This week is the MySQL Conference & Expo, held in Santa Clara, Calif. The first official “outing” of MySQL since the Sun acquisition, this turns out to be a very successful event: 2,000 attendees, several dozens partners exhibiting, hundreds of track sessions…

Talend has a booth there (of course) and so did several of our partners: SugarCRM, JasperSoft, the newly-launched Kickfire… We had some very good meetings, with existing Talend users, future Talend users, and of course many MySQL people.

Clearly this event has grown since last year, and MySQL is on a roll. So is Talend by the way: our name got mentioned in many track sessions, our brand is clearly recognizable, we multiplied by five the number of contacts we gathered… big difference from last year, when we were getting started in the US!

Oh, and this was also the first outing of Tux Droid, our new cyber friend that we will be raffling at the end of the show (more on this on this blog when we announce the winner).

Yves

We just announced the winners and finalists of the Talend Awards.  All my apologies for being late - we had originally said we would announce the results in February.  But at the request of many users, we extended the submission deadline by two weeks.  And then it simply took us some time to get our winners’ corporate communications departments to approve (or, in one case, to not approve) the use of their names.  I’ll keep that in mind for the next edition.

In the “Best Technical Use” category, the winner is… The Corporation of the City of Brantford in Ontario, Canada.  We also had two finalists with excellent projects: Austrian University UMIT-biomed and Hungarian consulting firm Koolin.

In the “Best Return on Investment/Best Business Gain” category, the winner is… a major global automotive manufacturer. Finalists included bio analysis firm Eurofins, dual-headquartered in France and Germany, and Groupe CPI in France.

OK, so what’s the deal with the automotive manufacturer?  Well, after we notified him that he was the winner, our champion there, Joe (that’s his real name), asked his corporate communications department to validate a quote he wanted to give us for the press release.  And to his surprise they said “no way”.  Apparently these guys are so protective of their brand that even the architect who built their HQ can’t list them as a client!  Joe was very fair play and offered to withdraw his entry, but we decided he would keep his prize and title: his project is still very good, and it’s not his fault.

For more info on the winning projects, please read the press release.  I’ll be posting here more details on each winner and finalist over the next few weeks.

Thanks again to all participants to the first edition of the Talend Awards!

Yves