It has taken almost a decade, but open source is making in-roads
into the enterprise. This is not a religious battle between Windows
and Linux, it is about open source middleware gaining ground.
One supplier of open source middleware is
Talend, which
specialises in data integration products to support the process of
moving and combining data from different IT systems. Its main
product Talend Open Studio (TOS) is designed to help users extract
data from different sources (databases, files, applications, web
services, e-mails), applying transformations (join, lookup,
de-duplication, calculation) to this data and sending the resulting
data to target systems.
Talend middleware
TOS comes in two editions: a free-to-download community edition
and Talend Integration Studio (TIS). TIS is a subscription service
that extends the community edition with technical support, IP
protection and enterprise-scale capabilities such as automatic
deployment, a monitoring console, grid and parallel-processing
capabilities.
This type of middleware software has traditionally been the
domain of commercial software houses, and is often licensed at a
high premium to large end-users. But Talend is based on open source
data integration, using the open source model to make data
integration available to all types of organisations.
About 55% of Talend's revenues come from subscriptions, with the
rest from services. Its strategy seems to involve deepening product
functionality, extending enterprise capabilities and increasing
support.
Bertrand Diard, co-founder and CEO of Talend, says the company
aims to tackle operational data integration, an area he claims is
not served well by existing products.
He says it is hard to create an off-the-shelf product to cater
for this type of application, because operational data integration
relies on creating links to many different types of software -
often bespoke or company-specific.
"Open source provides a very good model for this type of data
integration because, to be useful, the product needs lots of small
connectors," Diard says.
In fact, Talend has 350, including connectors to
Salesforce.com,
SugarCRM, LDAP directory
services and Microsoft products.
"We provide a core open source application programming
interface, licensed under GPL2.0 [GNU Public Licence] and let
developers create their own connectors."
Data connectors
He says this has meant that a third of data connectors in Talend
are built by users, and returned to the open source community
through GPL. This is because, under the terms of GPL, the source
code for any enhancements to a GPL-licensed product must be handed
back to the open source community.
According to analyst Ovum, the company had about 50 customers in
the 15 month period after the company released TOS. But 2008 saw a
big improvement, with more than 300 new customers, including Virgin
Mobile, SNCF and Allianz Healthcare. And the company has secured
$12m in Series C financing to help fuel further growth.
Balderton general partner Bernard Liautaud, the founder of
Business Objects, will join Talend's board of directors. He is a
strong believer in open source technology. "Open source has proven
its maturity, and its ability to handle even the most complex needs
of enterprises."
Helena Schwenk, senior analyst at Ovum says there is strong
evidence of increasing market acceptance for Talend's products. She
says, "Talend has had a short but successful history so far. Its
approach to market is a very traditional one for a company that
specialises in open source."
Schwenk says Talend is a strong contender in the data
integration market, but it faces stiff competition. , First, there
is growing competition from open source data integration providers
such as Pentaho,
Kinetic Networks,
Apatar,
SnapLogic and
Enhydra Octopus, which are
gaining mindshare among developers.
Second, Schwenk says, Talend also faces the stalwarts of the
data integration market - IBM, Informatica and SAP Business Objects
- which continue to deepen and expand data integration
coverage.