Over the past few months, Talend has made two important announcements, each targeting users who are being held hostages by proprietary technologies and sales tactics. We are actually offering a reliable and long-term alternative to organizations who had chosen Genio or Sunopsis - two ETL tools, both acquired by large proprietary vendors - and who need today switch for various reasons.

Genio, an ETL product, was developed in the late 90s by Leonard’s Logic, a vendor acquired by Hummingbird in 1999 - which was itself absorbed by Open Text in 2006. Following this latest acquisition, several user companies (600 in total according to some sources) have expressed concerns regarding their integration architecture. Indeed Open Text, which has publicly claimed to be “100% focused on the ECM [Enterprise Content Management] market”, doesn’t plan to invest in new Business Intelligence tools, and those currently in its portfolio are been used for content management.

Created in 1998, Sunopsis used to offer a distributed integration architecture. The company was acquired in 2006 by database vendor Oracle, who wished to reinforce its support for heterogeneous technologies. After Oracle has instituted a new price list for Oracle Data Integrator (the new name of Sunopsis’ products within Oracle), numerous former users of Sunopsis have decided to discontinue the use of this product, and have expressed their worries about the longevity of this offering among Oracle’s multiple ETL tools.

However, for these users, migrating toward a new tool meets a major obstacle: the need to redevelop all the integration architecture, which represents a significant workload and can be very difficult to implement without a proper tool.

Talend offers a structured migration process that, even tough it cannot automate 100% of the tasks, reduces greatly costs and risks. It also increases reliability and reduces migration times.

These announcements reflect well the strengths of the open source model we have implemented: openness, reliability and suitability to the users’ needs. When leading software vendors such Oracle change their financial terms, users have no choice but to comply, unless a robust alternative exists. And most other products have been taken over (or will soon be) by the same leading proprietary vendors. This is what I would call “forced user loyalty”, and of course it does not help the users. Conversely, the adoption of technology standards, the absence of entry costs, our focus on integration technologies, and our commitment to the community, allow us to offer exactly the opposite: openness and interoperability, reliability and longevity.

At the end of the day, I should probably thank these large proprietary vendors for fertilizing the ground for us! The more they try to shackle their clients, the more users we get. And this isn’t over…

Bertrand

For anyone who still doubts of the dynamism of open source adoption by government, the European Commission is listing the most recent deployments on its Open Source Observatory web site. This site lists a number of very interesting implantation case studies.

I would for example recommend reading Building a market for FLOSS: The OSOSS project in the Netherlands that details how the Netherlands is helping ministries and municipalities to make their IT strategies more open. Its goal is to create a level playing field for open source solutions, and to boost the local economy and the Netherlands’ capability for IT innovation.
This kind of initiative is essential for the autonomy of public services, but also to improve their efficiency, their productivity and the quality of their services.

Also interesting is the News section of the European Commission’s web site, updated daily. You will for example learn that South Africa has adopted ODF (Open Document Format) or that the Swedish Police has decided to implement MySQL. The number of such announcements does not decrease, despite rumors that try to make believe that open source deployments are declining. These rumors, spread by several proprietary vendors, rely on statistics about servers that they try to apply to the market as a whole… This disinformation is not worth spending too much time on: at Talend, we know that the growth isn’t slowing down! We have just opened new offices in Germany and hired a new VP of Sales Operations in the US. I know several proprietary vendors who would be more than happy with this kind of growth – which actually symbolizes their own decline!

Historically, government agencies (especially in Europe) have been early adopters of open source. Their commitment has helped us improve our offerings and gain credibility by proving that open source solutions integrate well in a complex environment, while offering a great performance-price ratio. Today, it’s our turn to support them, by providing them with software and services that will enable them to successfully transition to e-government. With always the same goal: end user satisfaction.

Bertrand