Last week IT analyst Philippe Nieuwbourg ran his annual BI Conference, Strategie & Decisions at the Coeur Defense conference center near Paris. It was well attended – 300 people – and there was a nice bunch of speakers, among them my friend Shawn Rogers of the Business Intelligence Network, who presented the top 10 trends of BI in the US. Unsurprisingly, the trends in Europe are not very different. Well placed on the list was “Open Source Business Intelligence and ETL. But maybe more important, Shawn believes (and I do, too!) that Trend #1 is the market consolidation; He had a nice Powerpoint animation, where he started with a screen full of logos, and got them to disappear one by one behind the logo of the acquirer. Similarity vanished behind BO, then BO vanished behind SAP. Ascential and Cognos vanished behind IBM. And so on.
Of course, Talend was a sponsor of the event, and as such I got a 4 minute presentation slot (see photo) to give attendees the desire to visit our booth (the concept is to avoid forcing commercial presentations onto people).

We had also invited Clément Chaumette from Easyssur, an online insurance broker, to present their BI project and how Talend Open Studio has become their universal data integration platform.
In the expo area, lots of interest. We were located next to Ingres, creating a de facto open source area. Many people came by, who are in the process of selecting ETL tools for their BI projects.

Yves