Today I presented a session on Collaborating for Open Source Interoperability at the European Catalyst Conference in Barcelona, Spain. I was actually presenting this as a representative of the Open Solutions Alliance - but wearing a Talend shirt, of course.

The presentation was well received by senior IT managers, but I was surprised to see how little open source awareness the attendees had. The overall content of the conference was not very dense open-source-wise, so it’s good that we had the opportunity to present the OSA message to this crowd.

Actually, the area that elicited the most questions was the IP compliance part. Which tells me that these IT managers had probably heard all the FUD about open source, but not the positive stuff. At least today, they heard a few good things.

Yves

Talend Open Studio v1.0.0 was released on October 5, 2006. The product was not unexpected - we had made a few pre-announcements - but it clearly caught the industry by surprise. Comments we got from industry experts and analysts was that few open source products before had been released in such a state of “completeness” in their first version.

After all, there are two approaches releasing open source products. The first one is to first build a prototype, with a few essential features, release it to the community; and “hope for the best”. The best sometimes happen, and there are great open source solutions out there which started this way. But it can take time - and it’s risky. The other approach is to develop the product internally, and when it’s ready for prime time - donate it to the community. This is what we did at Talend (I should say ‘they’ for I wasn’t on board a year ago…). For about three years, our engineers had been toiling away from the spotlight, and they did develop a great product, one that was on par with - if not superior to - existing proprietary offerings.

As the open source model matures, more and more vendors are choosing this latter approach. And we are happy it happens, as this reinforces the credibility of open source solutions, and their enterprise-readiness.

One year later, we just released Talend Open Studio v2.2. The tool has been downloaded by over 150,000 users. Our community is very active - in the forums, the bugtracker, etc. We are receiving every day new testimonials of how the tool is used in various configurations, how users are switching from a propietary product to Talend Open Studio.

If you are not part of this community yet, join it now, and download Talend Open Studio!

Yves