Talend blog » Bertrand

Supporting French Software Vendors Expansion in the US

Bertrand — Thu, 10 Nov 2011 09:27:32 +0000

Last week we were proud to welcome the AFDEL team in our Los Altos office. AFDEL is the French Association of Software Vendors, and for two years now Talend has been chairing its open source subcommittee.

Among its many missions, AFDEL is committed to supporting the international development of its members. This is what they have decided to open a Silicon Valley branch office, and Talend is proud to provide logistical support to this move. The US branch of AFDEL is hosted in Talend’s Los Altos office and the official inauguration took place last week.

Among the participants, we were happy to welcome Patrick Bertrand, the president of AFDEL and a very successful French entrepreneur, and Loïc Riviere, the AFDEL’s executive director. A number of members had made the trip and were joined by local entrepreneurs.

Talend is proud to have been selected to host the US branch of AFDEL, and of course we are committed to supporting and provide advice to any member who is interested.

Bertrand

Participation in the G20 YES

Bertrand — Tue, 26 Jul 2011 21:23:12 +0000

Previously held in Toronto, Canada in 2009 and Seoul, South Korea in 2010, the G20 Summit will be held in Cannes, France on November 3 & 4, 2011. France will chair the meeting this year, during which several events are usually organized like the B20 (the Business Summit drawing together employers’ organizations and the CEOs of major companies in G20 nations), the social G20, the agricultural G20 and the G20 YES (“Young Entrepreneurs Summit”).I had the honor of being chosen to be a member of the official delegation of young French entrepreneurs who will participate in the G20 YES, held from October 31 to November 2, under the patronage of the President of the French Republic, the Minister of the Economy and the Minister of Industry. This delegation will be made up of 60 entrepreneurs under 45 years old representing 15 different sectors of industry. They were selected from a pool of 730 candidates by a panel of prestigious entrepreneurs and journalists. True leaders of the French entrepreneurial ecosystem, the 60 entrepreneurs chosen embody positive entrepreneurial values and are vectors of hope for younger individuals.

The G20 YES is organized in France by Journées de l’Entrepreneur (JDE), an association created in 2007 that brings together the main players of the entrepreneurial world (AFIC, CDC, E&Y, 100 000 Entrepreneurs, APCE, Medef, CCIP, Hec Entrepreneur, Movjee, CGPME, Institut Telecom, ESCP Europe, OSEO, etc.).

While the G20 Summit focuses on global economic stability, the objectives of the G20 YES consist of valuing the entrepreneur, highlighting its role in innovation, job growth and creation, inspiring current and future generations of entrepreneurs, and promoting dialog between governments and entrepreneurs. The G20 YES will also enable the leaders of the entrepreneurial ecosystem of the top 20 economies in the world to share their experiences and emphasize good entrepreneurial initiative stimulation and support practices.

Over the course of these three days, 4 main topics will be covered: the role of entrepreneurs in the economy of the 21st century, financing growth, promoting the entrepreneurial culture to encourage initiatives and the shaping of fertile entrepreneur ecosystems. The development of an annual entrepreneurship barometer to measure entrepreneurs’ perception of their environment and to analyze a series of economic indicators is also anticipated.

For my part, I will have the privilege of working with other entrepreneurs on the topics that I hold near and dear to my heart: stimulating innovation, internationalization and support for rapidly growing companies.

In addition to this honor which highlights Talend’s success, I think that participating in the G20 YES is an excellent opportunity to bring forward some of our ideas in an unbiased environment and share our experiences with other business leaders who are dealing with similar development issues.

Without revealing any details of the event in Cannes this November, I expect it to be a source of proposals, particularly in the sector concerning government and entrepreneur relationships and the development of institutional support for innovation. In addition to the numerous issues related to the role of institutions, our goal is to strengthen collaboration between entrepreneurs and share and distribute good management and financing practices.

I will keep you posted on the progress of our work. Stay tuned!

Bertrand

Feedback on Start West

Bertrand — Tue, 05 Apr 2011 08:42:57 +0000

I had the honor of being invited to chair the judging panel for Start West 2011, a series of Capital and Innovation meetings organized on March 23, 2011 with the objective of connecting innovative project developers with professional and private investors.

Start West has been organized for 11 years by the Nantes Atlantique Financial Center, the Nantes Saint-Nazaire Chamber of Commerce and RETIS, in partnership with OSEO, Deloitte, In Extenso and AFIC. This year, the event also profited from the support of the Brittany and Pays-de-la-Loire Regions, Rennes Métropole and the Rennes Chamber of Commerce.

After 11 years, Start West has become a national benchmark event, drawing together project developers, investors, large companies and innovation specialists. 20 projects from the information and communications technology, health, software, energy/environment and recreation sectors were presented this year, totaling in about 10 million € in potential funding.

The judging panel that I chaired singled out three specific projects:

The “Start-up” Award: OPENSKYMAP provides innovative monitoring and real-time analysis services for international air traffic (www.radarvirtuel.com). In the medium-term, OPENSKYMAP aspires to improve its Internet service to create a true benchmark media website for the air travel world.
The “Marketing” Award: NEOSTEO, since August 2009, has been designing, manufacturing and selling implantable medical devices for trauma and orthopedic surgery (osteosynthesis). www.neosteo.com.
The “Judge’s favorite” Award: GLISS-SPEED. Created by AQUALEO, which manufactures and markets a small electric motor boat, accessible to the general public without a permit, GLISS-SPEED is the first fully electric water kart. www.gliss-speed.com.

Meanwhile, after my participation in the Start West conferences, discussions and judging panel, I have the following thoughts and reflections to offer.

First, I was pleasantly “surprised” by the enthusiasm and professionalism of the players in the innovation sector in Western France, a region predominantly noted for being a university region. It is true that being split between Paris and California, I tend to forget that life also exists outside of my own geographic sphere… I know that my “surprise” may shock some provincial residents, but it is clear that we would all gain by visiting our colleagues in the provinces more often. France’s heart of business is unquestionably located in Paris; however, the provinces contain numerous other vital organs, without which the innovation sector would not exist. The companies presented at Start West are living proof.

Also, this year Start Westwas marked by the investors’ concerns regarding impending legislative changes, particularly in terms of tax exemption. Since these are huge developments that will certainly have significant effects on the future for investors, it seems to me that such meetings should not solely focus on this topic.

During the different Start West conferences and presentations, I noticed a sense of frustration among various players in the innovation sector: the Regions are frustrated that they only rarely recover their stakes when they invest in a company, and investors are frustrated by the restraints imposed by regulatory limits.

Yet, it seems to me that the system is working pretty well today. The Regions now have an absolutely crucial role in start-ups, and if they do not directly recover their return on investment, they still contribute to job creation in their territory, which is not only essential, but also completely inherent to their organization.

Meanwhile, investors, and particularly Business Angels, need to stress the added value that they can offer: their experience and entrepreneurial know-how, apart from the financial considerations.

Sometimes, during our discussions, I had the impression that each company was trying to surpass their own trade, which in my opinion seems to be a dangerous approach. The French often praise and admire Silicon Valley, which they consider “the El Dorado” where every innovative company dreams of being located. I simply want to remind you all that in this valley in California, there is no tax exemption mechanism for investments; entrepreneurs, their partners and investors primarily focus on creating value… while accepting the existence of the established ecosystem, based on well-defined regulations and duties. It seems pointless to attempt to challenge this system that has repeatedly proven its worth.

Lastly, I was very surprised, on reading the business plans of the presented companies, that French entrepreneurs almost never include the international dimension in their projections. Personally, I think that this is a mistake. First of all, for the investor, this limitation to the national territory may discredit the entrepreneur and translate as a lack of ambition. Secondly, I think it eliminates any chance of developing the new business: in the twenty first century, the entrepreneurial “playground” for new technology is either global or it simply doesn’t exist at all. Talend’s strength lies in the fact that from the start, Fabrice and I considered the international dimension as a non-negligible step for our development. A company like AQUALEO, which markets the GLISS SPEED, must internationalize its strategy. Besides, given the local context of California (beaches, surfing, taste for sports, etc.), it would be a shame not to at least try!

In conclusion, I want to thank everyone who helped organize Start West, especially Pierre Tiers and his team, the RETIS network, Loïg Chesnais Girard, Chair for Economic Development in Brittany and Pierre Villemur, representative for the innovation mission in Brittany. They hold this event every year, which to my knowledge is one of a kind, and allowed me to clear my mind for two days in contact with new start-ups and the innovators of tomorrow. I would like to add a special mention to OSEO, which plays a vital role in this innovation ecosystem and without which it simply would not exist.

I also would like to thank the members of the judging panel who demonstrated a great capacity for listening and understanding, showing immense respect for the entrepreneurs who came to present their projects.

I truly hope to attend other such events in the near future. Being an entrepreneur implicates an undying curiosity and openness, and these meetings are a great way to quench our thirst.

Bertrand

About MDM, Data Warehouse and Innovation

Bertrand — Tue, 22 Feb 2011 15:32:48 +0000

Gartner recently released several studies that confirm our perception of our market. The first study is dedicated to Master Data Management (MDM) and states that “MDM is important in a tough economy, and more important in growth”. John Radcliffe, Vice President of Research at Gartner commented in EFY Times, that “Today, most organizations juggle multiple sets of business and data applications across corporate, regional and local systems. At the same time, customers are demanding faster and more complex responses from organizations, leading to an inconsistency that hinders the organization’s ability to measure and move within the market. With MDM, CIOs can create a unified view of existing data, leading to greater enterprise agility, simplified integration and, ultimately, improved profitability.”

According to Gartner, in 2010, the MDM market was valued at $1.5 billion, with 14% growth from 2009. The analyst firm predicts that this growth will continue to increase (18% CAGR), reaching $2.9 billion by 2014, “even through the worst of the global recession”. The company also adds that “by 2015, 10 percent of packaged MDM implementations will be delivered as software as a service (SaaS) in the public cloud” and particularly recommends it to enterprises that lack in-house skills. Gartner confirms what we have always maintained: MDM is pivotal for every Data Management project.

The second study identifies “Nine Key Data Warehousing Trends for the CIO in 2011 and 2012”. According to Gartner, “The data warehouse is set to remain a key component of the IT infrastructure (…) and as the demand for business intelligence (BI) and the wider category of business analytics increases, optimization, flexible designs and alternative strategies will become more important.” If the data warehouse is still a strategic component of the IT infrastructure, so is the loading of the “enterprise’s largest data repository”! And loading the data warehouse means optimizing data and application integration. Here, I see good perspectives for Talend: with the acquisition of Sopera, we are now able to work on the synergies of Data and Application Integration which will help enterprises optimize data circulation in their information system, and ultimately, thrive.

I will wrap up this post by mentioning another good prospective article, “5 Paths To The New Data Integration”, published by Seth Grimes on Information Week. This article begins with a statement that many analysts acknowledge today, “Data integration will be a top story in information technology in 2011”. The author explains that in addition to ETL and ELT technologies, the market will offer innovations that will help to better respond to clients’ needs, while enhancing user-friendliness: mashups, semantic integration, and data profiles.

Innovation has always been at the heart of our strategy. For example, Talend was the first vendor to release a unified data management platform, uniting data integration, data quality and master data management (MDM) within a single solution. Our efforts were noted by awards such as the Red Herring Top 100 Europe Tech Startup and the 2010 Innovation Award of the Open World Forum. This kind of articles and studies confirm that we are on the right path, and encourage us to continue!

Bertrand

Big Data & Analytics: moving toward a global strategy of information management

Bertrand — Thu, 10 Feb 2011 02:43:50 +0000

Analytics is becoming increasingly embedded in businesses and has become one of the main tools used to achieve a sustainable competitive advantage. The number of Business Intelligence and Business Analytics projects continues to grow and some experts are now talking about the development of a third generation of BI systems.

But how do the companies use analytics to increase their knowledge and implement tangible actions? MIT tackled this question and the answers appear in an article published by MIT Sloan Management Review entitled, “Big Data, Analytics and the Path from Insights to Value”. This article examines the findings of the first survey of 3,000 decision makers from 30 industries and more than 100 countries, conducted in partnership with the IBM Institute for Business Value.

The findings of this survey are so rich and varied, I recommend that you read the entire article. However, here are some of the points I noted while reading it:

The most dynamic companies use analytics up to 5 times more than other companies.
Obstacles to adopting analytic systems no longer exist in the data (how to collect data, how to guarantee data reliability, etc.), but rather in the company culture and managers (how to use analytics to improve business).
The future of analytics lies in the new technology of data visualization, semantic video analysis and social media analysis.

MIT also suggests following a five recommendation approach to make the most of a company’s analytic programs and quickly create value: think big from the start and concentrate on the biggest opportunities, start by asking the right questions rather than searching the data available, load information in the business processes, make BI features coexist rather than replace them, and plan an information governance strategy.

Today, according to MIT, data quality issues should no longer pose a problem for businesses: the technology exists and it is mature. Therefore, we should focus on building a global strategy for information management, describing the why and the wherefore of analyzing the available information, to define actions that will drive the creation of value. As we can see, the future of BI and analytics offers new perspectives that will help businesses grow and develop.

In conclusion, here is new evidence of the openness of public data: the City of Paris just announced that all of its databases (green spaces, election results, waste collection, etc.) will now be available to the public. This should generate the creation of many new services for residents and tourists. So, to sum up the article by a leading Business Intelligence expert in France, “We will be talking about Big Data a lot in 2011.”

Bertrand

Novell’s Acquisition: Why it Makes Sense

Bertrand — Tue, 23 Nov 2010 08:05:11 +0000

In a release issued yesterday, Attachmate announced that it plans to buy Novell for $2.2b. This is significant for Talend, and for everyone involved in commercial open source, because Novell is one of the largest open source vendors with its SuSE product line.

This deal represents a 50% premium over Novell’s valuation at the beginning of this year. Of course, speculation about a takeover did fuel Novell’s share price, but how much of Novell’s valuation comes from open source? Many speculated that Sun’s hefty $7b price tag was in great part due to its $1b MySQL acquisition (a nice ROI…). In this case, would Novell be valued so much if all it had to sell were NetWare and GroupWise? (not exactly cutting edge technology)

This acquisition does not make a lot of sense for Attachmate – no one sees any product or market synergy in this deal – but it does make sense for Attachmate’s investors, Francisco Partners, Golden Gate Capital and Thoma Bravo who are getting their hands on a golden nugget – a leading open source product, well deployed and with deep open source know-how. Open source is the next generation model for producing software, and Attachmate’s investors understand that. By acquiring Novell, they are buying their ticket into this market, and certainly intend to leverage this opportunity beyond just SuSE.

The ironic component of this deal is Microsoft’s involvement. After fighting open source for many years, Microsoft is now embracing it. Which Novell patents is Microsoft getting as part of the deal? Nobody knows rights now. It will be interesting to see how much they contribute to Microsoft’s open source strategy.

At the end of the day, this acquisition is good news. It proves one more time that open source creates opportunities for investment, and that open source vendors can thrive, grow, and play on the enterprise scene.

Bertrand

Why Did Talend Raise $34 Million?

Bertrand — Fri, 19 Nov 2010 12:25:22 +0000

Last week, Talend announced that it had completed a round of financing for $34 million. This round was led by Silver Lake Sumeru, one of the most visible and largest investment firms in the IT sector the US. To put things in perspective, Silver Lake Partners, the parent company, was the leading force in Skype’s buyout from eBay ($1.2b). Silver Lake manages $15 billion in assets.

Why did Silver Lake invest into Talend? It’s simple: because we have proven our ability to deliver, consistently, and to contribute to a market shift. Looks at where the data integration market was 5 years ago, and where it is today. I am pretty proud of what we have contributed to: democratization of the market. Silver Lake trusts that we will be able to apply the same model to similar markets – and application integration is one of them.

What will we do with these $34m? Part of it has been used to acquire Sopera. Another part will be used to invest heavily in the deployment of our new application integration division. And then… for further acquisitions!

Why did we choose Silver Lake as a financial partner? Because they have a vision for Talend, and we are aligned with this vision. They want to help us become a global player in the open source space. The Sopera acquisition already puts us in a good spot – we are today one of the top five open source vendors. But we won’t stop here.

Bertrand

The Coming of Age of Open Source

Bertrand — Tue, 28 Sep 2010 18:17:49 +0000

I described in a post from June 2009 how Accenture created – in stealth mode – its Innovation Center for Open Source. Just last month, Accenture published the results of a survey – targeting 300 large organizations in both the private and public sector of three countries: USA, UK and Ireland – which resonated like thunder. These results illustrate again the rise of open source software in the enterprise market.

According to Accenture’s survey, “69% of organizations anticipate increased investment in 2010, with more than a third (38 percent) expecting to migrate mission-critical software to open source in the next twelve months“. This follows the statement that “half of the respondents (50 percent) are fully committed to open source in their business while almost a third (28 percent) say they are experimenting with open source and keeping an open mind to using it“.

Furthermore, “two-thirds of all respondents (65 percent) noted that they have a fully documented strategic approach for using open source in their business, while another third (32 percent) are developing a strategic plan“. Yes, this means that 97% of enterprises strategically adopted open source today. This is the new reality that we called for since the creation of Talend. And as Paul Daugherty, Accenture’s chief technology architect points out: “What we are seeing is the coming of age of open source“.

OK, this is not a great surprise for all the specialists of the market. The evolution of adoption has been overwhelming for the past 2 years. But there is also a shift in the way enterprises are selecting open source solutions: “Through both our research and our work with clients, we are seeing an increase in demand for open source based on quality, reliability and speed, not just cost savings. This is a significant change from just two years ago when uptake was driven mainly by cost savings. We can expect to see this trend develop as open source continues to evolve and address even more business critical functions” continues Daugherty.

While the first benefit has always turned around cost saving, quality is now the main argument in favor of OSS: “76 percent of respondents in the UK and US cited quality as a key benefit of open source“. And this is great news for all the technological actors like Talend, who strive to prove that if cost reduction is of course important for enterprises, it doesn’t serve their interest if its performance are not in line with their objectives. I clearly remember this saying: “Cheap costs a lot“, translating the fact that if a cheap product does not work, you’ll have to pay more to buy another one! With open source, you get both: quality and cost reduction.

Another data point attracted my attention in this survey: “Despite a very encouraging picture, some organizations still remain hesitant (…) Lack of senior management support appears to be a key reason given for not using open source software among organizations that have looked at it but ultimately chosen not to use it“. This is clearly a central theme of our future go to market strategy. We know that technology experts are bold but their management is sometimes reluctant for various reasons. It is our role to give them insight that proves that the benefits of open source are real. For example, sharing the great data of this Accenture survey…

Bertrand

Talend’s Development and the Return of Social Analytics

Bertrand — Thu, 23 Sep 2010 01:07:31 +0000

Summer generally tends to be a season for reflection. It is crucial for an entrepreneur, after a busy year devoted to business, the organization of their activities and of course raising financing, to gain some perspective in order to look ahead into the future. This year, it seems that this period was as essential as ever. Talend, as we published in July, “has surpassed virtually every goal we set for the first half of 2010 in sales, product development, customer service and support and business development.”

Our customer base has grown by 50% to over 1,500 customers, Total downloads reached 10 million, and last, but certainly not least, we released Talend 4.0, the first integrated data management platform combining Data Integration, Data Quality and Master Data Management (MDM) in a single solution.

So, what will be the next step for Talend? I strongly encourage you to read the interview with Thomas Tuchscherer, Talend’s VP of Corporate Development, which was just published in the Talend newsletter. He offers some interesting input on our development plans, both in terms of geographical and product development.

Additionally, as you may have read, we actively strengthened our management team through the recruitment of our new CFO, Nick White, after welcoming Thomas at the beginning of the year to drive Talend development.

In a more general context, I recently found a very interesting article from The Economist that I wanted to share with you entitled, Untangling the social web. It seems that with regard to business marketing, the next big thing will be analyzing the social web. Marketing experts are carefully looking at social networks, like Facebook and Twitter, to identify a new type of individual that they call “influencers”. The telecom industry is generally at the forefront of marketing innovations and the article outlines how Bharti Airtel, the largest mobile service provider in India, is reducing churn rate and enhancing the loyalty of its 135 million clients by using software that analyzes the social web. Another example was given by Le Grand BI, describing how Marriott (revenue of $11 billion with 137,000 employees) is using text mining software from SAS Institute to keep an eye on its e-reputation. The same blog (sorry it’s in French) published an interview with Jim Goodnight of SAS Institute in an article entitled, Analytics is the Next Big Thing.

After a period of weak interest, which then evolved into alarm, it seems that social networks have really entered the business ecosystem, proving to be of real interest in brand management. Who would have believed it 5 years ago? It’s a little like Talend’s evolution: apart from only a few visionaries, no one could predict our explosive growth. A little like open source development…

Some advice: keep your eyes and ears open!

Bertrand

Data Publica: an Open Data Marketplace

Bertrand — Thu, 16 Sep 2010 14:32:33 +0000

Talend has partnered with two French start-ups – Araok, an e-commerce consulting company and Nexedi, the vendor of the open source ERP solution ERP5 – to create a platform for providing data. Data Publica, which was officially launched today, aspires to offer the first marketplace dedicated to the distribution of all types of data, whether public or not. Its objective is to facilitate exchanges between publishers of data and Internet or mobile application developers.

Originally developed to create a French public data directory, the platform has been gradually extended to the free or paying distribution of all types of data. For each data set, Data Publica provides a description, metadata, the name of its publisher and the legal conditions under which it is available. In practice, the platform stores and indexes related data and metadata to facilitate searches. In addition, automatic updates are made periodically to add significance to the data (for example, data on car traffic, with a file per hour to describe the progress of this traffic). Today, Data Publica offers approximately 1,500 sets of data produced by sixty publishers.

The Data Publica project is partially funded by the Directorate General of Competitiveness, Industry and Service (DGCIS), following a call for projects launched by the French government agency responsible for the Strategic Planning and Development of the Digital Economy. Approved by the Free Software Thematic Group of the Systematic Competition Department, it also fits into the work of Initiative Services Mobile [Mobile Services Initiative] (www.intiative-services-mobiles.org), an operation that supports the development of mobile applications.

In addition to the Nexedi technology, the platform leverages Talend’s data and metadata management tools. While Talend’s data integration technologies enable data movement and transformations, Talend MDM is used to manage data repositories and approval workflows. Today, we are very proud to demonstrate in practice that our tools meet these user needs, while offering top-quality performance.

Indeed, Data Publica serves two distinct targets: publishers (meaning any company, institution or other entity that possesses data of general interest: traffic, weather, marriage announcements/births/deaths, demographic studies, etc.) seeking to develop their data, and developers wishing to integrate data to their applications. The platform also supplies various license texts that can be adopted to distribute data or applications to help these two target groups choose the method of distribution that best suits their purpose.

We are particularly pleased to participate in this type of project which democratizes access to a lot of data, while encouraging the development of Internet and mobile applications. We are also part of a wider movement (“Open Data”), affecting all industrialized countries and aiming for more transparency through better access to data.

Moreover, the success of Data Publica is such that two heavyweight players are joining us in the project: Inria (National Institute of Research in Computer Science and Control) will contribute its Semantic Web, database and search engine knowledge. For its part, Atos Origin will provide its high-tech transactional services expertise through Atos Worldline, its expertise center.

Finally, I would like to thank our CTO, Cédric, for his involvement with this project. I know he was especially interested in its success – well done, Cédric!

Stay tuned, I will keep you posted on the developments of this project.

Bertrand

Nick White, New Addition to Talend’s Executive Team

Bertrand — Tue, 03 Aug 2010 11:19:36 +0000

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

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

A CIO for the French Government

Bertrand — Tue, 06 Jul 2010 15:45:09 +0000

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

Interoperability: the fight goes on!

Bertrand — Thu, 03 Jun 2010 10:11:24 +0000

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

The evolving CIO mind on open source

Bertrand — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 14:40:43 +0000

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

Welcoming Open Source MDM

Bertrand — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 09:03:35 +0000

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

The view from 2010

Bertrand — Mon, 18 Jan 2010 14:48:00 +0000

In hindsight, it’s easy to say that 2008 didn’t start very well, but most of us didn’t realize it until mid-September when Lehman Brothers became the first domino in a spectacular crash that has been likened to 1929. We found ourselves entering a recession, which has been rather euphemistically defined as “a pronounced deceleration of economic activity.” In other words, things screeched to a halt.

The world has been through down markets before in many arenas—housing, food shortages, medical care, employment—but it was a first for the software industry. Yes, the dot com bubble had an effect in 2001, but software essentially carried on.

Back in 2008, when I was looking ahead at the beginning of 2009 the plan was then — despite a challenging economy — to grow aggressively quarter after quarter; double the number of company employees; and continue our geographical expansion. We would continue to help our community grow and contribute more to the product, develop our OEM program to target more ISVs, small and large, in all industries, and deploy additional programs to support our channel.

How did we perform against goals?

Talend started 2009 on a high note. In January, we secured $12 million in a Series C funding round. Our revenue more than doubled. We started the year with 100 employees and now have a staff of 200. Our customer base grew from 400 to over 1000 and is now increasing at the rate of 100/month. Core product downloads more than doubled — from 700,000 to 1,500,000.

We opened a new office in the UK, reinforced our German team, continued to rampup our US operations. In just the past 6 months we’ve seen a 100% increase in the adoption of our technology by software vendors under the OEM model through our “Powered by Talend” program. In November, Gartner positioned Talend in the “Visionaries” quadrant of the “Magic Quadrant for Data Integration Tools;” a clear validation of the commercial open source model in general, and of Talend in particular.

I’d say that we’re better than on-target. And that’s just from a business standpoint. Let’s look at products.

In the past year we released new major versions – 3.1 & 3.2 – of Talend Integration Suite and Talend Data Quality, incorporating significant new functionality for each. 2009 also introduced specialized products:Talend Integration Suite MPx for high scalability, Talend Integration Suite RTx for real-time integration, and our Lifecycle Platform. In September, Talend acquired the MDM technology developed by Amalto, placing Talend on track to deliver the first open source MDM solution, providing organizations the same features and benefits found in proprietary MDM solutions – at a fraction of the cost.

So where are we now, as we enter 2010?

The economy is slowly improving and Talend is now playing with the “big boys” – IBM, Oracle, Informatica, SAP, etc. We’ve proved that we’re the next generation in terms of products and innovation, and we’ve won many technical challenges in the face of our competitors. Our market is growing exponentially and our team has never been stronger or more ready.

2010 is set to be another very successful year for Talend. We are looking forward to its challenges!

Bertrand

An endangered species

Bertrand — Mon, 14 Dec 2009 15:40:19 +0000

In a smart IT world, clients would cheer when a price drop was announced. But in our glass-half-empty world, customers only show joy when they hear that a price increase has been postponed!

This is the sad reality of the proprietary IT universe. “SAP Announces Delay in Maintenance Fee Increase” and (particularly DSAG and USF) express their delight.

As mentioned in a previous post:

“The price of maintenance is thus set at 22% of the software license price, compared to the 17% it was previously. However, this increase will not take full effect before 2015 for current customers – the cost of support will go up 3.1% annually, rather than an immediate 8%. New clients will be charged 22% as soon as they sign the contract.

In exchange, SAP agreed to jointly develop KPI benchmarking in order to measure the value of Enterprise Support (business continuity, business process improvement, protection of investment and total cost of operations) and to delay future increases until these targets are met.”

Eweek commented that on December 1 SAP announced “it will delay a decision on increasing customers’ maintenance fees until the beginning of 2010, in recognition of “ongoing pressures” on IT budgets in the aftermath of a global recession.” So, changing a maintenance fee from 18.36% to 18.9% is delayed; and that’s the good news!

In the aftermath of a global recession, we would be more inclined to suggest that they switch to open source. And it does seem that they’ve noted the trend. As Eweek reported: “SAP saw its revenues fall by 9% during the most recent quarter, due to an ecosystem-wide decrease in spending on business software.”

In response to the SAP decision, two of the user group members leading the project resigned, but “the Enterprise Support program is still on track.” So, besides the ongoing recession, what can SAP users expect? Nothing. As shown by Oracle’s decision earlier this year, the maintenance fee is set to rise to 22%. This is business-as-usual in the proprietary software world.

As I said in my earlier post: “Maintenance fees for open source solutions aren’t calculated the same way and, with no license fee, the open source alternative is far less expensive than a proprietary solution. And, finally, with free access to the source code, users can easily personalize their systems and at much less expense than contracting with SAP’s expert consultants.”

In fact, user reaction might be straightforward. They know that open source alternatives can help them cut expenses, while keeping the same level of service. And this is strengthened by Talend’s recent inclusion in the Gartner Data Integration Magic Quadrant. Open source is here to stay!

Bertrand

Open source continues to conquer, but always conveys the same platitudes

Bertrand — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 23:31:09 +0000

I recently read the results of a survey by Computer Weekly and ResearchNow Business. The Computer Weekly IT Panel was launched in April 2009 and comprises almost 4,000 IT professionals working in a range of organization types, size, and business sectors.

These results confirm the growing adoption of open source technologies, and attribute it to the weak economic environment. To the question: In light of the economy, how likely is it that your business will use open source software in the future? only 29% of companies replied that they do not intend to use such technology. 26% already use open source, and 45% are thinking about using open source either throughout the company, or for a smaller project. The study determined that the “use of open source software appeared to be more common among smaller organizations, i.e., those with fewer than 50 employees and less than £10 million in revenue.”

While this is nice to hear, it only reflects part of the truth. Certainly, facing a slowing global economy, open source remains an essential alternative for companies seeking to reduce their costs. However, this is only one of the benefits – albeit the most common – attributable to open source.

Let’s look at some others, in no particular order:

Open source also gives control of the code to users and thus scalability.
Open source offers opportunities for customization that only an army of consultants could provide for a proprietary solution (and I’m not talking about the cost of implementation).
Open source standards-based technology facilitates the integration of other tools – open source or proprietary – and blends seamlessly into a company’s IT system.
Open source offers performance similar, or superior, to traditional solutions.
Open source is generally based on a community that participates in development and is involved in product improvement. The community also contributes to knowledge transfer via forums, wikis, or online courses.
Open source provides user-friendly features, designed for the majority of users.

Quite a lot, but this isn’t an exhaustive list. I haven’t mentioned reliability or security. And we have nothing to be ashamed of in these areas.

So, of course open source can help reduce business costs, but if you only think about it on that level, I don’t think many companies will rush to purchase.

Bertrand

Open source, twenty-four years later…

Bertrand — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 09:02:05 +0000

US Department of Defense recently released a memo, “Clarifying Guidance Regarding Open Source Software (OSS)”.

As FederalComputerWeek notes: this memo “puts open-source software on the same level as commercial software and urges DoD agencies to evaluate it on an equal basis with proprietary offering.“Jay Liman, from the 451Group, explains it even more clearly: “The DoD memo wisely lays out the idea that open source software should be considered not alongside traditional, commercial offerings, but basically as traditional, commercial software offerings, so that the evaluation process is truly fair. Open source doesn’t fit in all circumstances, but it certainly does afford potential cost savings, flexibility and freedom in some situations, as noted in the memo.”

Following the White House announcement of its choice of Drupal, these words “not alongside…but basically as” sound very, very good. I affirm that this announces a turning point for the open source community. Twenty-four years have gone by since the creation of the Free Software Foundation by Richard Stallman. For 24 years, the power of OSS made gradual inroads on enterprise information systems, with clear acceleration in the past five years. Today’s memo brings credibility to what we’ve been writing about on this blog all along: OSS is on the same level as traditional software. And it echoes what we already wrote on this blog : cost reduction is not the only benefit you can realize. Typical criticisms were around reliability, security, or performance. The DoD has shattered these false allegations.

I feel like a cyclist after climbing the first pass of the first mountain stage of the Tour de France – happy to have reached this goal, and yet focused on the next pass. I know that the entire OSS pack will face other huge challenges, but today I’m really happy to savor this victory.

Bertrand

Linking technology and society

Bertrand — Sat, 31 Oct 2009 13:26:45 +0000

“What does technology tell us about society?” asked Matt Asay last August, in an effort to explain what our decision to use (or avoid) tools like Twitter or Facebook says about our society.

Technology both reflects and influences the values and culture of the society that produced it to the point that, historically, eras have been identified by their dominant technology – Stone Age, Iron Age, Bronze Age, Industrial Age, and today’s Information Age. And, while enriching daily experience, today’s instant interaction has created a paradigm shift in the way we do business and live our lives.

The world isn’t actually getting smaller; it just seems that way. The invention of the automobile meant that people no longer needed to work or go to school in the same town they lived in. As air travel became more prevalent, it was possible to visit other countries without having to emigrate there. Better sanitation and medicine promised longer life and better circumstances. In the Bronze Age, life expectancy averaged 18 years. During the 20th century the average lifespan in the United States increased by more than 30 years (to 78+), of which 25 years can be attributed to advances in public health.

The proliferation of the computer has shrunk the world even further. You can visit some of the world’s top museums and get a better view of the art than you could wandering through the galleries. And technology has changed the way we think about pictures in general. From the early, unsmiling tintypes recording social mores – betrothal pictures, portraits of the dead – it’s now possible (and perhaps regrettably prevalent) to publish pictures of our kid’s first tooth worldwide on a social network site.

I think that Twitter translates our society’s current desire to share and discover what’s happening right now, anywhere in the world, in 140-character sound bytes. Facebook is a social network that reflects our cozy desire to share news and photos instantly with a huge number of “friends” all over the world. (A January 2009 Compete.com study has ranked Facebook as the most used social network by worldwide monthly active users.)

What does that really mean?

Matt’s question reflects only half the reality. Perhaps it’s better to ask if technology is influenced by the evolution of society or if society is influenced by the evolution of technology. It’s not a chicken-or-the-egg question, but there is a piece missing and that is, what links society and technology? The answer is…the use we make of it.

The Information Age has generated a phenomenon known as IT consumerism, broadly defined by Jon Stokes as “the general move of consumer-level products and technologies into the enterprise.” In the course of 30 years, ENIAC, the “Giant Brain” introduced in 1946, morphed into the ubiquitous PC present in any geek’s toolkit. As it became more user friendly and, consequently, more popular, it moved into major companies as the tool of choice. Today, it’s a sad reality that, for the most part, a user’s home system is several iterations ahead of what’s in general use at the office.

I feel strongly that society shapes technology as much as technology shapes society. To continue Matt’s premise, look at Twitter. Twitter isn’t technologically revolutionary. All of the pieces existed previously. However, it has infiltrated and subtly changed our society. Where previously letters were sent to announce important milestones (child birth; graduation; marriage; death), the new world of micro-blogging assumes that people actually care what we had for breakfast or that we’re watching TV. The same is true of Facebook, although it permits extended verbosity on the trivial minutia of daily life.

Take a look at the telephone. At first it was advertised as an improvement on the telegraph – better for transmitting urgent messages and ordering groceries. Although Alexander Graham Bell predicted the social use of the telephone, it wasn’t until the 1930s that AT&T advertised “Reach out and touch someone.” Today we can do it in 140 characters.

As John Lienhard, Professor Emeritus of Mechanical Engineering and History at the University of Houston, put it: “Our machines teach us. But they take their time evolving a role in our lives. Commercial software has been changing us year after year ever since it burst on the scene around 1980, and we’re still being changed by it. We can’t begin to see where the Internet is taking us. So it’s small wonder that the telephone took fifty years to show us how it would alter the very fabric of everyday life.”

And why did Michelin launch its Red Guide and maps? To sell tires. If people travelled more by car, they’d wear out their tires and buy new ones. The guides became extraordinarily popular in their own right and today there is no connection between how they’re used and the thought process behind their conception.

There is nothing unique or inevitable about the social changes brought about by technology. New technologies must meet consumer needs or fail, and these may involve intangible human elements like desire, imagination, or sometimes chance. The electric car is hovering on the brink. Today it doesn’t meet the commute needs of most people. It remains to be seen whether it will become the vehicle of the future, or go the way of the amphibious car (which, incidentally, I thought was an excellent idea).

To conclude, I’ll add that open source is the perfect symbol of this “use revolution” – not technological revolution as a goal in itself (of course, if we can contribute, we won’t hesitate!), but presenting innovative ways of distributing products, proving that a free model can thrive. The free model emerged in reaction to traditional software that, for a number of reasons, failed to satisfy clients. And this reaction does not need to be supported by a brand new technology but yes, by a brand new way of doing things, new things with new or old technologies.

Bertrand