Talend enters a new market and everything changes - literally.  Last week, we introduced the first open source MDM solution and one week later the market landscape has undergone substantial consolidation with the two leading pure play MDM vendors being bought by larger companies.

Last spring as we were considering an extension to our product line, we carefully considered the MDM market because it is a natural extension of our historical core competencies of data integration and data quality.  We also evaluated the market conditions to see if it was ready for an open source solution.  What we found was a quickly maturing market that was gaining significant momentum.  These three factors lend well to the introduction of an open source alternative.

Our goal with Talend MDM is to democratize this space, just as we have done with data integration and thus far the reception has been amazing.  We have introduced an affordable, open source alternative at a fraction of the cost of cost-prohibitive and disjointed proprietary technologies.  In just over a week and a half we have had over 1500 downloads of the Talend MDM Community Edition.  The press and analysts and more importantly, our current customers have accepted our message and the blogosphere, twittosphere and other o-spheres are abuzz with open source MDM stories.

Then, everything changed.

Last week, Informatica bought Siperian and this week, IBM acquired Initiate Systems.  The two largest pure play vendors were consumed by bigger fish.  This changes the landscape and shrinks the battlefield.  This is business as usual in the proprietary software market; consolidation of closed, black-box technology in the hands of megavendors who control the entire data management stack chain and can dictate their terms to customers. All the while, we are immediately considered a leading pure play and are one of only a few independent MDM vendors.

This consolidation validates both the MDM market and our approach.  The two large acquisitions denote the mark in time that a baseline monetary value was placed on this growth market.  MDM is no longer a nascent market, it grew up and is here to stay.

The consolidation also validates our product strategy.  We have introduced a unique MDM solution.  It is driven by an Active Data Model and packages data integration, data quality, master data management, workflow and stewardship into a single platform.  This past week’s acquisitions represent a strategy to cobble these features together to meet the market demand.  We haven’t cobbled features together; we have united them on a single platform.

I am confident that we offer a compelling MDM technology and the initial interest has confirmed this.  Talend presents a flexible solution for the vast array of domains that need mastering and we will financially, strategically and technically help simplify the MDM business case process. Talend MDM decreases the time to value for MDM implementations and provides an ecosystem and community for sharing MDM discipline, governance, process, and organization…  it democratizes the market.

The problems that MDM addresses have been around forever and they will continue.  In fact, this MDM earthquake we are experiencing represents market maturity.  In this fundamental shift, we feel the time is right for open source MDM.

Bertrand