick path to deployment, these solutions enable users to take advantage of all the benefits - such as flexibility and cost effectiveness -

that open source has to offer.”

Infobright-s self-managing software reduces administrative efforts by up to 90 percent, leverages standard servers, and requires far less storage than other products due to its industry-leading data compression and elimination of indexes, data partitioning or data duplication. Through the virtual machines, Infobright customers now have access to innovative and affordable database, data integration and BI capabilities within a single offering.

“Talend is pleased to extend our partnership with Infobright through the release of these compelling new open source offerings,” says Yves de Montcheuil, vice president of marketing at Talend. “Our user communities can now benefit from an easy to deploy, low-cost opportunity to get up and running with an integrated, end-to-end solution that enables them to load and analyze large amounts of data faster than ever before.”

The virtual machines include sample transformations that extract data and load it into the Infobright analytic database, demonstrating the products- ease of use and performance. Each can be freely downloaded and installed in minutes at http://www.infobright.org/Downloads/Talend_VM/

About Infobright

Infobright, the open source data warehousing company, has pioneered the development of self-managing analytic database software. The critical need for business intelligence, coupled with the dramatic growth of corporate data, has outpaced IT-s resources and budget within many companies. Infobright-s technology solves this problem by delivering a highly scalable analytic database that reduces ongoing management by up to 90 percent and costs significantly less than other solutions. Infobright is being used by both enterprises and ISVs in online marketing, financial services, telecommunications, and other industries to provide rapid access to critical business data with unmatched operational simplicity. For more information, please visit http://www.infobright.com and http://www.infobright.org.

[2009-11-17] Talend Press Release: Conexance MD uses Umanis and Talend to help its clients gain market share

Conexance MD uses Umanis and Talend to help its clients gain market share

Direct Marketing specialist aggregates 120 files within a data warehouse powered by Talend Integration Suite, which provides additional important automatic processing.

SURESNES, November 17, 2009 - Talend, the recognized leader in open source data integration solutions, and Umanis, one of the major French consulting companies in Business Intelligence, announced today that Conexance MD, a firm that markets and develops databases aggregated for long distance shopping, selected the two companies to design a new product that will strengthen its competitive advantage.

Conexance MD is the French leader in aggregated databases for catalog shopping and e-commerce. Conexance MD experts analyze more than 250 million transactions daily to predict the purchase behavior of 17 million home shoppers. The 120 advertisers-members of the Catalog Shopping Alliance-update their data on a daily basis, resulting in tens of millions of lines that must be integrated daily.

“We wanted a tool to pool our databases. With such large volumes, we not only needed a solution powerful enough to handle them, but we also needed to industrialize frequent updates,” explained Nicolas Giard, Managing Director at Conexance MD. “Umanis was a technology partner of ours in the past, so we asked them to develop a data warehouse to receive and duplicate our partners files, and select and establish an integration tool to meet our needs.”

A specialist in Direct Marketing, and particularly well versed in Master Data Management, Umanis-a Talend Platinum partner-chose Talends open source data integration solutions. “Aside from the excellent price/performance ratio, we were looking for an open tool that would allow the integration of other tools, such as the NORMAD address standardization solution,” explained Luc Doladille, Project Director at Umanis. “Talends extensive connectivity selection and ease of use were deciding factors in choosing the tool. Also, Talend Integration Suite offers collaborative features that let us close the distance between the teams scattered across multiple sites in Paris and Lille. We also appreciated the level of support and professional assistance, both extremely useful given the challenges related to the projects volume and performance. Finally, Talend Integration Suite accelerated each database update from one day to 6 hours.”

With Talend, Conexance no longer has to deal with laborious developments that are difficult to maintain. “We asked ourselves the value of developing an internally-dedicated tool, which we definitely would have undertaken if the market only offered expensive, closed proprietary solutions.,” concluded Nicolas Giard. “But thanks to Talends open source model, we were able to install a ready-to-use, efficient, and particularly economic solution. Additionally, the Talend team was able to mobilize support when we needed assistance. Today, we have a business system that is easy to use, fast to learn and offers the productivity level we expected. We can offer new services to our clients and develop our skills in performance analysis and direct marketing.”

“The collaboration with Umanis and Conexance perfectly illustrates the strength of our solutions-in terms of performance, openness, automation, cost savings, and the ability to handle large volumes of data,” said Franois Mro, VP and General Manager, Talend EMEA. “These assets are critical for one of the major players in marketing and client knowledge in France and we are proud to help strengthen its position in an intensely competitive market.”

About Conexance MD

A simplified stock corporation launched in April 2006 with a capital of 210,000 , Conexance MD is a direct marketing company that specializes in database marketing. It manages the first aggregated database devoted to catalog shopping and electronic commerce: “VAD Alliance”. Its data mining expertise, based on proprietary statistical models that have been implemented and optimized in the United States for more than 15 years, allows catalogs and VAD Alliance Internet site members to track the transactions of long-distance buyer profiles online and offline that correspond with their offers. An innovative company positioned in the client knowledge niche, the Conexance MD system provides strong productivity gains in the prospection and loyalty phases. The service offer extends from locating strong affinity files to optimizing proprietary files. It now includes studies in integrating consulting.

The company is managed by corporate shareholders and the two investment funds, Xange Capital and Aurinvest.

About Umanis

Created in 1991, Umanis is a consulting and engineering company specializing in Business Intelligence, Client Relation Management (CRM) and e-Business. Umanis assists its clients in every aspect of their IT projects, from integration consulting to applicative third-party maintenance and training, according to three modes of intervention: on-site provision, fixed prices and a shared services center.

In 2008, the Umanis Group, which has 500 active clients and 1000 employees, realized revenues of 60 million Euros. Known for its technological and functional expertise, the Umanis Group is a strategic partner of the biggest software editors on the market.

Umanis has been listed on the Eurolist Compartment C market of Euronext Paris (ISIN Code FR0000066771) since December 1998. For more information, please visit: www.umanis.com.

[2009-11-17] Talend Blog: Open source, twenty-four years later…

US Department of Defense recently released a memo, “Clarifying Guidance Regarding Open Source Software (OSS)”.

As FederalComputerWeek notes: this memo “puts open-source software on the same level as commercial software and urges DoD agencies to evaluate it on an equal basis with proprietary offering.“Jay Liman, from the 451Group, explains it even more clearly: “The DoD memo wisely lays out the idea that open source software should be considered not alongside traditional, commercial offerings, but basically as traditional, commercial software offerings, so that the evaluation process is truly fair. Open source doesn’t fit in all circumstances, but it certainly does afford potential cost savings, flexibility and freedom in some situations, as noted in the memo.”

Following the White House announcement of its choice of Drupal, these words “not alongside…but basically as” sound very, very good. I affirm that this announces a turning point for the open source community. Twenty-four years have gone by since the creation of the Free Software Foundation by Richard Stallman. For 24 years, the power of OSS made gradual inroads on enterprise information systems, with clear acceleration in the past five years. Today’s memo brings credibility to what we’ve been writing about on this blog all along: OSS is on the same level as traditional software. And it echoes what we already wrote on this blog : cost reduction is not the only benefit you can realize. Typical criticisms were around reliability, security, or performance. The DoD has shattered these false allegations.

I feel like a cyclist after climbing the first pass of the first mountain stage of the Tour de France - happy to have reached this goal, and yet focused on the next pass. I know that the entire OSS pack will face other huge challenges, but today I’m really happy to savor this victory.

Bertrand

[2009-11-15] Talend Press Release: Healthcare Customers Turn to Talend for Enhanced Data Integration

Healthcare Customers Turn to Talend for Enhanced Data Integration

Organizations Around the World Adopt Open Source Software for Cost-Effective and Rapid Data Management

LOS ALTOS, Calif. - November 16, 2009 - Talend, the recognized market leader in open source data integration software, today announced several global healthcare customer wins including Children's Hospital&Medical Center of Omaha, Hosta, The Clermont-Ferrand Hospital and The University for Health Sciences, Medical Informatics and Technology (UMIT). The traction gained in this space further validates Talend's ability to provide scalable and flexible solutions at an affordable cost to healthcare organizations of all sizes, while satisfying the need for the real-time data the industry demands.

Worldwide customer wins include:

• Children's Hospital&Medical Center of Omaha-Children's Hospital&Medical Center of Omaha is the only healthcare center in Nebraska dedicated to children and specialty pediatrics. It handles close to 300,000 outpatients and 7,000 to 8,000 inpatients a year. The hospital uses Talend Integration Suite to normalize patient records among diverse applications. With Talend, the hospital was able to enhance its billing processes and improve compliance.
• Hosta-Hosta, a provider of services for the healthcare insurance industry, uses Talend Integration Suite for data conversion and data consolidation. With Talend, Hosta is able to deploy a Customer Data Integration (CDI) hub and consolidate policy holder information in a single reference record.
• The Clermont-Ferrand Hospital-The Clermont-Ferrand Hospital has 6,000 employees deployed over three sites, giving residents of the Auvergne region of France a capacity of 1,900 beds. The hospital uses Talend Open Studio to not only verify the quality and consistency of the data, but also for locating missing data. With Talend, the hospital was able to bypass an unreliable information system to improve invoicing by correlating data on hospital stays.
• The University for Health Sciences, Medical Informatics and Technology (UMIT)-UMIT is based in Hall, Austria, and is a key participant in the IMGuS project. A life science data warehouse system supporting systems biology in prostate cancer is managed by UMIT/biomed. In coordination with five other research groups located in Germany and Austria, UMIT manages the technical infrastructure and the data warehouse part of the project and uses Talend's open source data integration solution to process treatment data and perform statistical analysis. With Talend, UMIT was able to develop specific components to access and process human DNA data.

“Healthcare professionals need up-to-the minute information to advance medical research and provide the best care and services possible,” said Lou Agosta, independent industry analyst in data warehousing. “With the multiple data types and legacy systems, so often found in the healthcare profession, the need for a cost-effective and robust data integration solution to deal with heterogeneous data is in demand. Today, healthcare organizations around the world are discovering the changing economics of data warehousing, driven by open source solutions which offer the flexibility and scalability needed to address the complex data quality issues this industry faces.”

Talend Open Studio has more than five million lifetime downloads and one million core product downloads. Along with enterprise-version Talend Integration Suite, it is a less expensive and more scalable open source alternative to proprietary data integration solutions that require costly initial investment and rely heavily on IT resources for maintenance and upgrades. Talend Integration Suite is an enterprise-grade, high-performance data integration offering that extends the functionality of Talend Open Studio, with technical support and additional features for collaboration and deployment in large enterprise settings. To download Talend Open Studio, visit http://www.talend.com/download.php.

[2009-11-02] Talend Press Release: Talend Announces New Version of its Enterprise Open Source Data Quality Solutions

Talend Announces New Version of its Enterprise Open Source Data Quality Solutions

Talend Data Quality and Talend Open Profiler Now Make Data Quality More Extensible, Versatile and Automated

ORLANDO, Florida. (TDWI World Conference)- November 3, 2009 - Talend, the recognized market leader in open source data integration software, today announced the availability of enhanced versions of its Talend Open Profiler and Talend Data Quality solutions. Talend made the announcement at the TDWI World Conference in Orlando (November 1-6, 2009) where the company is exhibiting its full line of data integration and data quality products.

The new versions of Talend Open Profiler and Talend Data Quality enable organizations of any size to better manage their corporate data. The new features deliver improved usability, expanded support for a large number of data sources and can allow the creation and sharing of custom plug-ins specific to various vertical industries-such as healthcare, retail and financial services-that have specific rules about data validation. The upgraded products also enable customers to take advantage of Talend's upcoming open source Master Data Management offering, which was announced in September, 2009.

“Open source software is quickly becoming the choice for companies that need to implement cost effective solutions to address their data quality and data integration needs,” said Fabrice Bonan, co-founder and COO of Talend. “The new versions of Talend Open Profiler and Talend Data Quality make it even easier to ensure data quality in the enterprise; these two upgrades offer the enhanced features our customers are looking for and fit into any environment.”

Talend Open Profiler is the first open source data profiler and provides businesses with a snapshot assessment of the quality of their data, based on indicators they create for each individual data element or combination thereof. Talend Data Quality is the first open source enterprise data quality platform that combines data profiling and data cleansing in the same environment. It enables organizations to utilize correct data within their information systems, while identifying and eliminating bad, corrupted or duplicate data.

Talend's Data Quality solutions are used across a broad range of industries, each with its own set of data quality requirements in varying environments. The new versions of Talend Data Quality and Talend Open Profiler introduce upgraded features and benefits including:

• Custom Plug-In Support: Users can now build customized data quality plug-ins to measure and/or correct specific aspects of data quality with custom logic-for example complex dependencies between data items, or industry-specific data validation logic (computations, lookups and more). Customers and partners can easily build plug-ins and share them with other community members through Talend Exchange.
• Support for Additional Data Sources: Talend Open Profiler and Talend Data Quality now support native profiling of DB2 for zOS and DB2 for i (formerly known as DB2/400), in addition to the already-supported Oracle, Microsoft SQL Server, MySQL, and PostgreSQL. In addition, a database-independent profiling capability is now available, supporting standard portable SQL via a JDBC connection.
• Functional Dependencies Analysis: With this new feature, data profiling users can analyze and measure dependencies between several data fields. Examples would include: using a set of patterns for telephone numbers or postal codes that is dependent on the country, or checking that the “maiden name” field is left empty for male individuals.
• Automated Deduplication: When detecting an important number of duplicates in a profiling analysis, Talend Data Quality can now automatically generate the data cleansing processes that will remove and resolve these duplicates, dramatically improving the overall data quality process efficiency.

[2009-10-31] Talend Blog: Linking technology and society

“What does technology tell us about society?” asked Matt Asay last August, in an effort to explain what our decision to use (or avoid) tools like Twitter or Facebook says about our society.

Technology both reflects and influences the values and culture of the society that produced it to the point that, historically, eras have been identified by their dominant technology - Stone Age, Iron Age, Bronze Age, Industrial Age, and today’s Information Age. And, while enriching daily experience, today’s instant interaction has created a paradigm shift in the way we do business and live our lives.

The world isn’t actually getting smaller; it just seems that way. The invention of the automobile meant that people no longer needed to work or go to school in the same town they lived in. As air travel became more prevalent, it was possible to visit other countries without having to emigrate there. Better sanitation and medicine promised longer life and better circumstances. In the Bronze Age, life expectancy averaged 18 years. During the 20th century the average lifespan in the United States increased by more than 30 years (to 78+), of which 25 years can be attributed to advances in public health.

The proliferation of the computer has shrunk the world even further. You can visit some of the world’s top museums and get a better view of the art than you could wandering through the galleries. And technology has changed the way we think about pictures in general. From the early, unsmiling tintypes recording social mores - betrothal pictures, portraits of the dead - it’s now possible (and perhaps regrettably prevalent) to publish pictures of our kid’s first tooth worldwide on a social network site.

I think that Twitter translates our society’s current desire to share and discover what’s happening right now, anywhere in the world, in 140-character sound bytes. Facebook is a social network that reflects our cozy desire to share news and photos instantly with a huge number of “friends” all over the world. (A January 2009 Compete.com study has ranked Facebook as the most used social network by worldwide monthly active users.)

What does that really mean?

Matt’s question reflects only half the reality. Perhaps it’s better to ask if technology is influenced by the evolution of society or if society is influenced by the evolution of technology. It’s not a chicken-or-the-egg question, but there is a piece missing and that is, what links society and technology? The answer is…the use we make of it.

The Information Age has generated a phenomenon known as IT consumerism, broadly defined by Jon Stokes as “the general move of consumer-level products and technologies into the enterprise.” In the course of 30 years, ENIAC, the “Giant Brain” introduced in 1946, morphed into the ubiquitous PC present in any geek’s toolkit. As it became more user friendly and, consequently, more popular, it moved into major companies as the tool of choice. Today, it’s a sad reality that, for the most part, a user’s home system is several iterations ahead of what’s in general use at the office.

I feel strongly that society shapes technology as much as technology shapes society. To continue Matt’s premise, look at Twitter. Twitter isn’t technologically revolutionary. All of the pieces existed previously. However, it has infiltrated and subtly changed our society. Where previously letters were sent to announce important milestones (child birth; graduation; marriage; death), the new world of micro-blogging assumes that people actually care what we had for breakfast or that we’re watching TV. The same is true of Facebook, although it permits extended verbosity on the trivial minutia of daily life.

Take a look at the telephone. At first it was advertised as an improvement on the telegraph - better for transmitting urgent messages and ordering groceries. Although Alexander Graham Bell predicted the social use of the telephone, it wasn’t until the 1930s that AT&T advertised “Reach out and touch someone.” Today we can do it in 140 characters.

As John Lienhard, Professor Emeritus of Mechanical Engineering and History at the University of Houston, put it: “Our machines teach us. But they take their time evolving a role in our lives. Commercial software has been changing us year after year ever since it burst on the scene around 1980, and we’re still being changed by it. We can’t begin to see where the Internet is taking us. So it’s small wonder that the telephone took fifty years to show us how it would alter the very fabric of everyday life.”

And why did Michelin launch its Red Guide and maps? To sell tires. If people travelled more by car, they’d wear out their tires and buy new ones. The guides became extraordinarily popular in their own right and today there is no connection between how they’re used and the thought process behind their conception.

There is nothing unique or inevitable about the social changes brought about by technology. New technologies must meet consumer needs or fail, and these may involve intangible human elements like desire, imagination, or sometimes chance. The electric car is hovering on the brink. Today it doesn’t meet the commute needs of most people. It remains to be seen whether it will become the vehicle of the future, or go the way of the amphibious car (which, incidentally, I thought was an excellent idea).

To conclude, I’ll add that open source is the perfect symbol of this “use revolution” - not technological revolution as a goal in itself (of course, if we can contribute, we won’t hesitate!), but presenting innovative ways of distributing products, proving that a free model can thrive. The free model emerged in reaction to traditional software that, for a number of reasons, failed to satisfy clients. And this reaction does not need to be supported by a brand new technology but yes, by a brand new way of doing things, new things with new or old technologies.

Bertrand

[2009-10-25] Talend Press Release: Fashion Institute of Design & Merchandising Selects Talend to Enhance Business Intelligence Capabilities

Fashion Institute of Design & Merchandising Selects Talend to Enhance Business Intelligence Capabilities

Open Source Data Integration Provider Accelerates ETL Processes for FIDM

LOS ALTOS, Calif. - October 26, 2009 - Talend today announced that the Fashion Institute of Design & Merchandising (FIDM), a private college dedicated to educating students for careers in fashion, graphics, interior design and entertainment industries, has chosen the Smart i Appliance-powered by Talend Integration Suite's Extract, Transform, Load (ETL) tool-to boost its business intelligence (BI) capabilities. The Smart i Appliance, a collaboration between Talend, Key Information Systems, Systech Solutions and IBM, is a plug-and-play BI appliance based on IBM's System i (AS/400) platform. Under the terms of the agreement, FIDM uses Talend's transformation components-such as mapping, normalizing, sorting and aggregating-to cleanse, transform and load data into a new data warehouse.

“FIDM executives need to access up-to-date, reliable data from our systems to be able to make key business decisions,” said Roxanne Reynolds-Lair, chief information officer, FIDM. “Talend's tool within the Smart i Appliance expedited our ETL processing, making it two to three times faster than before. This is a huge benefit for us, and it enables our team to retrieve accurate, timely reports that make a significant business impact.”

FIDM's previous ETL tool often experienced failed data transitions, proving it to be unreliable, leaving the organization's CFO with day-old data and manual calculations. In addition, the support for the solution was lacking due to the vendor's overseas location. When FIDM needed to expand its BI reporting functionality and make data processes more efficient, it turned to the Smart i Appliance, which includes Talend's ETL tool running native on the IBM i. FIDM uses Talend to extract and load data as well as integrate all Talend jobs and control the overall data process flow. With Talend, FIDM's BI reports are available much earlier, without any manual interface. In turn, updated information gathered through the system provides executives with accurate and timely reports, enabling them to make better informed business decisions.

“We are very excited to work with FIDM on its Smart i project. It truly leverages the benefits of Talend Integration Suite--an open, user-friendly solution that can make data processes more efficient for the leading fashion institution,” said Vincent Pineau, Talend's vice president and general manager, Americas. “Organizations such as FIDM need consistent information in order to make strategic decisions. This is another example of how companies across any vertical industry can benefit from a scalable, cost-effective and enterprise-class data integration platform such as Talend.”

For implementation of the Smart i Appliance, FIDM relies on Systech Solutions, a business intelligence solutions provider and Talend partner. Systech, one of the leading U.S. professional services firms delivering customer-focused business intelligence solutions, entered a strategic partnership within the Talend Alliance Program in early 2008. As a part of the agreement, Systech leverages Talend's software to help develop and implement robust solutions for clients with extensive data integration needs.

[2009-10-22] Talend Forum Announcement: Talend Open Studio 3.2.1 is available

Download it

10 bugs were fixed, reported by 3.2 early adopters, including problems on metadata wizards, repository view, job designer editor and Java components.

See details in Bugtracker generated ChangeLog

[2009-10-22] Talend Forum Announcement: Talend Open Profiler 3.2.1 is available

One of the most important new features is that you can now edit the internal indicator's definitions and create your own indicators (see the appropriate cheat sheet to learn about this feature). These user defined indicators can be shared on the Talend Exchange website.  You can choose to compute column indicators in Java instead of pure SQL.

New analysis was added to evaluate functional dependency between columns.

Great enhancements were made in the nominal-nominal correlation chart which is a kind of multi-dimensional analysis.

A preference page for the presentation of the profiling editors was added.

The Structure Comparison Editor allows you to drill down in the substructure differences.

The performance of Column analyses was optimized.

And several other great features.

Download it at http://www.talend.com/download.php

[2009-10-19] Talend Press Release: Talend Upgrades Leading Enterprise Open Source Data Integration Solutions

Talend Upgrades Leading Enterprise Open Source Data Integration Solutions

Newest Release Delivers Enhanced Integration Capabilities With Support for Business Rules, Creating a Higher Degree Of Integration Within IT Operations

LOS ALTOS, Calif. - October 20, 2009 - Talend, the recognized market leader in open source data integration software, today announced a significant upgrade to Talend Integration Suite, the industry leading enterprise open source data integration solution and to Talend Open Studio, the most widely-used data integration tool. The new and extended features in Talend Integration Suite 3.2 give business users greater control over the definition of data integration processes, extend integration capabilities to IT operations and improve the overall impact of data integration throughout the organization.

Talend Integration Suite 3.2 is a subscription service that extends the award winning Talend Open Studio with professional grade technical support and features to facilitate the work of large teams and industrialize enterprise-scale deployments. It is the first open source enterprise data integration solution designed to support multi-user development.

“By solving all of the data integration challenges of the even most demanding enterprises, Talend Integration Suite has become a superior alternative to proprietary technologies at a fraction of the cost,” said Fabrice Bonan, co-founder and COO of Talend. “Our open source model not only enables Talend to provide our customers with unmatched value, but also enables us to rapidly deliver product enhancements that meet their exact requirements.”

The key new features of Talend Integration Suite 3.2 include:

• Business Rules Driven Integration: A new embedded rules engine allows business users to define rules interpreted at run-time. Users can change the behavior of the data integration processes by redefining rules through a user friendly interface, without involving IT. This new capability leverages the award-winning JBoss Rules technology.
• Error Recovery Management: Data integration processes can now include recovery checkpoints. In case of failure, processes can be resumed from one of the checkpoints. Dynamic instructions can also be provided to IT operations, instructing them how to react to specific error conditions.
• Migration and Replication Automation: New features automatically create migration and/or replication processes based on metadata discovery while supporting heterogeneous environments, thus greatly accelerating migration and replication tasks.
• Log-Based Changed Data Capture: Changed Data Capture (CDC), based on database logs, is now supported for Oracle, DB2/400 (IBM System i) and Microsoft SQL Server.

Talend Open Studio and Talend Integration Suite 3.2 are available immediately. Talend Open Studio is provided under the GPL license and can be downloaded for no charge at http://www.talend.com/download.php. Talend Integration Suite is provided under a subscription license. For more information, please visit http://www.talend.com.

[2009-10-15] Talend Blog: Powered by Talend: the Power of OEM

Since the appearance of software, companies have been looking for a powerful data integration tool that fits easily into their applications. The criteria? Easy to integrate; small footprint; highly scalable, platform independent and highly distributable. Oh and, of course, it has to be affordable to small, medium, and large software companies.

Good luck with that!

For decades, the only options were high-cost, platform-dependent, large footprint proprietary solutions from companies like Informatica and DataStage, which presented high barriers for most enterprises wanting to OEM these products. Instead, quite a few of these software companies wrote their own data integration tools using Java or Perl scripts. The result? Messy code and, over time, an unmanageable number of scripts.

Enter Talend.

With its progressive and advanced technology, Talend’s native OEM adaptable architecture provides a tool that empowers applications with a ready-to-go implementation approach.

Ease of embedding Talend: Talend’s unique architecture lets the software company implement the needed data integration Job only once; then, by embedding the Job within the application, it can deploy that Job (in Java or Pearl) an unlimited number of times. Smaller footprint, customizable and cost efficient solution — an excellent solution for both the OEM and the OEM’s users.

Talend’s flexible architecture means that old scripts can be re-used in a well-managed process, and new implementations can be added within the same framework — a huge asset to IT and R&D departments at a very low cost.

With Talend’s natural, friendly OEM architecture, software companies can embed data integration into an application in less than two weeks. Our rapidly growing team of OEM Partners who signed up for the Powered by Talend program is very impressed with the power of our software. Talend’s OEM solution is also affordable for all sizes of companies, which is critical in the current economy.

We are committed to the success of our OEM program, and congratulate all the new Partners who joined this Quarter!”

Check our website at www.talend.com for information on our products, learn about the Powered by Talend program, and join our group of successful OEM partners by emailing partners@talend.com.

Vincent

[2009-10-07] Talend Forum Announcement: Talend Open Studio 3.2.0, ready for general use

This is the first release of the new 3.2 branch. Be ready to upgrade your 3.1 projects :-)

download it

The list of new features compared to Talend Open Studio 3.1:

* Support for Excel 2007 File Format was added.
* String comparisons were simplified to increase security and code comprehension.
* The ability to define JVM parameters at job level was added.
* The ability to export logs was added.
* The ability to perform Webservice and POP requests with SSL was added.
* The component documentation can now be displayed in a tooltip.
* New options for Oracle Bulk load were added.
* The ability to use a TNS Oracle configuration file was added.
* MS SQL Server inserts performance were improved.
* JDBC batch insert to Teradata was added.
* Vertica support was enhanced with transaction support and connection wizards.
* New components tMDMInput & tMDMOutput for Master Data Management.
* Properties file reading was improved to handle sections.
* A button in component designer to validate the xml schema of the component.
* The ability to set batch size for the Salesforce component was added.
* Salesforce Relationship Queries in the Salesforce Metadata Wizard.
* A Perl component was added for listing files on a remote FTP connection.

[2009-10-04] Talend Press Release: Talend Upgrades its On Demand Open Source Data Integration Platform

Talend Upgrades its On Demand Open Source Data Integration Platform

Software-as-a-Service Mode Allows Distributed Teams to Share Data Integration Projects Without Configuration, Maintenance or Administration Costs

LOS ALTOS, Calif. - October 5, 2009 - Talend, the recognized market leader in open source data integration software, today announced the availability of an enhanced version of Talend On Demand, a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) data integration platform based on Talend Open Studio, the company's open source data integration platform. Talend On Demand allows distributed teams to share and collaborate on data integration projects, eliminate infrastructure costs and integrate with existing Talend Open Studio deployments.

Talend On Demand allows project teams of any size and location to consolidate data integration work in a centralized and shared repository, which is hosted by Talend, facilitating collaboration, object and code reuse, and promotion of development best practices. The upgraded version of Talend On Demand provides faster synchronization of information with the central repository and fully supports the new features of Talend Open Studio including new connectivity to mainframe and business applications, a redesigned business modeler and upgraded dependency analysis.

“Talend On Demand has proven to be an ideal data integration solution for midmarket companies with distributed development teams, companies that work with system integrators and IT outsourcers and any organization that needs to collaborate on projects,” said Fabrice Bonan, co-founder and COO of Talend. “With this new version, users have access to a low-cost and maintenance-free enterprise data integration platform that rivals proprietary systems without the need to deploy or support infrastructure components.”

Talend On Demand leverages Talend Open Studio as its design and runtime environment, providing a system with which users are familiar resulting in a shortened ramp-up time. New users can sign up for a Talend On Demand account in minutes and start sharing metadata and project information instantly. Talend On Demand does not require any configuration or administration and backup of the centralized repository is handled remotely by Talend. To get started with Talend On Demand, visit http://www.talend.com/talend-on-demand/talend-on-demand-signup.php.

[2009-09-30] Talend Document: Leveraging Open Source Data Quality - Practical Examples

Poor-quality data affects all data-related projects and refers to the state of completeness, validity, consistency, timeliness and accuracy that makes data appropriate for a specific use.

This Technical White Paper presents the main challenges of data quality and drills into specific uses of data profiling and data cleansing. It highlights, through 32 distinct use cases, how open source data quality technology can be used to alleviate issues related to poor-quality data.

[2009-09-29] Talend Blog: Joining the Board of BonitaSoft

I just agreed to join BonitaSoft’s Board of Directors. BonitaSoft is a rising star in Business Process Management (BPM), a market that Chausson Finance describes as currently worth $2.6 billion and expected to grow 30% per year by 2012.

The Bonita Project, the first open source BPM solution, was launched in France in 2001 by INRIA (Institut National de Recherche en Informatique et Automatique), then hosted by the ObjectWeb Consortium (now OW2), and brought to maturity by Bull. The solution has already been downloaded more than 140,000 times and has more than 300 contributors. The three founders - Miguel Valdés Faura, Rodrigue Le Gall, and Charles Souillard - have created a structure to support development of both the project and the business.

BonitaSoft just announced its first round of funding of $3 million with two major investors – Ventech and Auriga Partners. I want to congratulate BonitaSoft’s management who, despite an unfavorable economic climate (particularly in terms of investment) managed to convince a pool of investors of the relevance and future prospects of their solution and their business model.

Besides the size of this market today and its forecast growth, BonitaSoft has other things going for it. On one hand, the solution takes advantage of all the well-known benefits of the open source model - ease of use and deployment, worldwide contributions, interoperability, rapid ROI, and scalability. BonitaSoft’s TOC is 10 times lower than that of proprietary solutions. Does that remind you of anything? Oh, of course - Talend!

The BPM market today resembles the data integration industry of three years ago - it is dominated by giants (Tibco, Oracle, IBM, etc.) - proprietary solutions characterized by high development, implementation, and maintenance costs, as well as an ROI that is hard to quantify and predict.

In addition, BonitaSoft serves a diverse community - government, banking and insurance, industry, technology, etc. Since the emergence of software, large, strategic markets have been its primary target. The interest shown by these institutions and large enterprises is, of course, a guarantee of continuity for current projects.

And finally, after 20 years the BPM has reached maturity. Firms now understand the benefits they can derive - increased productivity and efficiency, aligning processes with strategy, compliance and traceability, and control and integration between customers and partners.

All these factors have helped BonitaSoft build a solid and promising company. I won’t conceal that I’ve been carefully following BonitaSoft’s progress for some time and have offered both my experience and my connections. It was, therefore, quite natural to agree to join its Board of Directors. We will now work to create synergies between our software offerings that some of our customers have been asking for. And we will certainly keep you informed.

Smooth sailing, BonitaSoft!

Bertrand

[2009-09-28] Talend Blog: A Cloud Doesn’t Always Mean Bad Weather

In the business world, there’s no lack of ill-speakers and prophets of doom - those, for example, who strive to position good ideas as hype or “BS” marketing.

Today, Cloud Computing is hype. So people take pot shots at it. No surprise.

Think about it - what’s a good idea? For me, in the IT industry, a good idea can solve business problems, overcome challenges that existing software can’t handle, and basically respond to clients’ needs. Nothing necessarily new of course, but sometimes we have to get back to basics.

So here is a case study, published on RightScale’s Web Site, our partner in the Cloud Computing area. You will see how our BI for the Cloud solution helps social gaming sites (Sibblingz and CrowdStar) retain customers, by providing a better understanding of their behavior. In addition, the solution reduces risk as the infrastructure can be instantly updated to respond to the success of new products launched.

“The beauty of the cloud BI stack is its low cost barrier, without having to sacrifice performance or functionality. No huge investments in hardware, staff and other resources are required to get a scalable, end-to-end enterprise BI solution delivering results on the first day of business.” Sounds like a satisfied customer to me. So I guess we’ve proved here that our BI for the Cloud stack is really a good idea.

The story illustrates also how four vendors - two with an open source model and two with a traditional business model - partnered to provide the best BI on the Cloud solution: On-Demand, Elastic and Affordable.

To me, that’s value.  Not marketing hype.

Bertrand

[2009-09-28] Talend Forum Announcement: Talend Open Profiler 3.1.4 is available

Download it

This is a bug fixing release.
The main bugs that were fixed are an issue with MySQL 5.1 DATETIME fields and numeric overflow with the average indicator on Teradata.
See the changelog for more details.

[2009-09-27] Talend Press Release: Talend Announces First Open Source Master Data Management Solution

Talend Announces First Open Source Master Data Management Solution

Acquires Technology to Complement its Successful Open Source Data Integration and Data Quality Solutions; Speeds Open Source MDM Time to Market

LOS ALTOS, Calif. - September 28, 2009 - Talend, the recognized market leader in open source data integration software, today announced it has acquired all rights to the Master Data Management (MDM) technology of Amalto Technologies. As a result of this acquisition, Talend will be the first company to offer an open source MDM solution, providing organizations with the exact features and benefits found in proprietary MDM solutions, at a fraction of the cost.

Organizations of all sizes need to ensure that they have “a single version of the truth” in order to have a trusted and unified view of the data on their customers, partners and employees. Unfortunately, MDM continues to be beyond the reach of most organizations. The entry point for deployment of proprietary MDM products can range from the hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars. Talend is democratizing MDM for the masses in the exact way it has done with open and cost-optimized data quality and data integration technology. It will shortly offer a free version of its open source MDM solution under the GNU General Public License as well as a commercial subscription version with value-added features and services for enterprise deployment. The new Master Data Management solutions will be available in early 2010.

“Many of the Global 5000 size organizations we work with will be delighted to see a major open source player enter the fast growth MDM market, especially at a time when organizations are doing all they can to optimize the ROI of their projects,” said Aaron Zornes, chief research officer at The MDM Institute. “Talend has a proven track record in software technology domains closely related to MDM and will also bring their open source business acumen and track record to bear in the MDM market.”

Today, most enterprises have a heterogeneous application portfolio, with fragments of often inaccurate, incomplete and inconsistent data residing in various application silos. The problem for these organizations is to provide a consistent view of their customer base, product catalog, employees, or other master data shared and used by many applications and lines of business. In recent years, Master Data Management (which allows an organization to link all of its critical data to one “master file”) has emerged as the means to more efficiently manage shared data, eliminate redundancy and create the elusive “single version of the truth.”

“We have been analyzing the MDM market for some time and sought the right fit that would easily integrate with our existing technologies. We found Amalto's technology to be a perfect match at a time when the industry is in need of a flexible solution that offers fast time-to-value,” said Bertrand Diard, co-founder and CEO of Talend. “Moreover, MDM is a natural extension to our data integration and data quality solutions and will enable our customers to cover all aspects of the data lifecycle. By introducing the first open source MDM solution, Talend is poised to change the market landscape, competing head to head with established players such as IBM and Oracle, for the greater benefit of all customers and users.” Talend has completed a full audit of the source code to ensure its intellectual property compliance and is in the process of integrating it with the company's data integration and data quality technologies.

[2009-09-21] Talend Press Release: Talend prescribes remedial measures for the Clermont-Ferrand Hospital

Talend prescribes remedial measures for the Clermont-Ferrand Hospital

Bypassing an unreliable information system, the Clermont-Ferrand Hospital improved invoicing by correlating hospital stays data

Suresnes, France - August 18, 2009 - Talend, the recognized market leader in open source data integration, today announced that the Clermont-Ferrand Hospital in the Auvergne region of France has chosen Talend Open Studio to consolidate data from multiple sources for each of its services to improve invoicing procedures. Previously the hospital used hand-coded scripts which became more and more difficult to manage, particularly since the implementation of the new charge-by-procedure billing system.

Clermont-Ferrand's global information system is characterized by a highly fragmented architecture; each department has an autonomous subsystem connected to a central core common to all the specialties which aggregates the administrative data.

Increasingly complex scripts
“IT Management handles 35 databases-each corresponding to a medical specialty-which are distributed over approximately 25 servers,” explained Dr. Jean-Christophe Jourdy, of the Department of Medical Information. “At the same time the deployment of a new medical product (supplied by McKesson) was underway. We also have an administrative database (a McKesson Hospital Information System) connected to all the servers. Diagnosis and data are captured separately, service by service, and we need to reintegrate this data by combining it in a dedicated database. The aim is to recreate the full path followed by patients in order to bill them correctly and to provide reports to our governing body. Until last year we used many manual processes to consolidate this data, which resulted in multiple scripts.”

In time the management of these scripts became more and more cumbersome: “It not only required mastering a complex and very specific language, but maintaining the scripts was problematic and did not meet the evolving requirements of our activities. Because our financing models have been changing over the past few years, it has become more difficult and time consuming to manually alter the scripts to take new accounting models into account,” added Jean-Christophe Jourdy.

The hospital first tested Talend Open Studio on one or two flows before disseminating it to all databases. The solution was also used to meet loading and extraction needs. It is specifically used to not only check the quality and the consistency of the data between the different systems, but also to locate missing data. Today the old scripts are migrated progressively to Talend Open Studio as new projects are developed and the tool is connected to the hospital's database servers

Cost savings, user-friendliness and increase in productivity
Clermont-Ferrand cited the cost-effectiveness of Talend Open Studio as one of its principal benefits. “Talend Open Studio provides many advantages compared to proprietary tools: on one hand, the solution is completely free as far as licensing is concerned and there's a very low learning curve to get started. We can conserve our IT budget and put the money toward other activities,” explained Jean-Christophe Jourdy. “Its ease-of-use is another major advantage that allows significant productivity savings-we perform tasks more rapidly than before and are able to sort out problems instantaneously and to meet any development request without delay. The solution also let us to take all the data into account and to bill hospital stays which were not previously noted-a significant cost saving.”

”It's clear that open source is an essential tool for the public sector, including hospitals. It allows us to reconcile significant budgetary and technical constraints without sacrificing the performance and the reliability of their IT systems,” concluded Jean-Christophe Jourdy.

About the Clermont-Ferrand teaching hospital

The Clermont-Ferrand teaching hospital has three objectives: treatment, research and teaching. With a capacity of 1,900 beds, the facility employs 6000 people distributed over three sites in the Auvergne Region. The hospital serves a region with more than 1.3 million inhabitants, including the city of Clermont-Ferrand (300,000 inhabitants, 21st largest city in France).

The hospital treats three specific hospitalization areas: short stay, psychiatry, and after-care and rehabilitation. Medicine, surgery, and obstetrics are located in the Gabriel Montpied hospital on the St Jacques plain providing about 800 beds, and the Hôtel-dieu in the city center, built in 1773, and dedicated to gynecology and obstetrics among others. Because the latter site had no room for expansion, all its activities were transferred to the Estaing site, a former industrial site of the Michelin company located between the centers of Clermont-Ferrand and Montferrand. A third building, far from the city center, is primarily dedicated to mid-term care and geriatrics.

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[2009-09-21] Talend Press Release: Accent Group joins open source community with Talend Integration Suite

Accent Group joins open source community with Talend Integration Suite

UK social housing association selects open source data integration software

MAIDENHEAD, UK - September 21, 2009 - Housing association Accent Group has selected Talend Integration Suite, an open source data integration solution to improve information management and efficiently migrate data from the association's legacy systems, as part of an on-going internal data integration project.

Accent Group has been investing in communities for more than 40 years and manages its homes and residents' services through its three subsidiaries, Accent Foundation, Accent Nene and Accent Peerless.

Andy Gowdy, MBCS CITP, Legacy System Manager at Accent Group commented: “Housing up to 50,000 residents, Accent Group has to deal with a high volume of personal data and application forms. Our three subsidiaries use a range of different platforms including IBM Iseries and Windows, which means that accessing and moving data can be extremely tedious. Adding to this, we also run several data warehouses and needed an open source data integration tool that would link these seamlessly.”

“Talend Integration Suite will provide Accent Group with one common tool for managing its variety of disparate systems such as its anti social management system, or its rent collection application. A major selling point for us was that it is open source, meaning that it can integrate with our IBM iSeries legacy systems and different platforms. It can also exact data from any file format and at a dramatically lower cost than proprietary software. There is a strong open source community that can help us to develop and improve our current applications and this support will be a real benefit for us,” added Andy.
Talend Integration Suite provides advanced capabilities that dramatically improve the productivity of data integration job design and proven scalability to ensure optimal execution.

François Méro, General Manager-EMEA, Talend commented: “Accent Group must comply with regulatory requirements outlined by the Tenant Services Authority and the National Register of Social Housing (NROSH), which is a system for collecting social housing data on individual properties.”

“With Talend Integration Suite, instead of taking up to a month to create complex reports in order to meet these regulatory requirements, Accent Group will be able to collate relevant data from all sources accurately in just one day. This will also have a significant effect on productivity and customer service, by providing staff with an easy-to-use open source data integration tool that can radically reducing the time usually taken to process applications,” concluded François.

[2009-09-19] Talend Blog: Enhancing Indicators

Policymakers have been thinking a lot lately about how to improve the accuracy of economic performance indicators like the gross domestic product (GDP), which is to this day the dominant reference point for the progress of nations. Recently, the EU announced that they will launch a new indicator this year to measure environmental stress which will “reflect the pollution and environmental harm within the bloc’s member states, including aspects of climate change, biodiversity, air pollution, water use, and waste generation.”

As Stavros Dimas, the head of the environment directorate of the European Commission, said in the same New York Times article, “GDP, which measures short-term spending, was not traditionally intended to measure well-being. And it is not a sufficient guide for modern policymaking that takes social and environmental objectives into account. To change the world we need to change the way that we understand the world. And to do this we need to go beyond GDP.”

At the same time in France, President Sarkozy received the report he commissioned from Joseph Stiglitz a year ago when he named the Nobel Prize-winning economist head of the Commission on the Measurement of Economic Performance and Social Progress; four other Nobel Prize Winners were also invited to join. This report presents identical conclusions to those reached by the European Union. “GDP has increasingly become used as a measure of societal well-being, and changes in the structure of the economy and our society have made it an increasingly poor one.” A draft summary of the report is available on-line.

It’s always edifying to watch our government find better ways to understand our society and economy by analyzing indicators whose number and accuracy are continually increasing. Like companies, they are seeking a more precise image by analyzing data from an increasing number of sources and combining them in new ways. Does that remind you of anything? Of course. It’s all about business intelligence.

The story doesn’t say what systems will be used to include new data that feeds into the calculations for measuring well-being. Given the findings of several reports, however, open source certainly deserves a place since it helps unleash growth. We would, of course, be very proud to contribute to these calculations, particularly now that Talend has the experience, the solution, and the partner ecosystem needed to help them succeed in analyzing huge amounts of data.

Bertrand

[2009-09-17] Talend Forum Announcement: Talend Open Studio 3.1.4 is available

Download it

90 bugs were fixed including sqlbuilder, routine management, metadata wizards, mapper, job designer editor, Java components, job import/export and ELT components.

See details in Bugtracker generated ChangeLog

[2009-09-17] Talend Blog: Success for the First Talend Partner Summit

Last week in Paris we held our first Talend Partner Summit.  This event was a big success: over 100 participants joined us for sessions of learning and interaction.

Among the presentations, a few were specially noteworthy:

• Bertrand gave a great overview of the market drivers and trends
• Eric Panassié of Talend partner Naspstec explained the benefits Napstec is deriving from their partnership with Talend, and how they were able to switch from proprietary software deployment to open source
• Fabrice presented a product roadmap

There were also numerous product presentations, including a focus on our data quality offerings and the benefits for our partners and clients.

Thanks to all the participants for their contribution to this success!

Yves

[2009-09-15] Talend Forum Announcement: For test only, Talend Open Studio 3.2.0RC1 is available

download it

Bug fixing release. Discover the full (but short) list of new features and fixed bugs on the bugtracker changelog page.

We're preparing another "Bug Squashing Session" as we did for 3.1 with a nice participation from the Community. Stay tuned: subscribe to this topic I'll add a post to notify about this event.

[2009-09-11] Talend Document: High Performance for Integrating Massive Data Volumes - A Technical White Paper

Processing very large data sets provides unique constraints, especially when time windows available for this processing are shrinking.

This Technical White Paper presents a variety of technologies that are available for accelerating the processing of large data volumes, including massive parallelization, optimized data-set-mode processing based on Map Reduce, grid deployment, and load balancing.

[2009-09-07] Talend Webinar: Talend Open Studio ein Überblick (Wednesday, Sep 30)

Wednesday, Sep 30 from 8:30 AM to 9:30 AM CET
Language: German

In diesem Webinar vermitteln wir Ihnen:
- Einen generellen Überblick über die Lösung Open Source Lösung Talend Open Studio
- Die Einsatzmöglichkeiten der in Talend Open Studio enthaltenen Komponenten und Konnektoren um ein Excel-Dokument in eine Datenbank zu überführen.
- Wie der Einsatz von Open Source Ihnen bei der Umsetzung helfen kann

Die Demonstration konkreter Beispiele verdeutlicht die unterschiedlichen Einsatzmöglichkeiten.

[2009-09-07] Talend Webinar: Verwendung von Talend Open Studio in Verbindung mit SAP (Friday, Sep 18)

Friday, Sep 18 from 9:00 AM to 10:00 AM CET
Language: German

In diesem Webinar vermitteln wir Ihnen:
- Die Notwendigkeit einer Datenintegrations-Lösung für den Austauch von Daten von und zu SAP
- Der Einsatz und die Verwendung der in Talend Open Studio vorhandenen SAP Komponenten
- Wie der Einsatz von Open Source Ihnen bei der Umsetzung helfen kann

Die Demonstration konkreter Beispiele verdeutlicht die unterschiedlichen Einsatzmöglichkeiten.

[2009-09-07] Talend Webinar: Unterschiede und Vorteile der Talend Integration Suite (Wednesday, Sep 23)

Wednesday, Sep 23 from 9:00 AM to 10:00 AM CET
Language: German

In diesem Webinar zeigen wir Ihnen:
- Die generellen Unterschiede zwischen Talend Open Studio und der Talend Integration Suite
- Die Vorzüge der Talend Integration Suite bei der Prozessentwicklung und dem Produktionseinsatz

Eine umfangreiche Demonstration konkreter Beispiele rundet die Darstellung der unterschiedlichen Einsatzmöglichkeiten ab.

[2009-09-07] Talend Blog: Survey on open source use for business intelligence, data integration and data warehousing

Mark Madsen and the BeyeNETWORK are working on a research report on open source software (OSS) use for business intelligence, data integration and data warehousing. The focus is on how real-world organizations use or plan to use open source to store, analyze and deliver information. Through this report, expect to learn what OSS projects are most popular, what’s working in production and the reasons for success or failure in IT systems.

To prepare this report, Mark needs input from users of open source technologies.  Since Talend is sponsoring this report, we agreed to help Mark promote the survey he is currently running.

Please consider taking 5 minutes to participate. In addition to your help in shaping the results, you will receive the final research report and a $5 Amazon gift card…

Take this survey now:
http://www.zoomerang.com/Survey/?p=WEB229FHNWQXDQ

Yves

[2009-09-04] Talend Webinar: Open Source Data Integration with Talend Open Studio (Friday, Oct 16)

Friday, Oct 16 from 2:30 PM to 3:30 PM BST
Language: English

This one-hour Webinar will present:
- The specific constraints of data integration, including: high data volumes, heterogeneous environments, data consistency maintenance, data synchronization
- How open source brings the right answer to these constraints

A demonstration of a concrete case will also be performed.

[2009-09-04] Talend Webinar: Open Source Data Integration with Talend Open Studio (Friday, Oct 30)

Friday, Oct 30 from 2:30 PM to 3:30 PM BST
Language: English

This one-hour Webinar will present:
- The specific constraints of data integration, including: high data volumes, heterogeneous environments, data consistency maintenance, data synchronization
- How open source brings the right answer to these constraints

A demonstration of a concrete case will also be performed.

[2009-09-04] Talend Webinar: Enrich your data by leveraging external sources (Wednesday, Sep 09)

Wednesday, Sep 09 from 2:30 PM to 3:30 PM BST
Language: English

This live tutorial will present:
- How to leverage existing sources of data in the information system - and outside of it
- The various lookup technologies available in Talend
- How to fine tune lookups for maximum performance

[2009-09-04] Talend Webinar: Open Source Data Integration with Talend Open Studio (Friday, Oct 02)

Friday, Oct 02 from 2:30 PM to 3:30 PM BST
Language: English

This one-hour Webinar will present:
- The specific constraints of data integration, including: high data volumes, heterogeneous environments, data consistency maintenance, data synchronization
- How open source brings the right answer to these constraints

A demonstration of a concrete case will also be performed.

[2009-09-04] Talend Webinar: Enrich your data by leveraging external sources (Thursday, Sep 10)

Thursday, Sep 10 from 10:00 AM to 11:00 AM PDT
Language: English

This live tutorial will present:
- How to leverage existing sources of data in the information system - and outside of it
- The various lookup technologies available in Talend
- How to fine tune lookups for maximum performance

[2009-09-04] Talend Webinar: Tune data integration processes to handle massive data volumes (Thursday, Oct 22)

Thursday, Oct 22 from 10:00 AM to 11:00 AM PDT
Language: English

This one-hour Webinar will present:
- The constraints associated with large volumes data processing
- How to tune Talend to handle high volumes without performance losses or resources issues

A demonstration of several concrete cases will be performed as part of the Webinar

[2009-09-04] Talend Webinar: Accessing Legacy Data for ETL or Migration (Thursday, Oct 15)

Thursday, Oct 15 from 10:00 AM to 11:00 AM PDT
Language: English

In this webinar you will learn:
- The specific constraints of data migration and ETL, including: high data volumes, heterogeneous environments, data consistency maintenance, post-migration data synchronization and cleansing.
- The ability to read and write EBCDIC files to gain access to traditionally hard-to-reach data such as: mainframe sequential files & RPG data files.
- How to access data in the AS/400 environment and run Talend generated code natively on the AS/400

A demonstration of several concrete cases will be performed as part of the Webinar.

[2009-09-04] Talend Webinar: Leveraging SOA for Real-time Data Integration (Thursday, Oct 08)

Thursday, Oct 08 from 10:00 AM to 11:00 AM PDT
Language: English

This one-hour Webinar will present:
- The advantages of the Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) for real-time integration in a data environment
- How to build and deploy a data integration architecture that is SOA compliant
- What are data services (exposing application data through a SOA), how to build and use them
- The advantages of open source for SOA integration

A demonstration of several concrete cases will be performed as part of the Webinar.

[2009-09-04] Talend Webinar: Industrializing Data Integration (Monday, Oct 12)

Monday, Oct 12 from 10:00 AM to 11:00 AM PDT
Language: English

This one-hour Webinar will present:
- The role and importance of ETL (Extract, Transform, Load) for a BI project
- The specific constraints of ETL for BI: high data volumes, multiple and heterogeneous data sources, data quality management, specific data structures (star and snowflake schemas, slowly changing dimensions, etc.)
- How open source brings the right answer to these constraints
A demonstration of a concrete case will also be performed.

[2009-09-04] Talend Webinar: ELT: High Performance Loading for your Data Warehouse (Tuesday, Sep 22)

Tuesday, Sep 22 from 10:00 AM to 11:00 AM PDT
Language: English

This 1 hour webinar will show you :
- What is ELT ( Extraction, Loading and transformation) and the differences with the ETL mode
- The advantages of ETL approach for the data warehouse loading
- When to choose ELT, ETL or combining both.

A demo of several concrete cases will also be presented in this webinar

[2009-09-04] Talend Webinar: Efficient Change Data Capture with Real-time Integration (Wednesday, Sep 30)

Wednesday, Sep 30 from 10:00 AM to 11:00 AM PDT
Language: English

- How Change Data Capture (CDC) enables real-time integration
- The various techniques available to detect changes in your databases and applications
- Applying CDC to synchronization, replication, and event publishing
- Why CDC is also relevant to ETL for data warehousing

A demonstration of several concrete cases will be performed as part of the Webinar.

[2009-09-04] Talend Blog: Oracle, MySQL and the European Commission: isn’t it about Marketing?

The European Commission launched an antitrust probe into Oracle’s acquisition of Sun.  EU Competition Commissioner Neelie Kroes expressed concerns about whether MySQL would continue to get traction under Oracle’s ownership.

Matt Asay makes the point that the EC’s “meddlesome muddling reveals a surprising ignorance of open source, and shows a complete disregard for MySQL’s true market opportunity”.  He argues that MySQL will continue to thrive, no matter which choices Oracle makes, and provides as proof some popular MySQL forks.

Matt Aslett said in a recent tweet “Oracle’s (potential) control of MySQL is not about the license but copyright (not that the EC seems to understand that).”

They are both right: Oracle cannot kill MySQL, even if they wanted to.

But they can hurt it badly.

Try something.  Type “open source database” in Google. Your results may vary depending on where you are located and your browser language, but chances are MySQL will appear in the sponsored links at the top (in my results, I also had EnterpriseDB).

Now, think about what will happen when Oracle says “spending freeze on online advertising”.  Or when Larry Elison says “the Google guys have a bigger airplane than me - no more money for them” (since Larry Page and Sergey Brin own a Boeing 767, that’s a real possibility…)

MySQL - the company - has been investing heavily in the promotion of MySQL - the database.  And this contributed a lot to the adoption of the technology. I am not saying the MySQL project will die without marketing. But it will loose traction, and another leader will emerge.  Will it be a MySQL fork/derivative, or another open source database?  I don’t know.

I am not sure that the EC has the right reasons in mind for investigating the deal.  But they are right, Oracle can badly damage MySQL.

Yves

UPDATE: Matt Aslett expanded his thoughts on copyright ownership on the 451 CAOS Theory blog, explaining that “Oracle’s impending ownership of MySQL could theoretically have a significant impact on the emerging market for commercial products based on MySQL and their ability to compete with the Oracle Database.”   Another element to consider.

Is the EU right in blocking the deal but for the wrong reasons - because they don’t get it?

[2009-09-01] Talend Press Release: Talend Expands With New OEM Partnerships

Talend Expands With New OEM Partnerships

Global Partners Select Open Source Solution for Flexible and Cost-Effective Data Integration

LOS ALTOS, Calif. - September 2, 2009 - Talend, the recognized market leader in open source data integration software, today announced several partnerships with U.S. and international OEM partners, including Appko, Knowledge Relay, MCF Technology Solutions, LynasLogic and WDCi Group.

In the past six months alone, Talend has seen a 100 percent increase in the adoption of its technology by software vendors under the OEM model. These recent partnerships reaffirm Talend's position as the international leader in open source data integration and further validate the suitability of open source enterprise solutions embedded in third-party software solutions.

Recently-signed partnerships include:

• Appko - California-based Appko creates enterprise applications. Through its partnership with Talend, Appko integrated Talend's data integration solutions into its new product, AppEvolve. AppEvolve will enable organizations to extend their existing investments in the enterprise by enabling service based integrations (SOA), extended enterprise application functionality (RIA) and further insight with reporting and BI. AppEvolve will be launched sometime in 2010.
• Knowledge Relay - California-based Knowledge Relay provides easily implemented operational business intelligence (BI) solutions. Through its partnership with Talend, Knowledge Relay has employed Talend's Integration Suite (TIS) into its business intelligence solutions allowing for multi-billion dollar projects to integrate project management data with all other desired types of data saving. The end product saves Knowledge Relay customers millions of dollars annually by providing real-time reports and dashboards not obtainable anywhere else.
• MCF Technology Solutions (MCF Tech) - Ohio-based MCF Tech is a full service Web 2.0 Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) provider, that helps organizations maximize cloud computing PaaS tools to create efficient, low cost and highly effective business process applications. MCF Tech utilizes Talend's Integration Suite for its open source data integration capabilities to provide service-based business process automation solutions. This allows MCF Tech customers to seamlessly integrate current PaaS applications with other platforms such as QuickBase, QuickBooks, WorkXpress and Wolf Framework.
• LynasLogic - Brazil-based LynasLogic is a global provider of tax, auditing and financial consolidation software solutions. Through its OEM partnership with Talend, LynasLogic has utilized Talend Integration Suite to create LynasETL powered by Talend. LynasETL is part of the Lynas Application Suite and allows customers to integrate their disparate systems to and from Lynas software products.
• WDCi Group - Australia and Malaysia-based WDCi Group specializes in connecting systems by providing end-to-end solutions for identity, integration, data transformation and SOA requirements, both on-premise and on-demand. Through its partnership with Talend, WDCi has developed pre-built integration solutions. The ReadyMadeETL integration solutions use Talend to deliver rapid, low-cost integration solutions to organizations of all sizes.

“Over the years, Talend's open source ETL solutions have proven to scale and flex to meet the needs of our diverse customer base, allowing Jaspersoft to provide our customers with up-to-the-minute data in a fully integrated business intelligence setting,” said Jose Morales, vice president of business development at Jaspersoft, a leading vendor of open source business intelligence solutions that embeds Talend's technology under its own brand, JasperETL. “As one of the first companies to partner with Talend, Jaspersoft has experienced first-hand the competitive advantages that Talend's solutions provide, and the flexibility Talend shows when working with its partners to ensure common success.”

“Talend's commitment to the success of our channel partners has never been stronger,” said Vincent Pineau, Talend's vice president and general manager Americas. “Our collective achievements are a testament to the global strength and quality of our partners' applications and Talend's technology. By making our partners' success a top corporate priority, Talend will become the global standard in data integration solutions.”

Talend offers customized and rebranded versions of its solutions through a tailored and flexible OEM program that lets third-party software vendors, whether they use the open source model or not, embed Talend's award winning technologies for data integration and data quality into the vendor's own product stack. For all partner program inquiries please email partners@talend.com.

[2009-09-01] Talend Blog: A moment of truth: Informatica’s pricing revealed

I want to thank eWeek for the moment of truth it offers in its article: Informatica Launches Data Integration Service in the Cloud. To my knowledge, it’s the first article that discusses Informatica’s fee structure!

At last, the leader of proprietary data integration communicates its licensing prices via Girish Pancha, Informatica’s Vice President and General Manager of Data Integration.

What do we learn from this article? Truly, nothing new! But we do get official confirmation that Informatica’s products are expensive and out of reach of most enterprises’ budget - $165,000 “base price” for their solution! And that’s without considering connectors, additional CPU runtime licenses, and all the extra stuff they charge for throughout the life of your project.

Commercial open source software vendors like Talend are positioning their products along other lines that simple economics. The question of budget is important, of course, but openness, high performance, scalability, community-driven, etc, are other strategic attributes. Of course, with this kind of article all our efforts go up in smoke…
Bertrand

[2009-08-31] Talend Forum Announcement: For test only, Talend Open Profiler 3.2.0M3 is available

Try it at http://www.talend.com/download.php

The dependency analysis editor has been enhanced.
Management of Talend Exchange pattern now uses categories and shows where imported patterns are stored.
The performance of Column analyses was optimized.
Data can now be sorted in correlation analyses.

and several bugs were fixed.

See the full changelog at http://talendforge.org/bugs/changelog_page.php

[2009-08-30] Talend Press Release: Talend and Connectage Join Forces to Meet Public Sector Demand for Open Source

Talend and Connectage Join Forces to Meet Public Sector Demand for Open Source

Open source specialist partners with online business consultant

MAIDENHEAD, UK - August 27, 2009 - Talend, an open source data integration specialist has joined forces with Connectage.com, an online business consultancy, to help drive the adoption of open source data integration solutions in the UK public sector. The partnership will help to improve data management within Government Departments, Local Authorities and Agencies and as a result, will help to boost productivity and efficiency of public sector services.

The UK Government regularly stores huge volumes of data and it is vital that this data is kept accurate and up-to-date. As an online business consultancy, Connectage.com aims to help public sector organisations create innovative services online. By providing Talend's range of sophisticated open source data integration products, Government Departments will be able to integrate and migrate data more effectively so that staff can work with real-time information or share information more effectively using Government Gateway or GCSx. Customer service levels can there be dramatically increased.

Philip Doyle, managing director, Connectage.com commented: “By coupling Talend's software with our great tools and consultancy expertise, we believe that our partnership will offer a fusion of experience and provide an all-round open source data integration solution for the public sector.”

“We have worked closely with Talend and provided its products to a number of our clients in the past and have seen how attractive its offering is to the public sector. Open source is becoming more widely used in Government and we believe that there is a great opportunity for us to jointly provide Talend's open source data integration tools to the UK public sector.”

Talend's open source data integration and data quality solutions are designed to scale to the highest levels of data volumes and process complexity and are optimized to work in demanding enterprise environments.

François Méro, General Manager EMEA at Talend stated: “Over the last few months, Talend has seen the demand for open source data integration tools soar and in particular, in Government Departments. The partnership will enable us to meet this increasing demand by having the facilities and resources necessary to supply Talend's open source data integration solutions to the public sector instantly.”

“Together we can help government bodies solve the on-going issue of having access to poor data, by providing them with the capability to work with real-time, accurate data as well as having full time business and IT support to expand their services online successfully,” concluded François.

About Connectage.com

Connectage.com is a division of Novena Consulting, leader in open source connectivity, Content Management and e-Learning in the UK and Ireland. Connectage.com has particular Government with its Trust Server, the only zero-code solution for implementing Government Gateway and its CitizenDirect content management platform. Connectage has delivered cost0-effective open source solutions to central and local government and the NHS. With offices in London, Manchester, Plymouth and Dublin, Connectage.com supports its customers through a network of leading edge consultants.

[2009-08-30] Talend Press Release: Biogemma Ensures the Traceability of its Research with Talend Open Studio

Biogemma Ensures the Traceability of its Research with Talend Open Studio

PARIS, France - August 18, 2009 - Talend, the recognized market leader in open source data integration, announced today that Biogemma, the only European plant biotechnology research company developed and financed by the agricultural world, consolidated a number of applications within a unique system of laboratory management to facilitate tracking samples, and managing users, instruments, stocks, supplies, etc. BioSolution, a Talend Gold Partner, assisted Biogemma in developing and integrating the new system.

“Biogemma wanted to integrate all the laboratory processes previously managed by three applications - Oracle and Microsoft Access databases and Excel worksheets used for monitoring activities,” said Guillaume Kerboul, Founder and Chairman of BioSolution. “All this data is used within the scope of research work relating to plant genes - physiology and phenotypic analyses, studies on the functions of a gene, plant selection, etc. The data was derived from both Biogemma studies and the public domain, and describes nearly 200,000 plants produced in the last ten years and approximately 10,000 genes or sequences. Around thirty characteristics describe each element (name, bibliography references, DNA sequences, information on the functions of sequences, etc.).”

Integrating these applications required the recovery of historical data covering a period of 10 years. Given the exponential expansion of this information, the applications previously developed internally showed their limitations both in terms of scalability, as well as performance and reliability. BioSolution suggested that Biogemma implement Talend Open Studio to organize the migration and recovery of its data, and to create semi-automatic data processing. BioSolution cited a number of reasons for this - ease of access and development (graphic interface), cost control, speed of development, and compatibility with Perl and Java, which are widely used within Biogemma.

In addition to the recovery of historical data, BioSolution used Talend Open Studio to generate Perl code in order to process Excel files, automatically generate data, and integrate it for statistical analyses.

Productivity, rapid development, quality

In addition to the productivity gains already mentioned, BioSolution emphasizes several benefits provided by Talend's open source data integration solution. First is the accelerated development time, which has allowed migrating data from previous applications in less than 7 weeks. “With manual scripts, we needed at least 4 to 5 months to achieve the same results, but with fewer quality guarantees,” said Guillaume Kerboul. “In fact, the improved quality of the work is a second major benefit we realized with Talend. Today, we know that the data is reliable and the risks of error are completely under control.”

The tool is now in production at Biogemma and completely meets the requirements expressed at the start of the project - traceability, speed, simple extraction of information, and analysis. “The project is a success and that wasn't necessarily a foregone conclusion - at the beginning, several users believed that the recovery of all data was impossible! And yet we managed it. I believe one of the keys to this success lies in the time we spent with end users in order to verify and test jobs. Also, Talend helped us solve important semantic issues by homogenizing data via deduplication and data quality functions. Other data integration projects are under review. As Biogemma operates more than 150 applications and 70 databases, the number of potential projects is significant. And, with Talend, we know that we will reach our goals.”

About Biogemma

Today Biogemma is the only European plant biotechnology research company developed and financed by the agricultural world, The company's shareholders comprise specialists in plant breeding and representatives of major French plant sectors: the cooperatives Limagrain and Euralis, and companies such as RAGT, Sofiprotéol, and Unigrains with its technical institute, Arvalis. Biogemma has two research centers in France and more than 80 researchers and technicians specialised in genetic engineering, cellular and molecular biology, bioinformatics, functional and structural genomics, and plant physiology and pathology, and sharing a single goal: improving plants to advance agriculture.

About BioSolution

Created in 2006 and located in the heart of the Génopole® biopark in Evry, BioSolution provides consulting and integration services to biotech infrastructures which want to implement IT solutions within research teams and that will promote innovation. The company uses its broad expertise in the biotech field as well as a network of specialised partners able to respond rapidly to specific issues. BioSolution also has extensive experience in monitoring biological data flows, from their acquisition or production in the laboratory to processing and dissemination. For more information: www.biosolution.fr.

[2009-08-30] Talend Press Release: Talend's Madeleine Biskintaoui Recognized by Everything Channel's CRN Magazine as one of the Top 100 Women in the Channel

Talend's Madeleine Biskintaoui Recognized by Everything Channel's CRN Magazine as one of the Top 100 Women in the Channel

LOS ALTOS, Calif. - August 24, 2009 - Talend, the recognized market leader in open source data integration software, today announced that Madeleine Biskintaoui, manager, North America channels and alliances, has been recognized by Everything Channel's CRN Magazine as one of the Top 100 Women in the Channel. The Top 100 Women in the Channel were chosen by the editors of the magazine based on their achievements as executives and the amount of influence they wield over the technology channel. The Top 100 Women in the Channel represent a changing trend in a traditionally all male industry.

Biskintaoui brought more than 10 years of channel experience to Talend when she joined the company in April, 2009. Under her leadership, Talend has been able to expand its partner program to include systems integrators, OEMs, and technology partners, and successfully establish a strong infrastructure for future channel growth. In her current role, Biskintaoui is also responsible for leading the overall coordination of Talend's channel strategy in North America.

“Talend is a company that greatly values and supports its channel partners, with the understanding that they are key factors to its overall success,” said Biskintaoui. “I am proud and fortunate to be part of Talend, and I appreciate the recognition from Everything Channel's CRN Magazine for the work that I have done.”

A special feature profiling the Top 100 Women of the Channel is in the August issue of CRN Magazine and expanded coverage will be featured online at www.channelweb.com.

“We are very pleased to see women executives reaching the highest levels in a wide range of dynamic companies. It is with great pleasure that we honor the women that have made a profound impact in the technology marketplace. We offer our congratulations to Madeleine Biskintaoui for her significant contributions to our industry,” Robert C. DeMarzo, senior vice president and editorial director, Everything Channel.

Everything Channel (www.everythingchannel.com, www.channelweb.com)

Everything Channel is the one-stop shop for accessing, enabling, managing and accelerating technology sales. From branding and recruiting to marketing and sales, Everything Channel offers technology marketers the unmatched breadth and depth of global brands and market intelligence combined with unparalleled audience loyalty and credibility serving all technology sales channels through an extensive database. Everything Channel provides innovative field sales and marketing solutions to arm the sellers of technology with the resources they need to achieve measurable and significant results.

About Business Media Limited (www.unitedbusinessmedia.com)

UBM (UBM.L) focuses on two principal activities: worldwide information distribution, targeting and monitoring; and, the development and monetization of B2B communities and markets. UBM's businesses inform markets and serve professional commercial communities - from doctors to game developers, from journalists to jewelry traders, from farmers to pharmacists - with integrated events, online, print and business information products. Our 6,500 staff in more than 30 countries are organized into specialist teams that serve these communities, bringing buyers and sellers together, helping them to do business and their markets to work effectively and efficiently.

[2009-08-28] Talend Tech Blog Sebastiao CORREIA: Using regular expressions when profiling SQL Server with Talend Open Profiler

[2009-08-27] Talend Forum Announcement: For test only, Talend Open Studio 3.2.0M3 is available

Hi Talend Community and bug squashers :-)

download Talend Open Studio 3.2.0M3

The ability to use TNS Oracle configuration file was added. The Vertica support was enhanced with transaction support and connection wizards. The ability to perform webservice... requests with SSL was added.

Discover the full list of fixed bugs on the bugtracker changelog page.

[2009-08-24] Talend Blog: Talend’s Channel Manager Recognized by CRN

I am delighted to announce that Madeleine Biskintaoui, Talend’s North American Channels & Alliances Manager, has been selected as one of CRN Magazine as one of the “The Most Powerful Women Of The Channel”.

This award recognizes leading women executives at solution provider, distribution and vendor companies. Madeleine was singled out by the editors of CRN based on her achievements and the amount of influence she wields in the technology channel. CRN Magazine is running a special feature on these Top 100 Women in the Channel in the August issue - check it out.

Congratulations, Madeleine!

Bertrand

[2009-08-14] Talend Document: The Top 10 Reasons for Choosing Open Source Data Integration

When choosing a data integration solution that best meets their needs, companies are confronted with many product choices, and multiple sources of information - including software vendors who will assure that their product is the one they need! In reality, the proposed solutions may or may not be appropriate.

To help you evaluate various solutions and technologies available on the market, and to compare open source data integration technology with other alternatives, this White Paper presents the top 10 reasons why organizations are choosing open source for their data integration needs. To support these top reasons, the White Paper includes proof points (31 in total) provided by actual users of open source data integration.

[2009-08-14] Talend Webinar: Business Intelligence in the Cloud (Tuesday, Aug 25)

Tuesday, Aug 25 from 9 AM PT / 12 PM ET / 5 PM UK (London) / 18:00 CET
Language: English

Attend this webinar to discover how you can:

• Harness the power of the cloud, open source, virtualization and high-performance analytical databases – and create powerful solutions for your business
• Create analytical sandboxes on demand to optimize response to sudden market changes
• Offload expensive processing from overburdened data warehouses and avoid costly upgrades
• Prototype new proof-of-concept BI applications without purchasing and implementing new data center infrastructure
• Get started with the first business intelligence solution stack running in the cloud

This webinar will introduce the first business intelligence solution stack running on the cloud. This cutting-edge solution has been created by business intelligence industry leaders Jaspersoft, Talend and Vertica with the leader in cloud computing management, RightScale.

[2009-08-14] Talend Blog: Successful launch for the Cloud BI solution

Earlier this week, along with our partners RightScale, Jaspersoft and Vertica, we announced the availability of a complete turnkey BI solution on the Cloud.

The value of this solution is obvious: get an instant deployment of an infinitely scalable, enterprise grade BI stack, at a very affordable cost and without long term commitment.  Assembled with the best products in their respective fields, by long-time partners used to work together, the Cloud BI solution makes enterprise BI available to anyone.

Sounds exactly the opposite of what you’re used to getting from traditional players?  Well, there is a reason for this: it is exactly the opposite.

We leveraged the CloudWorld expo in San Francisco this week to announce the solution, and we also made a lot of media outreach (see what happens when you unleash four great PR firms on an announcement…).  Among the appeared coverage, I like:

• Open-Source, Proprietary Vendors Partner on Cloud BI, by Chris Kanaracus from IDG - also syndicated to several other titles
• Business Intelligence moves to the cloud, by Dave Rosenberg from CNET News
• Gang of Four Creates Cloud BI Stack, by Maureen O’Gara on Cloud Computing Journal
• Open and proprietary ISVs discover love in the cloud, by Gavin Clarke from The Register
• Fab four join forces for BI in the cloud, by Jason Stamper on CBR

All these articles do a great job at covering the news and analyzing the benefits.  But I have to say that as far as titles are concerned I like what our two British friends did.  A bit or romantism, a Beattles analogy - pretty nice.

There was also a bit of controversy from Dana Blankenhorn with If you have a proprietary partner is it still open source?  Dana, of course, agrees that “This partnership delivers a BI solution that lowers costs and offers more flexibility.“  Isn’t that what matters?  And for the record, it’s not because you partner with proprietary vendors that your loose your soul.  Otherwise we’d all be dementors.

Check it out: www.talend.com/cloud.  We offer a free 30-day trial.

Welcome to the Cloud!

Yves

[2009-08-13] Talend Webinar: Open Source Data Integration with Talend Open Studio (Friday, Sep 04)

Friday, Sep 04 from 2:30 PM to 3:30 PM BST
Language: English

This one-hour Webinar will present:
- The specific constraints of data integration, including: high data volumes, heterogeneous environments, data consistency maintenance, data synchronization
- How open source brings the right answer to these constraints

[2009-08-13] Talend Webinar: Open Source Data Integration with Talend Open Studio (Friday, Sep 18)

Friday, Sep 18 from 2:30 PM to 3:30 PM BST
Language: English

This one-hour Webinar will present:
- The specific constraints of data integration, including: high data volumes, heterogeneous environments, data consistency maintenance, data synchronization
- How open source brings the right answer to these constraints

[2009-08-13] Talend Blog: Don’t miss your target!

Maybe you remember an incident that happened 2 years ago during the Golden League in Rome - a French long jumper, Salim Sdiri, was hit by a javelin thrown by Finnish athlete, Tero Pitkämäki. The javelin thrower, one of the best in the world, was competing for first place when he slipped and missed his throw which struck the long jumper standing 80 meters (262′) away. Traumatized, Pitkämäki lost the competition and Sdiri was taken to the hospital.This scenario came vividly to mind while I was reading a recent post from Matt Asay, entitled “Building a business selling open source software,” where he explains how Rob Walling, blogger and web development expert, in the process of giving tips on How to compete against open source competition, actually does a fair job of describing how to build an exceptional open-source business.

In fact the arguments advanced by Walling are quite old and outdated, as in the well-known comment “Open source software is free if your time is worth nothing.” Matt’s post analyzes how he fails to convince us, particularly in the field of commercial open source software.

Aiming at one target, Walling managed to hit his own colleagues in the back. He’s not the first or the last but, as Matt Asay proves, open source opponents need to train harder and focus better.

For the record, Salim Sdiri went back to competition one year later, and beat the French record of long jump in 2009 (8m42, or approx. 26′). But Tero Pitkämäki never regained his former level, despite a bronze medal in Beijing in 2008.

I think that says it all.

Bertrand

[2009-08-11] Talend Press Release: RightScale Joins Forces with Jaspersoft, Talend and Vertica to Deliver Complete Business Intelligence on the Cloud

RightScale Joins Forces with Jaspersoft, Talend and Vertica to Deliver Complete Business Intelligence on the Cloud

Leading cloud and BI vendors offer first end-to-end solution for agile analytics on the cloud

SAN FRANCISCO, Calif. - CloudWorld Expo - August 12, 2009 - Leading providers of business and infrastructure software today announced the availability of a joint solution stack that delivers complete Business Intelligence (BI) on the cloud.

RightScale, Jaspersoft, Talend and Vertica today are unveiling an integrated solutions stack that will enable customers to increase agility and lower costs by combining the power of the cloud, a high-performance analytical database, and BI and data integration software.

With the push of a button, users can now easily implement sophisticated BI on the RightScale Cloud Management Platform. Instead of using precious time on the task of integrating a variety of technologies to build a complete BI stack, the solutions from Jaspersoft, Talend and Vertica can be automatically configured. This self-service, pay-as-you-go BI solution gives customers the agility to affordably build and use analytic sandboxes and disposable data marts as well as gain intelligence on a wide range of data, including brief or seasonal projects.

To sign up for a free 30-day trial, please visit: http://www.rightscale.com/BI.

“The beauty of the cloud BI stack is its low cost barrier without having to sacrifice performance or functionality. No huge investments in hardware, staff and other resources are required to get a scalable, end-to-end enterprise BI solution delivering results on the first day of business,” said Peter Relan, Executive Chairman and Co-Founder of Sibblingz and CrowdStar.

The stack is being demonstrated this week at CloudWorld Expo in booth #317 (RightScale), booth #318 (Jaspersoft/Talend) and booth #319 (Vertica). In addition, Jaspersoft CEO Brian Gentile and RightScale CEO and Founder Michael Crandell will share more details about the stack during a 30-minute session at the Expo on Wednesday, August 12, 2009 at 1:15 p.m. PT in room #3007 at Moscone West.

Cloud computing introduces a new opportunity for customers who need the ability to rapidly deploy project-based BI, provision new applications on the fly and respond to major market changes. As recently discussed in a webinar hosted by TDWI Research Director Wayne Eckerson, agile analytics can be a reality for any organization when BI is readily accessible on the cloud.

“The work done by RightScale, Jaspersoft, Talend and Vertica demonstrates the power of collaboration among vendors to deliver integrated solutions,” said Wayne Eckerson, Research Director at The Data Warehouse Institute. “And by focusing their efforts on delivering BI on the cloud, customers now have tools to help them move quickly with BI projects.”

A free webinar that details the new solutions stack and shares use cases will be hosted Tuesday, August 25, 2009 at 11 a.m. PT. To register, please visit: http://www.rightscale.com/lp/webinar/.

RightScale is the leader in cloud computing management. RightScale offers a fully automated cloud management platform that enables you to design, deploy, manage, business-critical applications on the cloud.

Jaspersoft is the provider of the world's most widely used business intelligence software and is based in San Francisco, Calif. http://www.jaspersoft.com/cloud

Talend is the recognized leader in open source data integration software. http://www.talend.com/cloud

Vertica is the market innovator for high-performance analytic database management systems that run on industry-standard hardware and was co-founded by database pioneer Dr. Michael Stonebraker. http://www.vertica.com/cloud

[2009-08-09] Talend Press Release: Talend wins real time integration contract with the University of Newcastle

Talend wins real time integration contract with the University of Newcastle

MAIDENHEAD, UK - August 10, 2009 - Talend, the recognized market leader in open source data integration software, today announced a deal with the University of Newcastle to provide Talend Integration Suite RTx, a new real-time data integration platform for enterprise application integration needs.

As one of the UK's leading universities with a dynamic community of more than 18,500 students and 4,900 staff, the university's reputation rests on the quality of its teaching - both for undergraduates and postgraduates, its outstanding research, and its work with the regional and local community, businesses and industry.

One of the reasons that the University chose the Talend Integration Suite RTx was that the real-time functionality of the solution would add significant benefits to a data integration project that the University called Project IDMAPS.

Project IDMAPS is a research project funded by the national funding body JISC (Joint Information Systems Committee) and aims to produce an exemplar of a single, logical, institutional data infrastructure based on the University's campus management system.

Jan Hesselberth, computing officer for the University of Newcastle stated: “We evaluated several integration solutions and believe that Talend Integration Suite RTx will be a key tool for our rapid integration projects. We needed a technology that could carry out data validation as well as integrate data instantly. As a real-time open source data integration tool with built-in data quality capabilities, Talend was able to meet all our stringent needs.”

“Another primary benefit is the number of connectors provided by Talend. We have a wide variety of applications and systems such as messaging, web services and databases which all require connectors. Furthermore we needed a non-proprietary solution based on industry standards and Talend was the right fit,” added Jan.

Talend Integration Suite RTx provides organisations with benefits in many areas. For example, with Talend Integration Suite RTx companies can save time and money by developing and maintaining data integration processes, in a fraction of the time and cost that it takes with proprietary technologies. For online merchants, Talend Integration Suite RTx provides the information necessary to make promotional offers on-the-fly, based on user behavior, resulting in more targeted offers with better response rates. The product also improves customer service by synchronising and maintaining data from multiple sources so that all stakeholders within an organisation can access accurate information.

About the University of Newcastle

Newcastle is one of the UK's leading universities with a reputation built on the quality of our teaching, outstanding research and our work with the community and industry. Our aim is to be a world-class research-intensive university, to deliver teaching of the highest quality and to play a leading role in the economic, social and cultural development of the North East of England. For more information, visit Newcastle University at http://www.ncl.ac.uk/

[2009-08-04] Talend Webinar: Leverage Open Source ETL for your BI Project (Tuesday, Aug 11)

Tuesday, Aug 11 from 2:00 PM to 3:00 PM CEST
Language: English

This one-hour Webinar will present:  
- The role and importance of ETL (Extract, Transform, Load) for a BI project
- The specific constraints of ETL for BI: high data volumes, multiple and heterogeneous data sources, data quality management, specific data structures (star and snowflake schemas, slowly changing dimensions, etc.)
- How open source brings the right answer to these constraints  

A demonstration of several concrete cases will be performed as part of the Webinar

[2009-08-04] Talend Webinar: Utilisez un ETL Open Source pour votre Projet Décisionnel (Tuesday, Aug 11)

Tuesday, Aug 11 from 10:00 AM to 11:00 AM CEST
Language: French

Ce Webinar de 45 minutes présentera:
- Le rôle et l'importance de l'ETL (Extraction, Transformation, Chargement) dans un projet décisionnel
- Les problématiques spécifiques de l'ETL dans le cadre du décisionnel: volumes de données importants, sources de données  multiples, gestion de la qualité des données, prise en compte de
structures spécifiques (schémas en étoile ou en flocon, tables de
dimensions et de faits, dimensions à évolution lente, etc.)
- Comment l'open source apporte une réponse particulièrement adaptée à ces problématiques

Une démonstration d'un cas concret sera également proposée.

[2009-08-03] Talend Press Release: Talend Releases Enhanced Version of Its Open Source Data Quality Platform

Talend Releases Enhanced Version of Its Open Source Data Quality Platform

Cost-Effective and Simple to use Products Enable More Efficient Processes to Provide Better Customer Service and Greater Customer Satisfaction

SAN DIEGO (TDWI World Conference)-August 4, 2009 - Talend, the recognized market leader in open source data integration software, today announced the availability of enhanced versions of its Talend Open Profiler and Talend Data Quality solutions.

From the largest Fortune 500 organization to the smallest company, the ability to move and combine reliable data across information systems can mean the difference between profit and loss. While data quality has been out of reach for most organizations, the new Talend Open Profiler and Talend Data Quality bring even more control and consistency to corporate data, at a fraction of the cost and without the complexity of other systems. “Data quality is essential to the success of any data-driven project, but has often been an afterthought for many organizations,” said Fabrice Bonan, co-founder and COO of Talend. “Talend's open source approach democratizes data quality, making it available to all companies as an easy-to-use offering. We have already seen strong adoption of our products and these new versions will further reinforce our position within the market.”

Talend Open Profiler - which is freely downloadable - is the first open source data profiler. It provides businesses with a snapshot assessment of the quality of their data, based on indicators they create for each data element. Built with the end user in mind, Talend Open Profiler can be used by anyone regardless of technical acumen, including business analysts and non-technical personnel.

Talend Data Quality is the first open source enterprise data quality platform to combine data profiling and data cleansing in the same environment. It not only enables organizations to get correct data into their information systems, but it identifies and eliminates bad, corrupted or duplicate data.

Talend's data quality products are used across a broad range of industries including retail, digital media, healthcare, government and more. The new version introduces the following capabilities:

• Custom data quality rules - allows users to define their own business rules applied to data quality and validate their data sets against these business rules. For example, users can define a rule that will check the validity of a postal code, based on the country defined in another data item, or check that the area code of a phone number matches the geographical location of an address.
• Pattern finder - identifies predominant patterns in data sets. For example, this could be used to detect that a “comments” field has actually been used to store Social Security numbers, or mobile phone numbers.
• Advanced data profiling - includes redundancy profiling, used to detect relationships between entities (foreign keys candidates) and correlation profiling, used to identify outlying values and possible incorrect data points.
• New data cleansing components - perform deduplication or data joins based on fuzzy matching technologies. For example, even though Marlborough and Marlboro are spelled differently, the two city names are often interchangeable. Fuzzy matching alleviates the concern that they will be classified separately.

Talend has also added a Web-based Data Quality Portal to Talend Data Quality which allows any user in charge of the quality and compliance of corporate data to understand, at a glance and in real-time, the improvement or degradation of data in order to identify and remedy any points of failure. The portal allows for granular reporting, the ability to better define key alerts and drill down into data issues.

[2009-07-31] Talend Blog: A Japanese contributor

During my recent trip to Tokyo, I had the pleasure to meet with one of Talend’s biggest fan in Japan. Kensuke Saeki, pictured here (middle) with Vincent and myself, is an avid user of Talend Open Studio, and an important contributor to Talend Babili, our community translation application.  Saeki-san is working to make the user interface of Talend Open Studio in Japanese.  Check out the progress of the translation, it’s almost at 20%.

I would like to take this opportunity to thank again all the contributors to our open source projects.  Some of them are well known within the community, and some have less visibility.  But please be assured that the R&D team at Talend is well aware of all the individual contributions, and we are all very grateful for these.  Thanks to your posts in the Forum, your bug reports and feature requests in the Bugtracker, your components published in the Exchange, your best practices posted in the Wiki, your translations in Babili, the projects are moving at a fast pace and maintains their innovative edge.

Thanks to Saeki-san, and to all our other contributors!

Bertrand

[2009-07-30] Talend Blog: Survey on the use of open source BI

Mark Madsen and the B Eye Network have just launched a pretty interesting survey on the use of open source BI technology - including ETL, database, reporting & analytics.

All our readers are highly encouraged to take this survey - the more answers, the more accurate the data will be.

Here is a link to the survey: http://www.zoomerang.com/Survey/?p=WEB229FHNWQXDQ

Yves

[2009-07-27] Talend Press Release: Retail Customers Turn to Talend for Enhanced Data Integration

Retail Customers Turn to Talend for Enhanced Data Integration

Top Retail Organizations Select Talend for Swift and Efficient Data Management

LOS ALTOS, Calif. - July 27, 2009 - Talend, the recognized market leader in open source data integration software, today announced several global retail customer wins including U.S. companies Levolor and MyBuys, as well as Europe-based Cdiscount.com, Zannier Group, Naville and PriceMinister.com. The traction gained in this space further validates Talend's ability to provide scalable and flexible solutions at an affordable cost to retail organizations of all sizes, while satisfying the need for the real-time data this industry demands.

These customer wins arrive on the heels of Talend's recent product release, Talend Integration Suite RTX, a real-time data integration platform for enterprise application integration needs. Talend Integration Suite RTX offers up-to-the-minute data, providing customers with a higher level of data consistency across applications, and enabling more accurate decision making capabilities.

Worldwide customer wins include:

• Levolor (a division of Newell-Rubbermaid)-Levolor, headquartered in High Point, NC, is the most recognized name in the window décor industry. The company utilizes Talend Integration Suite to process information from different sources-for product orders from reseller partners, Website customers and other retail systems. By replacing their manual coding processes with Talend, Levolor has increased IT efficiency and saves 25 percent in support time each year.
• MyBuys-MyBuys, the leading provider of personalized product recommendations for online retailers, uses Talend Integration Suite to streamline and accelerate customer deployments. With Talend, MyBuys is able to integrate new client data five times faster than before.
• Cdiscount.com-Cdiscount.com, the leading Internet retailer in France, uses Talend Integration Suite to streamline data feeds to its data warehouse by organizing data movement and data mining from multiple sources.
• Zannier Group-Zannier Group, the worldwide leader in children's fashion with 20 in-house and licensed brands - including Levi's, Catimini and Tartine et Chocolat - leverages Talend Integration Suite for data analysis as part of its business intelligence technology. With Talend, Zannier Group can better analyze its sales and stock to improve the services offered to end users through its retail network.
• Naville-Naville, a press wholesaler which distributes all the magazines and newspapers in the French-speaking part of Switzerland, uses Talend Integration Suite to integrate data from heterogeneous sources as well as external data from partners. Talend gives Naville the ability to build an interface in a couple of hours when previously, it would have taken at least a day using manual coding and FTP.
• PriceMinister.com-PriceMinister.com, the leader of the “Buying and Selling just got safer” concept on Internet, uses Talend Open Studio to automate data exchanges with its partners. With Talend, PriceMinister offers customers up-to-date data, covering 30 million sellers and more than 100 million items in inventory.

“Retail companies need a cost-effective, reliable data integration solution that can provide the up-to-the-minute data required to maintain a competitive edge in this industry,” said Vincent Pineau, Talend's vice president and general manager, Americas. “Talend's solution offers a kind of flexibility and scalability that can be leveraged across various industries, and continues to prove its suitability for organizations of all types and sizes.”

Talend Integration Suite is the enterprise version of Talend's flagship product, Talend Open Studio, which has more than five million lifetime downloads and one million core product downloads. It is a more scalable and cost-effective option to proprietary data integration solutions that require costly initial investment and rely heavily on IT resources for maintenance and upgrades. Talend Integration Suite is a high-performance data integration offering that extends the functionality of Talend Open Studio with technical support and additional features for collaboration and deployment in large enterprise settings.