This week Talend was at the TDWI conference in rainy Orlando. We were sponsoring the event with a booth there, and we were also invited by Mark Madsen to participate into his course on how to choose an ETL. In the morning, Mark does a class on the selection criteria, and in the afternoon he invites three vendors to show the different approached to ETL, with predefined criteria. This session featured Talend Integration Suite, Informatica PowerCenter, and Oracle Wahehouse Builder.

This was the first time Mark invited an open source vendor to be featured along with proprietary products, and this is an excellent recognition of where open source is going and the role it is now playing in enterprise IT.

The session went well, with all three vendors experienced nevertheless glitches of diverse severities - the “demo effect” that proves it’s real! And of course, we proved we could do all of the stuff proprietary tools do - and more! Course attendees were very interested by the open source story, and so were the visitors who stopped by our booth on the show floor.

Thanks again to Mark for getting us into this session, we’ll be back next time!

Yves