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
 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
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?Â
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
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
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