eWeek.com recently published their list of the people driving the commercial open source IT revolution. Next to icons such as Linus Torvalds, the father of Linux, or Jonathan Schwartz, CEO of Sun Microsystems and instrument of the GPL distribution of Java and of the takeover of MySQL, or even Marc Fleury, the French entrepreneur who founded and sold JBoss, I found two other persons I highly respect: John Roberts and Marten Mickos.

John Roberts, the co-Founder, Chairman and CEO of SugarCRM is a precursor when it comes to commercial open source. As mentioned in his bio, “Roberts established SugarCRM’s commercial open-source business model, co-led the product design of SugarCRM products and helped build the Sugar Community into one of the largest open-source communities on the Web”. One of his driving ideas is what made his company successful: “Make great software, not sales and marketing the core competency of your company” – quite a revolution for a CRM company, even qualified of “anti-marketing” by ZDNet. Another way to say this is: “Why can’t the best product win, rather than who spends the most on marketing and sales?” Isn’t this a revolutionary concept?

Talend and SugarCRM have been technology partners since 2007 and have worked to integrate closely our solutions. Talend Open Studio is even “Sugar certified”. Our companies have many similar points, offering free download, SaaS solutions, and commercial subscription licenses.

Marten Mickos, the former CEO of MySQL, is now Vice-President of the Database Division at Sun (some say he has business cards that say “Open Sourcerer”), after the biggest M&A in the open source history. This Finn, who holds a physics degree, was named entrepreneur of the year 2006. He has developed original concepts, making of MySQL the most widely used database on earth (over 100 million downloads). For example, during an interview with Guy Kawasaki, when asked “How do you make money with an Open Source product?”, he replied: “We start by not making money at all - but by making users. The vast community of MySQL users and developers is what drives our business. (…) At MySQL we LOVE users who never pay us money”. He also said about Oracle’s takeover policy: “Trying to kill MySQL by acquiring open source is like trying to kill a dolphin by drinking the ocean”.

Talend and MySQL have signed in 2006 a technology partnership to integrate MySQL’s and Talend’s solutions. Talend Open Studio was the first ETL to be MySQL-certified on the market. At some point I said to the press: “Talend leverages the same technology and business model than MySQL to democratize ETL in enterprises and to facilitate daily data integration operations.”

Both these companies are sources of inspiration for Talend: in parallel with the cost reduction approach, they work toward customer satisfaction by offering them innovative, high performance and reliable solutions that rival with proprietary offerings on the market. SugarCRM leverages 100 employees to serve 900 customers in 40 countries, MySQL has over 10 million active installations worldwide with a market share that reaches 40% in 2006 (+25% in only two years!) according to Evans Data. The analyst firm adds that MySQL’s popularity is explained also by its prominent role in the fast growing LAMP platform (Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP/Perl).

Anyway, this recognition that they are part of the 15 Open Source Business influencers is well deserved. Congratulations, John and Marten!

Bertrand