Half way into 2010, it’s time to pause for a minute (but not more than a minute!) and look back at these past six months.  We have put out a press release summarizing the high points of this year so far.

What does the press release say?

• Q2 was our twelfth consecutive quarter of growth - even Q1 was stronger than Q4, confirming a very strong momentum.
• We launched version 4, the first unified data management platform bringing together data integration, data quality and master data management within a single solution.
• We grew our customer base by 50% to over 1,500 customers, up from 1,000 at the beginning of the year.
• Total downloads reached 10 million, with over 450,000 users of our open source products.
• We added several prestigious awards to our already long list such as Network World open source company to watch, AlwaysOn Global 250, the Red Herring Top 100 Europe, The VAR Guy’s Open Source 50 and InfoWorld’s Bossie Award.

What doesn’t the press release say, but still is worth mentionning?

• It does not list customer names.  Listing customer names is always a big hassle, because we need to obtain approval on a case by case basis and get everyone to review the release.  So we went the easy way.  But we have recently announced some good customer references, and all you need to do is take a look at our rolling logos ticker on our site to understand who the other ones are.
• It does not mention geographical expansion. That’s because we officially opened two new offices in early July, so that was not technically in Q2.  And we want to save some news for September, when everyone comes back all suntanned and full of energy.  But if you want a hint on where we are expanding, I suggest taking a look at my Twitter feed - I usually don’t make random business trips just to easy sushi or pizza (OK, now I have blown it… and yes, this is so cliché).
• It does not say that we have completely redesigned our web site, making it better looking and more “pro”, but also easier to navigate with a new “adoption process” overlay.  Check it out. And - kudos to our web team, primarily Wassim and Daphné, for pulling this off.

Stay tuned for more news from Talend!  And enjoy your summer.

Yves

Earlier this week Talend announced native support for Hadoop, with immediate availability.  What does this mean?

From the technical standpoint, it means that Talend’s solutions now include the capability to not only connect to Hadoop-based data sources such as HDFS (Hadoop Distributed File system) and the Hive database, but also to run natively data transformations inside Hive.  You don’t need to get your data outside of the Hadoop-based systems to process and transform it.  This, in itself, is a major benefit for users.

One way to think of it is as the “ELT of Hadoop”.  The same way ELT allows you to run your data integration jobs inside the database engine, Talend Integration Suite runs your data integration logic inside the Hadoop architecture.  It does so by generating native Hadoop code.  (Maybe we ought to call this EHT).

From the usage standpoint, it means that organizations with large amounts of complex data are now able to fully leverage the Hadoop architecture.  Previously, there was no data integration option available for Hadoop.  You would have to extract data from Hadoop, transform it inside a data integration engine, and insert it again in Hadoop.  Not only was this costly in performance, but it was also highly inefficient – after all, Hadoop’s MapReduce architecture is especially well suited to running complex data transformations.

From an innovation standpoint, this feature once again highlights the unique innovation engine that drives open source (or that open source drives).  As far as I know, Talend is the first vendor to ship a functional data integration solution for Hadoop.  Sure, many other announcements have already been made.  With availability “in the summer” or “by end of year”.  But nothing is available today, except from Talend.

Yves