Author Archive for Bertrand

03
Aug

Nick White, New Addition to Talend’s Executive Team

We have just announced that Nick White has joined Talend as our new Chief Financial Officer.nick_white.jpg

Nick has extensive, senior-level finance experience in start-up, medium-sized, and high profile hardware and software companies. He was most recently CFO of SpringSource, a VC-funded open-source company that grew to 160 employees, a $30M run rate and operations in 9 countries - in 27 months.  Previously, he was the CFO at Transitive Corporation, a binary translation software company, and he has also served in senior positions at NeXT Computer, California Energy and Coopers & Lybrand (now PricewaterhouseCoopers).

Nick’s experience and expertise will be especially important as we will rely on him to manage strategic issues, key to our strong ambitions. With Nick on the team, we are gearing up the organization for the next stage of our growth.  As previously announced, Talend has experienced a strong first half of 2010. During this time, we increased our paying customer base by 50%, our downloads reached 10 million, and we have now almost half a million users of our open source products.

I am very happy that Nick is joining Talend and that he will be contributing to our tremendous adventure!

Bertrand

06
Jul

A CIO for the French Government

French Minister of Budget François Baroin just launched the second phase of the “General Review of Public Policies” program, aiming to modernize the French administration and to cut public spending by €10 billion.

150 new measures [in French] have been adopted for the 2011-2013 period.  Most of these are set to enhance quality of service to the public. In addition to cutting 100,000 positions in the public sector, these measures encourage a massive use of the Internet to rationalize the public’s dealings with the administration, while reducing associated costs by €300 million.

In addition, after the United States and United Kingdom, France is the third country (to my knowledge) to be announcing the nomination of a “State CIO”, whose missions will be, among others, to optimize IT Support within the whole administration and to centralize public purchase (which should bring an additional €700 million in savings). If IT back office is said to be rationalized, enhancing Internet front-office and associated applications will also help to simplify legal declarations for both enterprises and private individuals.

This nomination and 150 measures are really good news for French citizens, as the State CIO will be instrumental to anchor IT at the center of the public services, with a lot of e-administration programs to be launched or enhanced.

This news is also great for the open source world: if I understand correctly, the French government is aiming to boost quality of service while reducing costs. And to succeed, I don’t see many other alternatives than relying on open source solutions! I cannot imagine a government – which is planning to cut costs – deciding to select expensive and inflexible systems offered by proprietary vendors.

For more than 5 years, companies such as Talend have helped hundreds of public sector organizations industrialize their IT projects, cutting costs and gaining agility. It seems that it was only a beginning.

Bertrand

03
Jun

Interoperability: the fight goes on!

The European Commission recently released its “Digital Agenda“, one of the 7 initiatives it launched to help alleviate the economic crisis and prepare the EU economy for the challenges of the next decade: “Europe needs a new action plan for making the best use of information and communication technologies (ICT) to speed up economic recovery and lay the foundations of a sustainable digital future.

Many reactions followed. Times on Line for example, underlined the proposal of the EU to widen access to the Internet, while BBC News detailed the investments the European governments will have to make to compete with others countries like the US.

Certainly, no one will complain that European institutions consider IT as an essential productivity factor for its businesses (”Half of European productivity growth over the past 15 years was already driven by information and communications technologies“).

I will let you check out these different initiatives, ranging from “creating a Digital Single Market” to “boosting internet trust and security” and “encouraging investment in research and development”.

I still believe that this is a lot of wishful thinking (the Digital Agenda is only a recommendation). There is still uncertainty regarding open standards, which have been removed from the latest version of this document, leaving only a vague mention about interoperability (for more details: http://www.laquadrature.net/en/eu-commission-will-neelie-kroess-digital-agenda-endanger-freedoms).

To understand this evolution, one needs only to review the latest Documentation on the European Interoperability Framework. The new version no longer mentions “open standards” but only “open specifications”, which (according to the document) “can be achieved without openness”.

Too bad the EU is not supporting openness more overtly.  I guess the active lobbying from proprietary vendors plays a role here.  But clients understand the value, and consortiums Talend belongs to, such as OW2, are also key players here.

Bertrand

08
Mar

The evolving CIO mind on open source

CIOs point of view on open source is clearly evolving. Four years ago, the word on the street was that open source solutions were insecure, riddled with amateurish support, and we were hearing that the viability of OSS companies was a wild bet at best… Of course the spreading of FUD by proprietary vendors did not help.

Readers of this blog know that I always feel important to make it clear that open source is not only a way to cut costs. Hence the interest I found in the report on the first Open CIO Summit, organized by the Open World Forum in Paris in late 2009.

According to this report, CIOs regard OSS more as a source of innovation than as a way to directly save budget. If open source is often portrayed as a way to cut cost, CIO Summit participants give this cliché a pounding: they consider that the main benefit of open source is to help them to innovate easily in their IT, combining various elements: a dynamic ecosystem, the availability of a broad variety of software functions, modularity, compliance with standards, easy access, customization capabilities, and of course, lower costs. With OSS, they can test alternative options, without risk.

Secondly, the main interest offered by OSS lies more on standards and flexibility than code openness. CIOs know that code openness is a guarantee of customization and security, but they feel more attracted by standards compliance to guarantee flexibility and interoperability. OSS can be customized more easily than proprietary software, and OSS vendors are faster to take into account clients needs.

Finally, the main barrier slowing down the adoption of OSS seems to be usability: user interfaces of OSS tools have to be enhanced, in terms of ergonomics and design. OSS products have the reputation to be developed by technicians for technicians. And moreover, if adoption fails, the enterprise goes back to proprietary software with no second chance for OSS… This last point is quite important, and we addressed it from day one, in the very first versions of our products. I guess we succeeded: Talend customers often underline the ease of use and speed of learning of our tools in the case studies.

The report concludes that for CIOs, OSS is more an opportunity than a risk, if the enterprise knows how to manage best practices – which is essential in a quite tough economic environment. Of course, this is nothing new for us at Talend.  But this level of awareness (92% of CIOs are now using open source solutions or tools) is clearly encouraging.

Bertrand