Alumni Association Gadz.org accelerates its move to Web 2.0 with Talend’s integration solutionss

Talend Open Studio allowed Gadz.org to quickly develop a new and enriched version of its alumni website, to insure the integrity of data between its various systems, while improving data quality

SURESNES, France - October 25, 2007- Talend, the first open source data integration vendor, announced today that Gadz.org, a non-profit Alumni organization whose aim is to offer and develop IT and Internet tools for the Community of Arts & Métiers, uses Talend Open Studio to modernize its web site and improve the quality of its data.

"When we migrated our site to MySQL 5, we were confronted with a replication problem between these two databases, a task which would have been too complex to perform manually. We looked for an Open Source tool which could automate the process. Talend Open Studio did perfectly meet our needs and after a non-synchronous replication test, we did put the processes in production in less than 2 hours!" explains Laurent Penou, Gadz.org’s Vice President of R&D.

After this first use of Talend’s tool, the Gadz.org association decided to migrate its website to PHP 5, which would encompass significant data transformation and loading tasks. It did leverage the experience of the Polytechnique.org association which had gone down a similar route and had published its Plat/al framework under a GPL license, and used Talend Open Studio to transcode some 20 tables to 30 new tables, merge fields, parse data, merge tables, etc. This process was implemented in 4 days, whereas a manual development would had taken at least 90 man-days.

"Beyond a successful migration, Talend Open Studio also provided us with data validation processes. We would have lacked them if we had manually re-developed our 400 scripts," rejoices Laurent Penou. "The data quality tests are very fast and completely integrated to the tool. At the end of the day, instead of launching a one year project purely dedicated to a technical migration, we have sped up the development of our new Web site and got more time to design new features."

The success of these two projects has led the Alumni association to think about new concepts. It is for example considering replacing its old email routing system with Talend Open Studio to set the specific rules of each mailing list. "Like any organization linked to a community – subscribers, members, and customers – our integration needs keep growing. Knowledge sharing and social networking platforms, as well as mailing services, have created a new era of communication. We can’t help noticing that these new communication tools have emerged at the same time as the democratized access to the Open Source technologies," concludes Laurent Penou. "Communities like Talend’s participate to this trend which has but one main goal: the end-user satisfaction."

"Gadz.org’s experience proves that the ease of use, low deployment cost and powerful features of Talend Open Studio make it a good fit for any business use," adds Yves de Montcheuil, Vice President of Marketing at Talend. "Many organizations, such as alumni associations, are very aware of Open Source technologies, and not only because of budgetary constraints. The education world is also ramping up very quickly on our technologies, with students being very sensitive to the openness of the code. A real expertise pool is being created, which will further contribute to the success of Open Source."

About Gadz.org

Founded in 1999, Gadz.org is a non-profit organization whose aim is to offer and develop IT and Internet tools for the Community of Arts & Métiers – one of the leading "Grandes Ecoles"(Engineering Schools) in France, founded in 1780. Its volunteer members provide their expertise to provide online tools to the "Gadzarts"(this is how the alumni of the Arts & Métiers are called), especially the Students’ Association and the numerous classes. The key realizations of Gadz.org are the email service Imel@vi ("an email for life") and the Gadz Intranet, both free for all the alumni. Gadz.org is independent from the official alumni association and the Students’ Association, it therefore has the freedom it needs for exploring new technologies. Its board is in direct contact with the associations and communities of other Engineering Schools (e.g. Polytechnique.org, the alumni association of Ecole Polytechnique).

Press contact:
press@talend.com