Archive for November 7th, 2008

07
Nov

Putting financial crisis in context

I agree with Michael Wheeler’s recent remark.  In an Open Solutions Alliance newsletter, the CIO and Finance Officer of Redmayne-Bentley said “Our view is that there must be fantastic opportunities for long-term investors among various software companies with at least a foothold in the open source arena.”

We need to look at this in context – what does the current economic melt-down mean to us?  Open source is clearly a better position if you compare it directly with the traditional space, because it’s more flexible and more predictable in terms of cost.

Today’s climate requires new ideas and a strategic look at how to optimize basic parts of our business across the board.  Three rules will cover it:

  • Optimize Costs
    Costs are tight right now.  Expense costs are lower in our arena and clearly we need to generate a very simple, fast ROI.  The open source model (try before you buy) is a big advantage in validating solutions.
  • Optimize Efficiency
    This means adding value to the core business for partners.  We need to concentrate on producing solutions that customers really need and steer clear of the speculative.
  • Optimize Productivity
    We must generate more value in terms of productivity.  This doesn’t mean doing the same things as the competition.  We can’t just provide the same tools for the same performance; we need to provide better performance.

If we can address all three points, we’re not just resisting the financial crisis – we won’t have a financial crisis.

This has been our core strategy since we started the company and we plan to continue along those lines.

Bertrand

07
Nov

Events, announcements this week: of open source and proprietary…

This week was again a rich one for Talend.  3 events: TDWI in New Orleans, CRM Expo in Nuremberg (Germany), and Sugar CRM Acceleration Summit in San Francisco.

TDWI was rich in announcements for open source:

We announced a three-party partnership with JasperSoft and ParAccel.  We also announced an alliance with Infobright.  Infobright in turn announced connectors for Kettle (PDI), who announced a partnership with Netezza.  Is your head spinning yet?

The pattern here is interesting.  Open source and proprietary vendors form more and more alliances. The two models are not opposed, they are complementary.  I actually had chats about these announcements with David Hatch from Aberdeen, Philip Russom from TDWI, Mary Jo Nott from the BeyeNETWORK, Mark Madsen from Third Nature – they all agree that open source is taking a new dimension and that its credibility no longer has to be proven.

All this of course is reflected in several podcasts: the one I did with Bob Seiner from the BeyeNETWORK, but also the one with Kim Stanick from ParAccel, and with Jose Morales from JasperSoft.

Another event this week was CRM Expo in Nuremberg, Germany.  Another great forum for Talend to prove the value of open source data integration in the context of business applications.  We were there with our SI partner MyCRMSpace, and Cecile and our German team are back from the event with lots of great opportunities.

And to conclude on the CRM side of the story, we were also sponsoring the CRM Acceleration Summit in San Francisco. Vincent delivered a ten minute overview of “how to fix a mistake” – or how to migrate from a specific proprietary CRM to open source.  What makes things more interesting is that the said proprietary CRM vendor was actually holding its annual user conference at the Moscone Center, around the corner from the St Regis where the CRM Acceleration Summit was held.  And thanks to the pressure applied by this vendor, Sugar had been kicked out of the Marriott but instead got comped at the St Regis.  Not a bad trade-off…  Too bad Jean-Luc does not know how to take photos with his iPhone, I was looking forward to posting pictures of an open source event at the St Regis.

And to tie in on the title of this post – in some cases open source and proprietary software can be best friends – and in other cases, open source just triggers some pretty childish behavior in proprietary vendors!

Yves