Last week, Lora Bentley from IT Business Edge published an interview she did with me when we announced Talend Open Profiler. We covered many topics, ranging from the need for data quality to the value that open source brings to this field. Let’s not forget that Talend Open Profiler is the first open source data quality option! Check out the interview.

And on Friday, James Koopman published on linux.com a product review of Talend Open Profiler: Explore your database with Talend Open Profiler. Very nice piece, all the more since James wrote it withouth us knowing about it, and thus without asking us any question. Of course, James found a couple limitations to Talend Open Profiler - that’s what versions 1.0 are for, if we had all features in the initial version there would not be room for growth in the future. To cover one specific critic of the review - yes, support for additional databases is being developed and will be released soon. Here is James’ conclusion that I’d like to share:
“Data analysts, DBAs, and business professionals constantly investigate the validity of data. Usually the investigation requires not only a specialized skill set but also a highly paid technical professional or expensive tool set. Talend Open Profiler effectively brings the data closer to business users through a common interface with analysts and DBAs.”

Yves

To follow up on Bertrand’s recent post Price increases: because they can, and as if to prove us right, SAP attempted last week a massive switchover of the former BO customers to SAP’s technical support system. And this was a catastrophic failure, with thousands of customers unable to access the new support system. As Chris Kanaracus from PC World reported: “SAP moved more than 50,000 Business Objects customer records — including any open support issues — into its system, but not every customer has received a log-in”. They knew about this problem. And still, they switched - never mind the customers. Kanaracus actually interview a couple unhappy BO customers, and one said: “We’re pretty entrenched in their product right now. The last time we changed BI providers, it took about a year. … It’s a big roll out.” He is right. SAP, rest assured, you can do what you want, it will take a lot more than only a few weeks of tech support non-availability for customers to switch over! You have them by the balls, right?

On a slightly different topic, but still as a further proof that vendors such as SAP and Oracle do only what’s good for them - not what’s good for their clients, Sarah Lacy wrote in Business Week:

Why isn’t Oracle a bigger player in on-demand software? It doesn’t want to be, Ellison told the analysts and investors. “We’ve been in this business 10 years, and we’ve only now turned a profit,” he said. “The last thing we want to do is have a very large business that’s not profitable and drags our margins down.” No, Ellison would rather enjoy the bounty of an acquisition spree that handed Oracle a bevy of software companies, hordes of customers, and associated maintenance fees that trickle straight to the bottom line.

Indeed, as Lacy explained higher in her article: “Software sold “as a service” over the Web doesn’t sell itself, even when it’s cheaper and actually works. Each sale closed by these new Web-based software companies has a much smaller price tag. And vendors are continually tweaking their software, fixing bugs, and pushing out incremental improvements. Great news for the user, but the software makers miss out on the once-lucrative massive upgrade every few years and seemingly endless maintenance fees for supporting old versions of the software.”

Customers may not have a choice now. But they are not stupid either and won’t take the abuse indefinitely. See what happened to MicroStrategy when they decided to double their maintenance bills “because they could”. Did not turn out great for them in the long run. Who is willing to bet that SAP and Oracle will end up paying the price one day? I do.

Yves