In 2006, when Sybase took over Solonde (an ETL developed in Germany and certified for SAP integration) the company promised that it would keep the tool open. Yet barely 3 years after the acquisition, Sybase ETL - Solonde’s new name - is totally closed.

We don’t know exactly how many customers Sybase ETL has. According to a press release, 1500 companies use Sybase IQ. So even if the number of companies stuck with this solution is low, the announcement still carries a whiff of scandal. What if your car dealer required you to only buy gas in its own facilities? Yes, I know, some coffee machine manufacturers have begun to do it, but is that really the way the tide is turning? And particularly in the IT market - what would happen if a big leader in the database market (let’s say one with a red logo, for example) decided to adopt the same strategy for the ETL tool (another European vendor…) that it acquired some years ago?

This kind of announcement is really unacceptable. Of course, these shackled users will have yet another reason to consider open source alternatives, which is good for companies like Talend. But, philosophically, in a period where open source and traditional software makers join force to give concrete expression to interoperability, this kind of announcement sounds very odd. Maybe it’s the cry of the dying dinosaurs?

Bertrand

Yves

• In the Best Return on Investment/Best Business Gain category is Ontario, Canada-based Cymat Technologies Ltd. Cymat, an innovative materials technology company, receives the award for achieving a 90 percent time savings in its handling of data and automation for tasks related to compression testing on stabilized aluminum foam products. With this Talend deployment, the timing for processing test results, which previously took six hours, now takes less than 40 minutes to complete.
• For the Best Technical Use category, Habitat 76, an agency that manages subsidized housing in the Seine Maritime region of France, wins the award for its technical documentation project for public housing which automated the creation and maintenance of property listings, maintenance work and technical reports in its Alfresco enterprise content management system. As part of this project, Habitat 76 developed connectors to Alfresco.
• For the Best Performance category, Altic, a systems integrator specializing in open source, receives the award for its Talend-based data integration and data quality deployments at Wonderbox, which sells gift vouchers and activity gifts. Altic was able to reduce its publishing task processing time from 20 hours to less than 15 minutes by implementing new data processes, which extract large volumes of catalog data each day to send to its multi-channel distribution sites.

For the second year, these awards gave us an inside look at the diverse array of interesting projects being implemented by Talend users.  The caliber and variety of projects we reviewed clearly prove once more Talend’s suitability and flexibility for all companies, large and small, for many types of data integration projects. This year also mark our first award for the use of Talend Data Quality.

Congratulations again to our winners!

For more info: press release.
Yves

Details are below, sign up now!  The show will also be available on demand, I’ll post the link.

Yves

	DM Radio June 18 @ 3PM ET Open-Source Business Intelligence: Moving Up? Hosted by Eric Kavanagh with Jim Ericson		Sponsored by:
	Even the skeptical analysts now admit that open-source technology presents a viable alternative to otherwise expensive enterprise software. Combine that shift with the continuing economic pressures that abound, and some open-source advocates say the perfect storm has assembled to fuel their mission. Are they right? Tune into this episode of DM Radio to find out! Click here to register for this live Web audiocast slated for April June 18 at 3:00 PM ET We’ll talk to several open-source leaders, including Yves de Montcheuil of Talend, Richard Daley of Pentaho, Nick Halsey of Jaspersoft and Ilan Sehayek of Jitterbit. Attendees will learn: Just how mature the open-source market has become An overview of the open-source offerings now available Which questions to ask when reviewing open-source technology What kind of corporate cultures embrace open-source What sort of hidden costs might be lurking around the corner

Here is a sample of recent twits from @talend:

• Just completed a live webinar on data integration, for replay see our webinars on demand here: http://bit.ly/mVElP
• Talend will be from June 15 to June 17 at TDWI in Munich, Germany. For more information: http://bit.ly/nt16d
• RT @ydemontcheuil: Accenture jumps into OSS and uses Talend Alfresco Liferay & Spring per interview with @mjasay http://trunc.it/enw2
• Webinar reminder June 11 - 10am PDT - ELT: High Performance Loading for your Data Warehouse (English) http://bit.ly/18BZKq
• We will be at the CoTer Club conference in Strasbourg, France on June 16-17. To learn more (French): http://bit.ly/XMOH7
• Seminar on BI projects with Talend, Sun Microsystems and Squid Solutions on June 16 from 9am to noon in Paris, France: http://bit.ly/12ESSv
• RT @ydemontcheuil: Interesting post by Bertrand on the importance of communities for open source vendors http://trunc.it/e3d5

Enjoy!

Yves

PS: you can also follow me on Twitter: @ydemontcheuil

So, when you find a company that isn’t trying to catch the wave, but focuses on taking care of customers - silently – well, it’s surprising.

A year ago, Accenture created its Innovation Center for Open Source. They didn’t publicize it much. And it was huge! One of the world’s largest systems integrators adopting and promoting open source! Thanks to Matt Asay for letting us know.

Matt interviewed two Accenture senior executives about the role of open source software in their business. I can’t urge you strongly enough to read it and learn how one of the biggest information systems in the world is making the most of open source software, both for itself and for its clients.

Talend is among the software solutions they selected: “We have people active in a number of community projects and we are making increasing use of Alfresco, Liferay, and Talend, to name a few in the technology area.”

Another insight to be emphasized: “We see more open source software in those industries that have more custom software development. Where packaged software is more predominant, breaking in with open source is more challenging.”

We felt the same way a few years ago. But today, we know that we can provide excellent alternatives to traditional packaged software (the same performance for a fraction of the price), and we prove it by continuously innovating – note the recent launch of Talend Integration Suite MPx. Stay tuned… there’s more coming.

Bertrand

I mean, I hope Talend Open Studio will continue to generate enough traction on its own that we don’t have to resort to this. So far so good…

Yves

Matt’s answer is no: “’Community’ is perhaps the most overhyped word in software (…) In open source, we tend to think of community as a group of people that actively contribute code to a project. But this myth was debunked years ago. Most people don’t contribute any software, any bug fixes, any blog mentions, or any anything to open-source projects, including those from which they derive considerable value. They just don’t.” He added a few words from Linus Torvalds himself: “Most users are free-loaders. There are relatively very few people who actually give back in source code or in bug reports, so anybody who argues against free-loading in open source is a moron.”

Matt concluded his post by differentiating between “community of users” and “community” alone: “Community is mostly made up of onlookers.”

Carlo Daffara from Conecta did not agree: “I still believe that by leaving the underlying idea of “community” undefined Matt does collate together many different collaboration patterns, that should really not be placed together.”
In his opinion: “Most software do not have a real community outside of the developers (and eventually some users) of a single company; it takes a significant effort to create an external support pyramid (core contributors, marginal contributors, lead users) that adds value. If that happens, like in Linux, or the ObjectWeb consortium the external contributions can be of significant value; we observed even in very specialized projects a minimum of 20% of project value from external contributors.” He refers to contributions such as OpenCascade & OpenOffice, and adds that “the way the post is presented seems to imply that only commercial contributions are really of value.”

So where is the truth?
Sure, some salespeople and communications specialists act like street vendors, shilling their products. In their mind, community is hype, as is the Next Big Thing (virtualization, neural networks, hologram-based authentication, etc.) But the truth is that these vendors borrow the development principles of proprietary software which is to say that they have their own development staff and upgrade paths serving the interest of a commercial vendor.

But a company like Talend really relies on its community to improve its products and be responsive to customer needs. In a recent post on Talend Blog, Yves gave some examples of how the community is involved in the development process itself:

• Talend Babili - version 3.1 is the first version to contain localized language packs in 9 languages (in addition to English), enabling a native language user interface to be available for our users across the world. Talend Babili is a pure community project, and has seen tremendous involvement for a number of community members.
• Our beta testing process, and especially our bug squashing contest which has seen numerous bug reporters get involved in the final testing stages of version 3.1. The top bug reporters, located in Germany, USA and France, reported up to 15 issues!

With more than four million lifetime downloads and 900,000 core product downloads, Talend Open Studio has a tremendous community of users, but with thousands of topics on our forums, bugtrackers, Babili, and Wiki, we also have a huge community of contributors. While we depend on our own development staff to develop most of our binaries and components, we strongly rely on our community to enhance our products. Open source, as I repeat tirelessly on this blog, is above all about user satisfaction - collaboratively developing products which REALLY satisfy user needs.

We’ve stopped counting how many of our components were contributed by users - there are too many of them. For example, in France the Pays des Vals de Saintonge (PVS), recently decided to finance the Edigéo and Magic connectors to transform their data, which would then be given back to the community under a GPL license so that all municipalities could benefit from them. Eurofins enhanced a SQL Server connector commenting “Thanks to our expertise in terms of databases, we improved the MS Server connectors and we have shared these improvements with the community.” And Habitat 76 financed the development of a connector for the Alfresco management tool, which it opted to return to the community for integration in future versions of Talend Open Studio and Talend Integration Suite.

These are only few examples of the involvement of our community.

So to conclude, I’m delighted to say - no, the community is NOT hype!

Bertrand

We particularly liked Reason 4:

4. Better than open source
“Unlike some code in open source reporting products, MicroStrategy’s code is 100% safe and secure. We understand that many companies restrict the use of open source products to protect themselves from legal issues that can arise from misappropriated code. MicroStrategy supports the open source movement, ensuring that our products are optimized for open source operating systems (Linux), databases (mySQL and PostgreSQL), Web servers (Apache HTTP Server), and application servers (Apache Tomcat and JBoss). It’s important to note that open source BI products are not as mature as those from commercial vendors and they require more developer and administrator expertise, which increases the total cost of ownership.”

This is an excellent example of how to present every open source cliché in less than 150 words: unreliability, lack of maturity, TCO increaser, etc.

Is the code in open source reporting products safer, or less safe, than proprietary solutions? I can only say that open source vendors try to respect standards, which is hardly the case with the majority of proprietary vendors. And if, by chance, this is not the case, the open source user can dive into the code and correct it. Can you say the same for proprietary products?

And how can companies using MicroStrategy “protect themselves from legal issues that can arise from misappropriated code?”  Oh yes… their indemnification clause. Open source has that, too.

Does MicroStrategy support the open source movement to ensure that its products are optimized for open source operating systems, because the company supports proprietary alternatives? Or because USERS DEMAND IT?

And where do they get that open source BI products are not as mature as those from commercial vendors?

Old quibbles, old trial, old lies

MicroStrategy seems like the last of the dinosaurs: still alive, yes, but for how long. With thinking like this, I won’t be at all surprised to welcome a few new clients who want to find out if open source solutions really increase TCO. Let’s help them increase their knowledge!

Bertrand

Developed in cooperation with a team of researchers who specialize in advanced algorithmics, Talend Integration Suite MPx features some unique features to optimize high throughput data integration:

• The FileScale technology, based on the MapReduce architecture originally developed by Google for highly distributed processing of data in a data set mode. The FileScale components in Talend Integration Suite MPx allows integration processes to sort, filter and merge data, perform aggregation and arithmetic functions and transform and ensure the compliance of data. FileScale is leverages statistical algorithms that auto-configure the components to use the best algorithms for each data stream.
• Talend Integration Suite MPx also features multiple levels of massive parallelization, allowing the execution of separate sub-processes in parallel, break down of data sets into many parallel streams and the ability to leverage parallel database loaders.

Validated with some customers who have extreme scalability needs, Talend Integration Suite MPx is already getting lots of great feedback.  And of course it sill leverages the same environment as Talend Open Studio and Talend Integration Suite, and that means that all jobs are upward compatible.

For more information, please check the press release.

Fabrice

On one hand, the Redwood City company particularly distinguished itself by its absence at the TDWI conference and show - the event of the BI world in spite of the presence of its principal competitors: SAP, Oracle, IBM, and Talend. We’ve become accustomed to a more commanding presence from Informatica which, this year, seems to have decided to save. Sometimes an absence speaks more loudly than a presence. And it seems that most of the major announcements at TDWI were from vendors offering alternatives, such as open source. See our launch of version 3.1 of our flagship products, or Vertica’s introduction of Vertica Analytic Database 3.0.

At the same time, Informatica World 2009, the vendor’s annual conference scheduled to be held June 2nd through 4th in Las Vegas was canceled and replaced by a 2-day event called - I’m not making this up - “Deep Dive”.  Maybe a reference to the future of the company? Of course, the cancellation was “because of the uncertainty with the worldwide economy, and in response to feedback from many of you, our customers, who are feeling the pressure to contain costs” and not for Informatica’s budgetary concerns. Sure.

Meanwhile the company announced its financial results for last quarter - $109.1 million, up five percent from the $103.7 million, recorded in the first quarter of 2008, as well as the acquisition of Applimation for approximately $40 million. However, listening carefully to the earnings call on April 23, 2009 we learned that Informatica signed only 59 new customers this past quarter. Given a sales force of approximately 300, this is particularly low - only one sales rep in five managed to convince a prospect - which underlines the difficulties they are having today in positioning themselves against the competition, and especially against open source. Clearly, change is in the air. In comparison, Talend signs over 50 new accounts per month!

According to certain knowledgeable sources, Informatica is finding it difficult to maintain its lead as a proprietary vendor and the race for acquisitions as a means of incorporating new functionality can’t go on much longer. But where Informatica is experiencing the greatest difficulty is in convincing companies that to integrate data they must invest considerably more than they would for open source solutions and for a similar result. We know this because more and more often we’re competing for the same accounts.

This sort of information can’t be pleasant for Informatica’s management. I wouldn’t be surprised if the rumors proved true in the coming months

This perspective proves that the big proprietary vendors have missed the boat in this new computing era, which depends on regular communication with clients and, especially, a break away from licensing and focus on service. We saw that last week with SAP’s announcement of its new support policy. And Oracle is hearing the same tune as it sees the massive migration of former Sunopsis users to open source alternatives.

In the end, it’s always the users who decide and this is mostly good news for open source vendors - and for the users of course!

Bertrand

• Talend Babili - version 3.1 is the first version to contain localized language packs in 9 languages (in addition to English), enabling a native language user interface to be available for our users across the world.  Talend Babili is a pure community project, and has seen tremendous involvement for a number of community members.
• Our beta testing process, and especially our “bug squashing contest” which has seen numerous bug reporters get involved in the final testing stages of version 3.1.  The five top bug reporters, located in Germany, USA and France, reported up to 15 issues! Pierrick is in the process of notifying them of the prizes they have won.

Overall, the theme of version 3.1 is about enterprise interoperability.  With new mainframe connectors, new business application connectors, enterprise monitoring capabilities - it’s all about providing an enterprise grade data integration platform.

You can get more details about version 3.1 through our forum, the press release we issued today, and of course you can try it by downloading Talend Open Studio.

Fabrice

As InfoWorld reported: “SAP has ceded to pressure from user groups and agreed to slow the rate at which it applies a new tariff for software support.” The price of maintenance is thus set at 22% of the software license price, compared to the 17% it was previously. This is in accordance with what the German vendor had planned before users revolted. 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.

Some negotiating!

This is clearly an abuse of dominant position. SAP is ultimately imposing its will on users while making a few concessions that are still somewhat vague. The user groups agreed that while the deal isn’t perfect the Group is satisfied that the vendor “listened” to its customers and backed off the maintenance fee.

In a very challenging time for IT users, SAP is taking the same sort of major risk that Microsoft took with Software Assurance, which launched the first big move toward open source deployment! Competition is increasing and even if existing users comply - one way or another - with these new conditions, I’m not sure that new customers will be ready to do so.

This could turn out to be a trump card for open source vendors. First, this negotiation (or shall we just call it haggling) erodes user confidence. Second, 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.

Today, companies have many ways of freeing themselves from this sort of practice: Open Source ERP (Openbravo, OpenERP, ERP 5, Compiere), Open Source CRM applications (SugarCRM, SplendidCRM, CentraView) or Open Source Business Intelligence (Talend, SpagoBI, Jaspersoft, Pentaho, etc). And more and more enterprises are taking the plunge. The world is changing, but it seems that big companies like SAP are deaf or blind. Some customers may have the same disabilities, but I’m betting that they’re not in the majority.

Bertrand

One of the first customer to have adopted Smart i has agreed to provide a video testimonial.  In this 5-minute video on YouTube, Roxanne Reynolds-Lair, CIO at Fashion Institute of Design and Merchandising, talks about Smart i and their experience deploying the appliance.  Definitely worth watching.

One thing that’s really interesting about the Smart i appliance is how open source and proprietary come together, to provide an optimized solution for the needs of the customer.  No ideology here - just optimization!

Yves

“In no way are the results to be considered scientific (the final two options provide evidence of the informality of the poll), but after 138 votes a picture has emerged that indicates that the biggest myths are:

• It’s free - 17%
• It’s developed by amateurs - 14%
• It’s not for mission critical apps - 11%
• It’s not supported - 10%
• It eradicates vendor lock-in - 8%

The poll is still live and you can still take part.”

No big surprises here — we face this type of argument everyday — but it is interesting to compare these results with an old post written by Tim O’Reilly in 1999: Ten Myths about Open Source Software, which is the transcript of a talk he gave to a group of Fortune 500 executives in October 1998.

Myths are indeed ingrained. As early as 1999, Tim O’Reilly explained that one big myth was that “OSS is not reliable or supported” and another was that “OSS only matters to programmers, since most users never look under the hood anyway,” which match the “It’s not supported” and “It’s ideological” comments from Matthews’ poll.

Other myths, however, have been brought down. The one that amused me, of course, was: “There’s No Money to be Made on Free Software.” Even if making money is not my first ambition, I’m pleased to see that it’s now possible. Sun helped make people aware of that when it took over MySQL for $1 billion.

Another one: “Open Source is all about licenses” has also been debunked, as people realized that the reality was far more extensive and dealt with quality of service, end user satisfaction, and innovation among other things.

Thanks a lot to Matthew for his help looking backwards. But think about it — what will the 10 biggest myths about OSS be ten years from now? Maybe they’ll say: “Leading products from Oracle were created by independent developers.” Nope. Can’t cope with that one. I prefer “ancestor of today’s software 3.0″…

When myths meet reality…

Bertrand

• Posts in the Talend Blog
• New white papers and analysts reports posted to the Talend Document Library
• Events (shows, conferences, seminars, etc.) added to the Talend Events section
• Forum announcements
• Press releases issued by Talend
• Scheduled webinars (in several languages)
• Technical blogs from several Talend team members: Olivier, Pierrick, Sebastiao…
• Etc.

The Talend News are available on our community web site, www.talendforge.org/news.  It is also possible to subscribe directly to the RSS feed.

Enjoy!

Yves

• California-based SupplyFrame, an online component information service for the electronics industry, has chosen Talend Integration Suite to help streamline its data collection processes.  They previously used custom code to collect and aggregate product data from thousands of external sources. Since implementing Talend Integration Suite, SupplyFrame has seen a 90 percent decrease in development time-what used to take two weeks now only takes a day to develop.
• UK-based Virgin Money uses Talend Integration Suite for ensuring data quality and consistency to enable efficient reporting of management information for every fundraising event and donation that their new service Virgin Money Giving facilitates.
• The Institute for Radiological Protection and Nuclear Safety (IRSN) in France uses Talend’s and Camptocamp’s technologies to consolidate high volumes of complex research data including measurements taken from various source databases and present the assessment results online, making it available to the general public.
• The Irish Revenue Commissioners (Ireland’s taxation authority) are deploying Talend Integration Suite as the corporate tool for all projects up to and including enterprise-wide projects. Benefits already identified by the warehouse team include the re-use of rules (thanks to the component library and the shared repository) together with the speed of developing optimized structures for query, reporting and analytics.

These various deployments of open source data integration show the versatility of Talend’s solutions.  We have more success stories coming up soon, stay tuned!

Yves

Matthew Aslett with The 451 Group, has written widely on this subject, particularly through the CAOS blog and with the publication last October of the report Open Source is Not a Business Model: “As the open source development and distribution model has been adopted, either partially or fully, by both startups and established software vendors, some of the assumptions about open source software have taken a back seat to commercial reality. For example, the idea of a community of individuals sharing the development of software projects for the greater good has been superseded by the image of a community of vendor employees sharing the development of software projects to increase code quality and lower production costs.”

In a blog post Matt has also published ideas for classifying open source software methodologies which have been adopted by a number of specialists. We were talking about this earlier this month following a note from Brian Gentile on the “Open Core” business model in which we recognized ourselves.

Carlo Daffara surveyed 218 companies involved in the development or marketing of open source solutions. The survey was conducted within the framework of the FLOSSMetrics project, Free/Libre and Open Source Software under the auspices of the European Commission. “The main objective of FLOSSMETRICS is to construct, publish and analyse a large scale database with information and metrics about libre software development coming from several thousands of software projects, using existing methodologies, and tools already developed. The project will also provide a public platform for validation and industrial exploitation of results.”

This investigation led to the proposal of a new classification taking into account the way that the market for commercial open source solutions has developed. It seems that approximately 25% of the companies in the Open Core category are part of the “dual licensing” model. Of these, the vast majority (60%) are classified as “Product Specialists.”

I invite you to learn more about the work that FLOSSMetrics is doing. This classification effort reflects my own desire for transparency. As opposed to the debates — occasionally quite lively — between the “purists” and the “pragmatists”, I think that this classification is specifically geared to help users find themselves in this constantly changing market. Beyond that it also helps precisely evaluate the open source market as compared to traditional technologies.

Human beings are often reproached for their obsession to classify everything. “Everything must fit in a box!” But for once, I think these attempts are very handy in helping users differentiate among proprietary vendors who are integrating some open source components.

Bertrand

Obviously, this isn’t good news; it affects not only our business, but the entire world economy including employment and consumer spending. Yet it seems clear to me that some vendors — whether open source or proprietary — should take advantage of this decline in IT budgets. To Question 18 (Which software providers are gaining or losing share of your IT spending dollars?) respondents listed VMware, Red Hat, and Microsoft as the winners, and Novell, Informatica, and TIBCO as the losers. I’m not surprised to see the leaders of virtualization among the winners (VMware has led this category since 2005, and Citrix placed 4th in this latest ranking) since virtualization is the highest priority for enterprises these days, reducing both hardware costs and administrative overhead.

Over the past few years, open source vendors have significantly reduced project costs which is, of course, a good position to have in the coming months; reducing costs is considered a priority by almost 80% of the Goldman Sachs survey respondents. And, while we should be wary of shortcuts, we can ask ourselves to what extent IT departments have already decided to increase open source spending which would lower equipment costs for equivalent projects.

In terms of data integration, the Goldman Sachs survey places Informatica in the losers column. “This is likely a testament to a tougher IT spending environment, with customers preferring solutions offered by their current (mostly larger) vendors and/or simply ‘making do’ with solutions they have already and, in this case, primarily internally developed.” This proves that the proprietary model has much more to worry about than the open source model.

And yet, open source isn’t mentioned in the Goldman Sachs report. Can we conclude, as did Todd Ogasawara that “CIOs Surveyed by Goldman-Sachs Don’t Understand Open Source and Cloud Computing.” I think we still have some evangelism to do. Since this article was published in July 2008 a lot of water has run under the bridge, but I truly don’t believe that the CIOs of large companies are unaware of the benefits of open source. Let’s continue to prove it to them.

Bertrand

Operational data integration is a domain where Talend plays an important role, thanks in part to our open source approach and our breadth of connectivity.  When the report is released, I will be sharing on this blog some interesting findings of it.

In the meanwhile, Philip just informed me that he will be presenting the main findings of this report during a free Webinar on April 8.  I would highly encourage you to attend this session which will be very informative.

Here is the information Philip sent me for this Webinar:

Operational Data Integration: A New Frontier for Data Management
A TDWI Webinar featuring Philip Russom, Senior Manager, TDWI Research
To be broadcast at 12 Noon Eastern / 9am Pacific on April 8, 2009
Register online at http://www.tdwi.org/display.aspx?id=9268

Yves