Archive for October, 2008
These are tough times. Economies have tanked while debt is rising. Real estate is down; loans of any kind are hard to get; the unemployment rate is up; disposable income is increasingly limited - and corporations are changing the way they do business.
In effect, these are good times for open source, because it makes enterprise-class data solutions affordable to organizations of all sizes regardless of budget cuts and limited staff.
Less cash and fewer employees means that companies must find more innovative ways to manage their IT needs. The search is leading toward changes in how people and organizations use the tools they have and, increasingly, to open source and SaaS (Software as a Service). Business models are transforming to accept this. And an open source solution like Talend’s is the most cost-efficient response to the new realities.
This is one reason that Talend has been steadily taking market share from proprietary data integration tools - optimal pricing; optimal cost. Take only the functionality you want, when you want it.
But there are other reasons that people are choosing Talend solutions. The Talend Community is a huge asset. Hosted on www.talendforge.org, the Community has grown dramatically, to more than 2,200 active members. Nearly one-third of the more than 400 components in Talend Open Studio were contributed by Community members.
And, let’s face it - data integration is a growth market. The volume of data a company has to manage doubles almost every 18 months and information systems are increasingly complex. That’s not going to change because the economy is in a down swing. Scalable data integration is a must if companies are going to stay competitive, or even stay in business.
One of my VC friends was telling me recently that in his view only alternative deployment models such as open source and SaaS are in a position to generate the type of return on investment demanded by the market. This explains the many successful investments in open source companies - and also why Talend is in a unique position to accelerate its growth on the global market.
Freedom of choice has entered the software world. Software as needed - an emerging space responding to the needs of today’s consumers. And a must-have in today’s economy.
Bertrand
Last month, Gartner released their latest Magic Quadrant for Data Integration Tools.
No surprise, Gartner’s analyses are still very conservative. Their analysts use mostly their rearview mirror, to look at what happened behind them, whereas they should have a radar to see what’s happening around them and ahead of them. More than a state of the market, the Magic Quadrant reflects past adoption of certain technologies by large accounts in the US, who are customers of Gartner. Updated every 18 to 24 months and reflecting the long cycles of traditional vendors, who used to take years before their could achieve a significant position on a market, this Magic Quadrant is no longer compatible with new development and adoption cycles such as the ones we can find in open source and SaaS. This quadrant includes a combination of dying technologies which have been acquired over and over again (ETI, Open Text’s Genio…), loading utilities (Syncsort, Pervasive, Sybase’s Solonde…) and real enterprise solutions (Informatica, IBM’s DataStage). One component is missing: open source - of course.
Some would say that open source vendors cannot afford to pay Gartner (I personally don’t think it makes a difference). This may be true for some vendors. But in our case, Talend is a commercial vendor with strong resources and could afford a contract with Gartner. But why? To hear that “open source is immature (probability 0.9) and will become mature in 5 to 20 years (probability 0.8)”? No thanks. We know, and our clients know, that open source has changed a lot over the past years and has become a true alternative for the enterprise (probability 1.0). Maybe even Gartner will realize this one day (probability 0.2)!
Yves
PS: For the record, I have worked with Ted Friedman and Mark Beyer (and to a lesser degree with Andreas Bitterer) for many years and have lots of respect for them as individuals. I think the problem has more to do with general Gartner policy with regards to innovation, than with individual analysts not seeing what is obvious.
 Despite a thinner than usual crowd at Systems, our colleagues from Talend Germany and Cecile from the European marketing team are reporting a good event for Talend. A lot more people are coming to the booth (as in looking for it, as opposed to stumbling upon it by chance) and are on a mission to gather information on our products. Demos are being delivered back to back. And overall, contacts are excellent - high level people with concrete projects.
Of special interest to our visitors: the new SAP connector (lots of SAP deployments in Germany…) and Talend Open Profiler, our new data profiling tool.
This week was a busy one for Talend in Munich, with in addition to Systems, the MySQL Central Europe User Conference on Tuesday, and SugarCRM’s CRM Acceleration Summit on Wednesday - all of which we sponsored.
Continuing with our focus on Germany, we will exhibit at CRM-Expo in Nuremberg on November 5-6 - if you are around, visit us there!
Yves
Talend’s Recent Innovation and Accolades
I’ll conclude my review of the main events in Talend’s recent history with the innovation and products announcements we made between January and September 2008:
Talend also was pleased to receive the following accolades:
Last, but not least, three events marked Talend’s internal growth this year:
- We bolstered our leadership team with the appointment of software industry veteran Jean-Luc Solans as vice president of strategy and business development. Solans previously worked at Hyperion, which was acquired by Oracle.
- We opened a new Benelux office, joining existing operations in California, France, Germany and China, and expanded our business development teams in existing offices, giving the company a substantial presence in North America, Europe and Asia-Pac.
- We launched our Talend Ambassador Awards, which recognize innovative and effective projects using Talend’s data integration technology. The City of Brantford in Ontario, Canada and Eurofins in France and Germany were among this year’s winners.
I couldn’t be more proud of Talend’s great strides in making enterprise-class data integration affordable to organizations of all sizes. And Talend’s rapid growth is set to increase in the coming months. We’re on-plan to increase our quarter-on-quarter revenues by 50 percent or more, double the number of company employee, and continue our geographical expansion with a focus on Latin America and Northern Europe.
As I wrote earlier this week, we will also continue to help our Community grow and contribute more to the product, develop our OEM program to target more ISVs, small and large, in all industries, and deploy additional programs to support our channel. Finally, while we continue to reinforce our position in the data integration market as the only viable alternative to proprietary vendors, we will also aim to become a key player in the SOA stack.
What an exciting program! More than ever we are committed to very ambitious goals this year. Stay tuned.
Bertrand
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