Stephen Swoyer wrote a long piece in Enterprise Systems Journal in which has asked marketing folks for SAS and IBM what they think of Talend’s marketing message.  Unsurprisingly, they don’t agree with our claims that legacy data integration tools are – legacy.  Their story is – basically – that they have 20 years of experience and hence master the technology better.  Whereas us new players, the new kids on the block, all we can do is flex our marketing muscles.

This article was actually already commented at length by Vincent McBurney and Loraine Lawson and I left comments to both posts, but I though I would summarize here a few important points.

1. The FUD is actually not on the side Vincent eludes to.  We speak the truth, they don’t (and I am completely objective here, of course).  No, seriously – have you heard the anti-open source commonplaces that proprietary vendors sales reps feed to their clients?  It’s pathetic.  “With open source you get what you pay for – nothing” – “It’s developed by volunteers on their spare time” – “Don’t expect anyone to support you” (that’s a good one: have you tried to call IBM’s tech support?)

2. You don’t need to have 20 years of legacy to build good software.  Lots of new technologies are emerging and taking over legacy stuff, all the time.  Otherwise we would still be stuck with VT100′s running against AIX machines.  Or pagers.  I’ll grant you this – brand new technology can be rough around the edges.  But after 2 years of availability, 1.7 million lifetime downloads, 100,000 active users – Talend has made its case.  What’s important there is to know what customers need, not how the first version was developed 20 years ago.  And here, the open source model beats the proprietary one any day.

Something else that’s different between the “new guys” and the “old guys” is that we don’t have sales guys driving Ferraris (although a few drive BMWs… they are sales guys after all!) and we don’t buy billboards in airports or full pages in the NYT that say “999,999 of the Fortune 1,000,000 run Talend”.  We keep our operational expenses down, and don’t need to make users pay for lavish sales and marketing expenses.

But at the end of the day, do users pick the products that work the best for them, or do they listen to the best lying sales rep?  The former, I hope.

Yves