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

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