Matt Casters, the inventor of the Kettle open source ETL tool, visited us at our Suresnes office this week. Kettle was acquired by Pentaho in 2006. This meeting is a clear proof that in the open source world, “competing” companies can meet, dialog and share views on their market vision. As Matt said in his blog, the concept of competition is very vague because of the differences in our respective products.

The architecture, the design approach and the implementation of our tools are indeed very different and each cover specific needs. Users choose one or the other, after trying both without constraints, and without sales people breathing down their necks.

Indeed, both tools offer essential differences with proprietary tools, most notably in terms of cost, but also of reliability, openness, and respect for standards. These advantages are not specific to the data integration world, but are the same differentiators as for other open source solutions when compared to proprietary software.

Knowing that the total data integration market is valued at over $13 billion, and that only a negligible fraction of that market belongs to open source today, I think that there is enough room on the market for two talented ;-) open source vendors!

This meeting with Matt drives us to think that in the open source field, thinking out of the box is de rigueur, and will be better of by communicating and cooperating rather than fighting each other and… fight the wrong enemy. After all, our products both leverage community work.

Fighter jets have this “IFF” feature - “Identification, Friend or Foe” to avoid shooting at their own aircrafts. It’s probably based on open source code. We’ll leverage it.

Bertrand