This week,Talend did to data quality (DQ) what it did to data integration (DI) almost two years ago. We announced the first open source data quality solution. And the same way open source has stormed the data integration market, it will also storm the data quality market.

Proprietary vendors in this field command extremely high license prices. Very few of them are actually independent: a few years ago most DQ vendors were taken over by DI vendors. In turn, these DI vendors have been acquired by database or ERP vendors. As a result, clients buy DQ as part of a full IT stack: it will come along with your WebSphere or your SAP package, and if you spend $10m with the vendor maybe you’ll get DQ as a free add on. But if you don’t have $10m to spend – well you’d better be ready to spend $250,000 or more for DQ.

Here is why Talend’s solution is different:

• It’s open source, and thus commands a much lower “acquisition” price and TCO than competing products
• It’s open source, and thus it’s open.  For users, that means essentially extensible.  Want to add lookups against an industry repository, or public domain information?  Yes you can.  Want to customize the solution?  Yes you can.  Try that with proprietary solution, whose bread and butter consists of selling you add-ons to connect to this or that.
• It was grown from the same code base as our DI platform.  That means that DQ can actually be embedded into DI (by design and not as an afterthought).  And since it’s the responsibility of the DI guys to make sure that they don’t propagate bad data, putting DQ features at their fingertips brings tremendous value.

We have briefed a number of industry analysts and members of the press this week, and the feedback has been overwhelmingly positive.  I’ll post separately about some of the results from these discussions.

Yves