Author Archive for yvesm
Stephen Swoyer wrote a long piece in Enterprise Systems Journal in which has asked marketing folks for SAS and IBM what they think of Talend’s marketing message. Unsurprisingly, they don’t agree with our claims that legacy data integration tools are - legacy. Their story is - basically - that they have 20 years of experience and hence master the technology better. Whereas us new players, the new kids on the block, all we can do is flex our marketing muscles.
This article was actually already commented at length by Vincent McBurney and Loraine Lawson and I left comments to both posts, but I though I would summarize here a few important points.
1. The FUD is actually not on the side Vincent eludes to. We speak the truth, they don’t (and I am completely objective here, of course). No, seriously - have you heard the anti-open source commonplaces that proprietary vendors sales reps feed to their clients? It’s pathetic. “With open source you get what you pay for - nothing” - “It’s developed by volunteers on their spare time” - “Don’t expect anyone to support you” (that’s a good one: have you tried to call IBM’s tech support?)
2. You don’t need to have 20 years of legacy to build good software. Lots of new technologies are emerging and taking over legacy stuff, all the time. Otherwise we would still be stuck with VT100’s running against AIX machines. Or pagers. I’ll grant you this - brand new technology can be rough around the edges. But after 2 years of availability, 1.7 million lifetime downloads, 100,000 active users - Talend has made its case. What’s important there is to know what customers need, not how the first version was developed 20 years ago. And here, the open source model beats the proprietary one any day.
Something else that’s different between the “new guys” and the “old guys” is that we don’t have sales guys driving Ferraris (although a few drive BMWs… they are sales guys after all!) and we don’t buy billboards in airports or full pages in the NYT that say “999,999 of the Fortune 1,000,000 run Talend”. We keep our operational expenses down, and don’t need to make users pay for lavish sales and marketing expenses.
But at the end of the day, do users pick the products that work the best for them, or do they listen to the best lying sales rep? The former, I hope.
Yves
 The best way to demonstrate to our potential users the value that Talend’s technology can bring to them is to have them try it themselves. So we are getting on the road and organizing a series of free technical workshops in a number of cities in France, Switzerland and Belgium.
During 3 hours the participants to the workshops will receive complimentary training on Talend Open Studio - and at the end of the workshop they will leave with a USB key containing the data integration jobs they have developed.
Check out the calendar and sign up now!
Next year, we’ll be taking this concept to other countries and continents (we have also been running several workshops in Germany, which have been very successful).
Yves
PS: no we won’t be traveling on a bus, and workshops will take place in hotels or executive offices. But still, the bus picture is fun!
As a follow up on my post about InfoWorld’s recent article Open source lessons from the French, I wanted to react to this post by Matt Asay. Matt debates with a dilemna: shoud governments fund open source, or not? His (rightful) conclusion is that it’s not governments role to do so. But then, who should?
Well, Matt, you actually provide the answers to your question. Open source does not need to be funded by a government. Open source funds itself, on the free market. What a government (or a political system, for that matters) can do, and should do, is provide an environment in which the entrepreneurial spirit, the community spirit, and the open source spirit, can thrive.
The French government is doing a great job at promoting open source among its rising generations. At Talend, we employ a group of young energetic engineers who joined us with a mind shaped by years of using open source in their schools. And every summer, several interns join this team, and actually fight for the few positions we offer, proving that open source is a vivid concept in our engineering schools (in France, universities are state-run, and most private “grandes ecoles” are either directly or indirectly funded by the government or a major state-owned corporation - hence the goverment’s “responsibility” in the process).
But, to quote Bertrand in the InfoWorld article: “All students in France use open source,†says Bertrand Diard, CEO and co-founder of Talend, a French pioneer of open source data integration software. “A lot of universities in the U.S., except probably MIT, use traditional tools like Microsoft, Oracle, and SAP.â€
Conversely, French schools are not good at promoting the entrepreneurial spirit. Hence, France produces great engineers, heads of development, CTOs (all of them are in great demand in the Silicon Valley) but few entrepreneurs (of course Bertrand and Fabrice, Talend’s co-founders, are the exception!). Too few French schools have incubators, VC connections, licensing offices… the spirit is not there. No Sand Hill Road near Ecole Polytechnique or Supelec (sorry, I had to mention my Alma Mater, even though it did not teach me a lot about business) in France - this is not Stanford.
So where does that lead us? To leverage the best of both worlds. Inject more open source in US schools. Inject more entrepreneur spirit in French schools. Then replicate the model in other countries. Easy, no?
Yves
My friend Andrew Lampitt of Jaspersoft crafted a new term that I think makes a lot of sense for the commercial open source business model that vendors like Talend, Jaspersoft and several other embody.
In his post, Open-Core Licensing (OCL): Is this Version of the Dual License Open Source Business Model the New Standard?, Andrew addresses many valid reasons for adopting this term - the most important of all, I believe, being that the dual licensing term many vendors are using is both ambiguous and emotionally charged. Ambiguous (but not in a malicious way!), because Open-Core Licensing goes beyond granting different licenses (GPL and commercial) for the same source code depending on whether or not it is embedded in commercial software. Emotionally charged - well, just look back at the controversy that arose from Marten Mickos’ announcements at the MySQL Conference, back in April.
Matt Aslett from The 451 Group has been calling this approach the Split Licensing approach. I prefer the Open-Core Licensing term - and so does Matt, apparently.
To summarize how Andrew defines Open-Core Licensing: there is a “core” open source product that is GPL, and there is also additional high-value available as add-on features for purchase.
Andrew goes further by describing the associated business model:
So I propose the following for the OCL business model:
- core is GPL: if you embed the GPL in closed source, you pay a fee
- technical support of GPL product may be offered for a fee (up for debate as to whether it must be offered)
- annual commercial subscription includes: indemnity, technical support, and additional features and/or platform support. (Additional commercial features having viewable or closed source, becoming GPL after timebomb period are both up for debate).
- professional services and training are for a fee
Sounds familiar? This is the description of Talend’s business model (services & support on the GPL products, subscription licenses of the enterprise product, and OEM commercial licenses for closed-source vendors who want to embed our technology). But this is also a description of Jaspersoft’s business model (no surprise here), and of SugarCRM’s, and of Zimbra’s, and even maybe of MySQL’s…
I suspect this OCL concept is going to stir more discussion, that will lead to refining the model even further, and also heated debates on several of the issues addressed here. But positive criticism is good, and helps us move forward.
Anyway, thanks Andrew for crafting this term and opening up the debate.
Yves
|
Search
January 2009
| M |
T |
W |
T |
F |
S |
S |
| « Dec |
|
|
| | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 |
| 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 |
| 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 |
| 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 | 25 |
| 26 | 27 | 28 | 29 | 30 | 31 |
|
|
Latest Comments
consolidation ics debt
Yves, Andreas Bitterer
Lipinvemn
Yves, Omeed Yazdi
Charlie Hull