Technology both reflects and influences the values and culture of the society that produced it to the point that, historically, eras have been identified by their dominant technology - Stone Age, Iron Age, Bronze Age, Industrial Age, and today’s Information Age. And, while enriching daily experience, today’s instant interaction has created a paradigm shift in the way we do business and live our lives.

The world isn’t actually getting smaller; it just seems that way. The invention of the automobile meant that people no longer needed to work or go to school in the same town they lived in. As air travel became more prevalent, it was possible to visit other countries without having to emigrate there. Better sanitation and medicine promised longer life and better circumstances. In the Bronze Age, life expectancy averaged 18 years. During the 20th century the average lifespan in the United States increased by more than 30 years (to 78+), of which 25 years can be attributed to advances in public health.

The proliferation of the computer has shrunk the world even further. You can visit some of the world’s top museums and get a better view of the art than you could wandering through the galleries. And technology has changed the way we think about pictures in general. From the early, unsmiling tintypes recording social mores - betrothal pictures, portraits of the dead - it’s now possible (and perhaps regrettably prevalent) to publish pictures of our kid’s first tooth worldwide on a social network site.

I think that Twitter translates our society’s current desire to share and discover what’s happening right now, anywhere in the world, in 140-character sound bytes. Facebook is a social network that reflects our cozy desire to share news and photos instantly with a huge number of “friends” all over the world. (A January 2009 Compete.com study has ranked Facebook as the most used social network by worldwide monthly active users.)

What does that really mean?

Matt’s question reflects only half the reality. Perhaps it’s better to ask if technology is influenced by the evolution of society or if society is influenced by the evolution of technology. It’s not a chicken-or-the-egg question, but there is a piece missing and that is, what links society and technology? The answer is…the use we make of it.

The Information Age has generated a phenomenon known as IT consumerism, broadly defined by Jon Stokes as “the general move of consumer-level products and technologies into the enterprise.” In the course of 30 years, ENIAC, the “Giant Brain” introduced in 1946, morphed into the ubiquitous PC present in any geek’s toolkit. As it became more user friendly and, consequently, more popular, it moved into major companies as the tool of choice. Today, it’s a sad reality that, for the most part, a user’s home system is several iterations ahead of what’s in general use at the office.

I feel strongly that society shapes technology as much as technology shapes society. To continue Matt’s premise, look at Twitter. Twitter isn’t technologically revolutionary. All of the pieces existed previously. However, it has infiltrated and subtly changed our society. Where previously letters were sent to announce important milestones (child birth; graduation; marriage; death), the new world of micro-blogging assumes that people actually care what we had for breakfast or that we’re watching TV. The same is true of Facebook, although it permits extended verbosity on the trivial minutia of daily life.

Take a look at the telephone. At first it was advertised as an improvement on the telegraph - better for transmitting urgent messages and ordering groceries. Although Alexander Graham Bell predicted the social use of the telephone, it wasn’t until the 1930s that AT&T advertised “Reach out and touch someone.” Today we can do it in 140 characters.

As John Lienhard, Professor Emeritus of Mechanical Engineering and History at the University of Houston, put it: “Our machines teach us. But they take their time evolving a role in our lives. Commercial software has been changing us year after year ever since it burst on the scene around 1980, and we’re still being changed by it. We can’t begin to see where the Internet is taking us. So it’s small wonder that the telephone took fifty years to show us how it would alter the very fabric of everyday life.”

And why did Michelin launch its Red Guide and maps? To sell tires. If people travelled more by car, they’d wear out their tires and buy new ones. The guides became extraordinarily popular in their own right and today there is no connection between how they’re used and the thought process behind their conception.

There is nothing unique or inevitable about the social changes brought about by technology. New technologies must meet consumer needs or fail, and these may involve intangible human elements like desire, imagination, or sometimes chance. The electric car is hovering on the brink. Today it doesn’t meet the commute needs of most people. It remains to be seen whether it will become the vehicle of the future, or go the way of the amphibious car (which, incidentally, I thought was an excellent idea).

To conclude, I’ll add that open source is the perfect symbol of this “use revolution” - not technological revolution as a goal in itself (of course, if we can contribute, we won’t hesitate!), but presenting innovative ways of distributing products, proving that a free model can thrive. The free model emerged in reaction to traditional software that, for a number of reasons, failed to satisfy clients. And this reaction does not need to be supported by a brand new technology but yes, by a brand new way of doing things, new things with new or old technologies.

Bertrand

Good luck with that!

For decades, the only options were high-cost, platform-dependent, large footprint proprietary solutions from companies like Informatica and DataStage, which presented high barriers for most enterprises wanting to OEM these products. Instead, quite a few of these software companies wrote their own data integration tools using Java or Perl scripts. The result? Messy code and, over time, an unmanageable number of scripts.

Enter Talend.

With its progressive and advanced technology, Talend’s native OEM adaptable architecture provides a tool that empowers applications with a ready-to-go implementation approach.

Ease of embedding Talend: Talend’s unique architecture lets the software company implement the needed data integration Job only once; then, by embedding the Job within the application, it can deploy that Job (in Java or Pearl) an unlimited number of times. Smaller footprint, customizable and cost efficient solution — an excellent solution for both the OEM and the OEM’s users.

Talend’s flexible architecture means that old scripts can be re-used in a well-managed process, and new implementations can be added within the same framework — a huge asset to IT and R&D departments at a very low cost.

With Talend’s natural, friendly OEM architecture, software companies can embed data integration into an application in less than two weeks. Our rapidly growing team of OEM Partners who signed up for the Powered by Talend program is very impressed with the power of our software. Talend’s OEM solution is also affordable for all sizes of companies, which is critical in the current economy.

We are committed to the success of our OEM program, and congratulate all the new Partners who joined this Quarter!”

Check our website at www.talend.com for information on our products, learn about the Powered by Talend program, and join our group of successful OEM partners by emailing partners@talend.com.

Vincent

The Bonita Project, the first open source BPM solution, was launched in France in 2001 by INRIA (Institut National de Recherche en Informatique et Automatique), then hosted by the ObjectWeb Consortium (now OW2), and brought to maturity by Bull. The solution has already been downloaded more than 140,000 times and has more than 300 contributors. The three founders - Miguel Valdés Faura, Rodrigue Le Gall, and Charles Souillard - have created a structure to support development of both the project and the business.

BonitaSoft just announced its first round of funding of $3 million with two major investors – Ventech and Auriga Partners. I want to congratulate BonitaSoft’s management who, despite an unfavorable economic climate (particularly in terms of investment) managed to convince a pool of investors of the relevance and future prospects of their solution and their business model.

Besides the size of this market today and its forecast growth, BonitaSoft has other things going for it. On one hand, the solution takes advantage of all the well-known benefits of the open source model - ease of use and deployment, worldwide contributions, interoperability, rapid ROI, and scalability. BonitaSoft’s TOC is 10 times lower than that of proprietary solutions. Does that remind you of anything? Oh, of course - Talend!

The BPM market today resembles the data integration industry of three years ago - it is dominated by giants (Tibco, Oracle, IBM, etc.) - proprietary solutions characterized by high development, implementation, and maintenance costs, as well as an ROI that is hard to quantify and predict.

In addition, BonitaSoft serves a diverse community - government, banking and insurance, industry, technology, etc. Since the emergence of software, large, strategic markets have been its primary target. The interest shown by these institutions and large enterprises is, of course, a guarantee of continuity for current projects.

And finally, after 20 years the BPM has reached maturity. Firms now understand the benefits they can derive - increased productivity and efficiency, aligning processes with strategy, compliance and traceability, and control and integration between customers and partners.

All these factors have helped BonitaSoft build a solid and promising company. I won’t conceal that I’ve been carefully following BonitaSoft’s progress for some time and have offered both my experience and my connections. It was, therefore, quite natural to agree to join its Board of Directors. We will now work to create synergies between our software offerings that some of our customers have been asking for. And we will certainly keep you informed.

Smooth sailing, BonitaSoft!

Bertrand

Today, Cloud Computing is hype. So people take pot shots at it. No surprise.

Think about it - what’s a good idea? For me, in the IT industry, a good idea can solve business problems, overcome challenges that existing software can’t handle, and basically respond to clients’ needs. Nothing necessarily new of course, but sometimes we have to get back to basics.

So here is a case study, published on RightScale’s Web Site, our partner in the Cloud Computing area. You will see how our BI for the Cloud solution helps social gaming sites (Sibblingz and CrowdStar) retain customers, by providing a better understanding of their behavior. In addition, the solution reduces risk as the infrastructure can be instantly updated to respond to the success of new products launched.

“The beauty of the cloud BI stack is its low cost barrier, without having to sacrifice performance or functionality. No huge investments in hardware, staff and other resources are required to get a scalable, end-to-end enterprise BI solution delivering results on the first day of business.” Sounds like a satisfied customer to me. So I guess we’ve proved here that our BI for the Cloud stack is really a good idea.

The story illustrates also how four vendors - two with an open source model and two with a traditional business model - partnered to provide the best BI on the Cloud solution: On-Demand, Elastic and Affordable.

To me, that’s value.  Not marketing hype.

Bertrand

As Stavros Dimas, the head of the environment directorate of the European Commission, said in the same New York Times article, “GDP, which measures short-term spending, was not traditionally intended to measure well-being. And it is not a sufficient guide for modern policymaking that takes social and environmental objectives into account. To change the world we need to change the way that we understand the world. And to do this we need to go beyond GDP.”

At the same time in France, President Sarkozy received the report he commissioned from Joseph Stiglitz a year ago when he named the Nobel Prize-winning economist head of the Commission on the Measurement of Economic Performance and Social Progress; four other Nobel Prize Winners were also invited to join. This report presents identical conclusions to those reached by the European Union. “GDP has increasingly become used as a measure of societal well-being, and changes in the structure of the economy and our society have made it an increasingly poor one.” A draft summary of the report is available on-line.

It’s always edifying to watch our government find better ways to understand our society and economy by analyzing indicators whose number and accuracy are continually increasing. Like companies, they are seeking a more precise image by analyzing data from an increasing number of sources and combining them in new ways. Does that remind you of anything? Of course. It’s all about business intelligence.

The story doesn’t say what systems will be used to include new data that feeds into the calculations for measuring well-being. Given the findings of several reports, however, open source certainly deserves a place since it helps unleash growth. We would, of course, be very proud to contribute to these calculations, particularly now that Talend has the experience, the solution, and the partner ecosystem needed to help them succeed in analyzing huge amounts of data.

Bertrand

Among the presentations, a few were specially noteworthy:

• Bertrand gave a great overview of the market drivers and trends
• Eric Panassié of Talend partner Naspstec explained the benefits Napstec is deriving from their partnership with Talend, and how they were able to switch from proprietary software deployment to open source
• Fabrice presented a product roadmap

There were also numerous product presentations, including a focus on our data quality offerings and the benefits for our partners and clients.

Thanks to all the participants for their contribution to this success!

Yves

To prepare this report, Mark needs input from users of open source technologies.  Since Talend is sponsoring this report, we agreed to help Mark promote the survey he is currently running.

Please consider taking 5 minutes to participate. In addition to your help in shaping the results, you will receive the final research report and a $5 Amazon gift card…

Take this survey now:
http://www.zoomerang.com/Survey/?p=WEB229FHNWQXDQ

Yves

Matt Asay makes the point that the EC’s “meddlesome muddling reveals a surprising ignorance of open source, and shows a complete disregard for MySQL’s true market opportunity”.  He argues that MySQL will continue to thrive, no matter which choices Oracle makes, and provides as proof some popular MySQL forks.

Matt Aslett said in a recent tweet “Oracle’s (potential) control of MySQL is not about the license but copyright (not that the EC seems to understand that).”

They are both right: Oracle cannot kill MySQL, even if they wanted to.

But they can hurt it badly.

Try something.  Type “open source database” in Google. Your results may vary depending on where you are located and your browser language, but chances are MySQL will appear in the sponsored links at the top (in my results, I also had EnterpriseDB).

Now, think about what will happen when Oracle says “spending freeze on online advertising”.  Or when Larry Elison says “the Google guys have a bigger airplane than me - no more money for them” (since Larry Page and Sergey Brin own a Boeing 767, that’s a real possibility…)

MySQL - the company - has been investing heavily in the promotion of MySQL - the database.  And this contributed a lot to the adoption of the technology. I am not saying the MySQL project will die without marketing. But it will loose traction, and another leader will emerge.  Will it be a MySQL fork/derivative, or another open source database?  I don’t know.

I am not sure that the EC has the right reasons in mind for investigating the deal.  But they are right, Oracle can badly damage MySQL.

Yves

UPDATE: Matt Aslett expanded his thoughts on copyright ownership on the 451 CAOS Theory blog, explaining that “Oracle’s impending ownership of MySQL could theoretically have a significant impact on the emerging market for commercial products based on MySQL and their ability to compete with the Oracle Database.”   Another element to consider.

Is the EU right in blocking the deal but for the wrong reasons - because they don’t get it?

At last, the leader of proprietary data integration communicates its licensing prices via Girish Pancha, Informatica’s Vice President and General Manager of Data Integration.

What do we learn from this article? Truly, nothing new! But we do get official confirmation that Informatica’s products are expensive and out of reach of most enterprises’ budget - $165,000 “base price” for their solution! And that’s without considering connectors, additional CPU runtime licenses, and all the extra stuff they charge for throughout the life of your project.

Commercial open source software vendors like Talend are positioning their products along other lines that simple economics. The question of budget is important, of course, but openness, high performance, scalability, community-driven, etc, are other strategic attributes. Of course, with this kind of article all our efforts go up in smoke…
Bertrand

This award recognizes leading women executives at solution provider, distribution and vendor companies. Madeleine was singled out by the editors of CRN based on her achievements and the amount of influence she wields in the technology channel. CRN Magazine is running a special feature on these Top 100 Women in the Channel in the August issue - check it out.

Congratulations, Madeleine!

Bertrand

The value of this solution is obvious: get an instant deployment of an infinitely scalable, enterprise grade BI stack, at a very affordable cost and without long term commitment.  Assembled with the best products in their respective fields, by long-time partners used to work together, the Cloud BI solution makes enterprise BI available to anyone.

Sounds exactly the opposite of what you’re used to getting from traditional players?  Well, there is a reason for this: it is exactly the opposite.

We leveraged the CloudWorld expo in San Francisco this week to announce the solution, and we also made a lot of media outreach (see what happens when you unleash four great PR firms on an announcement…).  Among the appeared coverage, I like:

• Open-Source, Proprietary Vendors Partner on Cloud BI, by Chris Kanaracus from IDG - also syndicated to several other titles
• Business Intelligence moves to the cloud, by Dave Rosenberg from CNET News
• Gang of Four Creates Cloud BI Stack, by Maureen O’Gara on Cloud Computing Journal
• Open and proprietary ISVs discover love in the cloud, by Gavin Clarke from The Register
• Fab four join forces for BI in the cloud, by Jason Stamper on CBR

All these articles do a great job at covering the news and analyzing the benefits.  But I have to say that as far as titles are concerned I like what our two British friends did.  A bit or romantism, a Beattles analogy - pretty nice.

There was also a bit of controversy from Dana Blankenhorn with If you have a proprietary partner is it still open source?  Dana, of course, agrees that “This partnership delivers a BI solution that lowers costs and offers more flexibility.“  Isn’t that what matters?  And for the record, it’s not because you partner with proprietary vendors that your loose your soul.  Otherwise we’d all be dementors.

Check it out: www.talend.com/cloud.  We offer a free 30-day trial.

Welcome to the Cloud!

Yves

In fact the arguments advanced by Walling are quite old and outdated, as in the well-known comment “Open source software is free if your time is worth nothing.” Matt’s post analyzes how he fails to convince us, particularly in the field of commercial open source software.

Aiming at one target, Walling managed to hit his own colleagues in the back. He’s not the first or the last but, as Matt Asay proves, open source opponents need to train harder and focus better.

For the record, Salim Sdiri went back to competition one year later, and beat the French record of long jump in 2009 (8m42, or approx. 26′). But Tero Pitkämäki never regained his former level, despite a bronze medal in Beijing in 2008.

I think that says it all.

Bertrand

I would like to take this opportunity to thank again all the contributors to our open source projects.  Some of them are well known within the community, and some have less visibility.  But please be assured that the R&D team at Talend is well aware of all the individual contributions, and we are all very grateful for these.  Thanks to your posts in the Forum, your bug reports and feature requests in the Bugtracker, your components published in the Exchange, your best practices posted in the Wiki, your translations in Babili, the projects are moving at a fast pace and maintains their innovative edge.

Thanks to Saeki-san, and to all our other contributors!

Bertrand

All our readers are highly encouraged to take this survey - the more answers, the more accurate the data will be.

Here is a link to the survey: http://www.zoomerang.com/Survey/?p=WEB229FHNWQXDQ

Yves

Today, quite a lot of people think that open source means free software. This is partly because the word “free” (at least in English) connotes both “freedom” and “free of charge.” Then, too, the general public is typically aware of open source in the context of well-known products - like Firefox or Thunderbird - which cost nothing and are financed through non-profit foundations receiving advertising fees and donations.

The “no cost” concept, of course, relates to the “community” version of open source tools, which may be downloaded for free. In return, the community contributes to product improvement by developing extensions, connectors, and additional features, or testing the beta versions and identifying bugs, or even translating the solution into another language (see Talend Babili). These contributions benefit the community and the vendor by accelerating development, and by increasing both functionality and quality.

From the start, Talend has adhered to the “open core” model, based on the “dual licensing” concept which charges for certain open source features. For example, Talend offers Talend Open Studio at no cost and markets Talend Integration Suite, a complementary enterprise version which provides automated deployment, load balancing, monitoring, a collaborative work environment, and a tiered layer of support tailored to business customers. This version is, incidentally, very competitively priced when compared to traditional solutions.

Such additional features and specifications have a cost vendors carry alone and reflect the company’s R&D investment, rather than community development efforts. In summary, subscriptions finance the vendor and its R&D department, which integrates and develops the whole product. Ultimately, subscriptions will also finance products that are made freely available to the public.

With this in mind, Talend recently launched two new products - Talend Integration Suite MPx (to handle very large volumes of data), and Talend Integration Suite RTx (for integrating applications in real-time). Designed for specialized needs in the context of enterprise projects, both products are based on the same open source technology and are marketed via subscription license. Their introduction benefits all our solutions, free and paid alike.

For software solutions like Talend’s that are primarily used in business environments, the open core model provides a balanced solution for vendors and their communities. It allows companies to offer an economical, open alternative to proprietary solutions characterized by very high prices and their lack of access to source code.

Talend’s cornerstone is customer satisfaction. And given the growing number of happy customers, I feel we have chosen the best foundation on which to build our company. Through the open core model, we combine the advantages of open source philosophy (open code, freedom to modify, and community contributions) with the development imperatives of a commercial company (R&D, QA, continuous improvement, etc.)

Fabrice

Jeffrey’s insights on how “Open Source is infiltrating the enterprise” are really fascinating. I let you discover them for yourselves, but here are some particularly good extracts.

On the strategic role of OSS: “(…) anyone who tells you that it’s [open source] not being used strategically for mission critical applications isn’t talking to the right people, because I see it used that way as well as on individual projects at the departmental level. I’ll give you one example: I have talked with a large organization that’s using multiple open source products and projects and frameworks as the core of its reservation systems, and they’re pushing 30,000 transactions a second through what’s essentially an open source infrastructure. So I defy anybody to say that that’s not mission critical.”

On security: “I’ve seen open source used as the basis for in-store sales systems that are PCI compliant. So that would counter another fallacy that you often hear; you can’t build secure software with open source. And I defy you to find an example of a system which would need a higher level of governance and qualification than something that’s handling credit card data.”

On costs as a factor of adoption: “So the uses are many and varied, but generally, the goal is to save money. That’s where organizations tend to start. And then what tends to happen is the more that they become comfortable with using open source, and the more that they apply it successfully, the more they start to realize that there are benefits other than cost savings that they can take advantage of. And that’s when you start to see them turn from open source opportunists into open source advocates.”

In this article, Jeffrey refers to the Open Source Developer Report published by the Eclipse Foundation. In May, Ian Skerrett, Director of Marketing for the Eclipse Foundation, published the Top 6 Insights from the Eclipse Community Survey on his blog. The report Is further confirmation that open source software is really taking root in enterprise IT systems, with Linux taking market share, year by year, on the developer side; MySQL competing with Oracle; and, of course, Eclipse which became the de facto IDE.

The show goes on!

Bertrand

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