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