Time flies, it’s already been over two weeks since the Gartner Summits (Business Intelligence, MDM & Enterprise Architecture) in Las Vegas.  But I said I would blog on these events, so here we are!

I was impressed to see how busy these three events were. Gartner asks for a lot of money from attendees and sponsors/exhibitors, but apparently that did not deter participation.  Of course, the content and opportunities to interact with peers and analysts is worth the investment.  User organizations are clearly ready to start investing again, and receiving training and strategic advice is on their agenda.  Good news.

Open source was getting lots of visibility in these events.  I attended many sessions, here are a few nuggets I picked along the way:

• In the MDM Summit opening keynote, both conference chairs John Radcliffe and Andrew White insisted upon the fact that there were two disrupting sources at work in MDM: open source, with the entrance of Talend on the market in January, and Microsoft, with the soon-to-be-released SQL Server R2 Master Data Services.
• I also went to the “Open Source in Information Management” session of the BI Summit, during which Donald Feinberg presented the alternatives available for the different parts of the BI stack. In the data integration and data quality categories, Feinberg insisted that many of the options were unviable or unproven, with the exception of Talend.  His general grips with open source were the lack of enterprise readiness, the small size of core development teams, the lack of integration between the various data management disciplines… but I think I heard “except for Talend” at least a dozen times in this session.
• The Magic Quadrant power session is always an important time during a Gartner Summit.  Four analysts were on stage, explaining each their Magic Quadrant: Mark Beyer for the Data Integration Quadrant, Ted Friedman for the Data Quality Quadrant, John Radcliffe and Andrew White each for their flavor of MDM Quadrant (Customer for the former, Product for the latter). Again, Talend was mentioned as the only open source vendor to have gained traction in these markets, as the only open source player in the Data Integration Quadrant, as a disrupting force on the market…

I could not attend all sessions, busy also with a product launch (version 4) and a funding announcement, but several of my colleagues and friends went to other sessions and confirmed the traction and visibility that open source was gaining.

Of course, all these mentions attracted people to our booth on the solution showcase, where we were busy explaining the merits of open source MDM, data integration and data quality.

Beyond the sessions and the solution showcase, these summits were a great opportunity to interact with the key Gartner analysts, and I enjoyed spending time with Andrew White, Andy Bitterer, Ted Friedman, Mark Beyer, James Richardson…  And also hearing more about this new satirical cartoon: Analysterical, the Exotic Life of Analysts (highly recommended).

Another noteworthy point is that the MDM session of the BI Summit was so packed that people were standing in the aisles or sitting on the floor!  Isn’t this a great testament to the importance of unifying data management disciplines?

Finally, you can also watch my interview about these Summits on the Talend Channel – with a great view of the Las Vegas Strip behind me.

Yves