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